What about when you are afraid of certain events in poker, such as flips or bluffing in river? There are many such players in a poker career. And even if they are doing well, they are always expecting to lose every flip or get lucky by bluffing on the river. If the situation triggers a strong fear reaction, they will simply avoid such spots altogether, even if it costs them EV.
Fear can be insidious because it prevents us from gathering the right information. The subconscious inability to accurately accumulate frequencies of outcomes often makes it seem that some variations are happening more often than they should, or vice versa, and fear exacerbates this problem. Fearing a certain situation will psychologically make the thoughts even quieter and the memories of failures will be strong. This will distort your perception. How will you ever find out that a bluff rivals a 50% if you are scared to death, your heart is pounding, or even if you have already convinced yourself that you have lost? You have to get over the fear before you can do that by taking into account what is actually happening at the table. And how does a player move beyond fear? There is no universal answer, fear is a cobweb that is difficult to untangle. But there are two main aspects of fear: cognitive and emotional.
The cognitive aspect of fear comes from your beliefs. Usually, this is the easy part, but it also requires some self-reflection. If you are afraid of flips, you may realise that your core belief is that you expect to lose every time. Of course, this is not a rational belief. So, in that case, you should try to replace it with a more rational one: "I will win, somewhere, half of all my flips, so in the long run EV will remain neutral". If you start by recognising that the old belief is irrational, and then repeatedly remind yourself of the new one, you can effectively replace irrational thinking with rational thinking.
The emotional aspect of fear is more difficult. It is usually a conditioned, subconscious reaction. For example, your run may be average, but you have a constant emotional reaction to flips. You just feel the emotional punch of fear in your stomach with every flip and you believe you will lose. Let's say you've done some of the work in changing your cognitive beliefs, but you still feel the fear inside. In this case, there are two ways to deal with it: shifting the emphasis of conditioning and strategic avoidance.
Shifting the emphasis on conditioning means that you are simply trying to move yourself in the other direction. If you're scared to death of bluffing the river, you can move to micro-limits and bluff the river there consistently, forcing yourself to believe that your bluffs sometimes work.
We call it accentuated conditionality because in some cases, such as flips, you can't directly make the conditions change, nobody can make you win a lot of flips, but you can accentuate the less clearly representable aspects. For example, if you are afraid of flips, the next time you face one and win, you should emphasise that win by reminding yourself: "Here, I win at flips. It's not an anomaly, it's normal". Usually such an event is mentally de-emphasised or even ignored, so emphasising it will shift your thinking in another direction. Another way to change your beliefs is to review your hand database and remind yourself of all the flips you have won.
Strategic avoidance is a less attractive approach, but still important for dealing with fear. This tactic consists in "getting around" the fear as intelligently as possible in order to minimise its effects. For example, if you are afraid of flips or bluffs on the river, you can simply fold or reduce your tables every time you flip or bluff, so that you don't have to worry about the results and can concentrate on your other hands in peace. There are different types of fear (such as playing with a certain player or certain limits) and you can simply avoid them all. However, this is more of a temporary help, but it would still be wise to make use of it to improve your finances and to eliminate the fear reaction completely.
So, as we can see, there is a whole treasure trove of techniques to deal with fears, but a lot depends on the individual player and the nature of their fear. The very basic problem is that fear causes distortions of reality, and for us poker players, reality is currency. And we have to constantly work to eradicate our fears and close the gap between what we think we are and what we actually are.
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