PokerioMokykla.com presents a long-running series of articles based on Jered Tendler's book on the psychology of poker, The Mental Game of Poker. If you would like to purchase the original, which is available in English, you can do so at amazon.com

Jared Tendler, perhaps the most powerful poker psychology coach working today, who has worked with many of poker's elite players and top poker schools. You can also find psychology videos based on his books in our school: psychological videos

In 2017, PokerSchool.com will feature a new excerpt from Mental Game of Poker every weekend.

Mental game of poker

Introduction

Players who are successful at the psychological level of poker use a proven strategy that is successful. They have a system and a methodology to deal with the psychological part of poker, so they don't have to rely on luck or pray to the "poker gods".

If there was no way to control your game and recognise when you're playing at the highest level and when you're on an emotional high (tilt), my job as a teacher of the psychological game would be nothing more than hanging noodles in your ears. Emotional storms, like play at the highest level, happen for predictable reasons and manifest themselves in predictable patterns of behaviour. As a poker player, you profit from your ability to analyse those patterns and your opponent's habits. Using the tools in this book, you will develop the ability to study aspects of your own psychological game and habits.

The very fact that so many poker players have benefited from working on the psychological side of their game is proof that success at the psychological level of the game is as much a matter of skill as it is the whole game of poker. However, many players still believe that emotions, fear, motivation and confidence come about for random reasons that cannot be explained by logic. As a result, they say or think that:

• "Logically, I understand that variation exists, so it's foolish to react too emotionally to failures (bad beat)"
• "For some inexplicable reason I decided to play like an ass yesterday"
• "It's a really unsuccessful period at the moment, maybe we should take a break?"
• "I always play at the highest level at Full Tilt"
• "After I had significantly increased my chip stack, I somehow managed to squander a few buys"
• "I wish I could always play as well as I did today"

If you think the psychological side of the game is random, you simply lack the skills to see how predictable and rational it is.

Experienced poker players can easily see that the actions of a weak player are not random. They can see certain bets (betting), time (timing), psychological and verbal (verbal) clues, which they selfishly exploit to gain an advantage over weak players. Weaker players fail to understand that their game is predictable. The same applies to the psychological side of the game. It is likely that you are not yet able to recognise the actions, thoughts and emotions that determine whether you play well or badly. However, if you have been able to become a winner in poker, then with the right information you will be able to become a winner on a psychological level.

Now that poker is so competitive, more and more players are realising the importance of the psychological side of the game in gaining an advantage over other players. Having an edge is not a new idea in poker, it has just become more important recently as the number of good poker players has increased dramatically. Online forums such as 2+2, cardrunners and others have changed the perception of poker forever. Now, with so many good players, aspects of the game that until recently nobody cared about (e.g. psychology) are now becoming priorities.

Example of golf

Athletes in every sport face the same challenge - staying ahead. While few sports evolve as quickly as poker has in recent years, professional golf has evolved in a similar way to poker. This happened when Tiger Woods hit the golf world like a whirlwind a couple of decades ago. As he rose up the pro rankings, he brought with him new rules and standards of play that forced other pros to take a serious look at their physical condition and the mental side of the game.

Before Tiger entered the world of golf, few players paid attention to their physical condition. Many were in a constant state of physical disrepair, which meant that golf was not usually considered a "real" sport. On top of all this, Tiger had a whole other level of concentration, determination and confidence that set him apart from other players. The combination of his physical and psychological prowess forced other players to follow his lead in order to stay in the fight. Tiger changed the way professionals view golf forever. Now almost every golfer has a personal physical trainer, and with him a person who works on psychology. This has become the new standard.

As a successful poker player in the late 90s, I had hopes of turning professional. There was just one big problem - the pressure of national tournaments was taking my breath away. A month after Tiger won his first serious trophy, I failed to qualify for my first serious tournament because I couldn't handle my nerves. I was just one shot short.

It was hard to go that far only to have my nerves get the better of me. But I was not going to let myself be stopped. I kept on training until one day that summer I told a friend about my problems. His eyes immediately lit up because he realised that I had to read the book he had just finished. Soon he came back with a copy of 'Golf is not a game of perfect'. I was immediately hooked, because I knew all along that my problem was in my head and not in my ambition. With the help of the book, my game improved significantly over the next three years. Except for the big tournaments. Winning nine tournaments in college and everything I learned about sports psychology didn't help me deal with my nerves at a time when I was under a lot of pressure.

My dreams of becoming a professional golfer weren't completely dashed - I just had to find a solution to the problem. Since the information that was available at the time about sports psychology did not help me, I decided to look for answers myself. I knew that I couldn't play professionally at that time, but I realised that if I could find a solution to my problem, I could take another step in my career.

I suspected that conventional sports psychology lacks an understanding of the mental problems of the game and their causes. Conventional wisdom in golf at that time was something like it is today in poker. I knew the techniques to increase my confidence and concentration and to reduce anxiety, but I never understood why I was worrying at all. At the time I thought it was for personal reasons, so I enrolled in a psychology course at university. Here's what I discovered over the next 10 years: while personal reasons undoubtedly influence your performance, mental game problems can be caused by much more simple reasons such as; anger at your mistakes, overly high expectations or poor work ethic. Using the knowledge I have gained and becoming licensed in Traditional Therapy, I have started working with professional golfers and have become their personal mental game coach. Over the next 2.5 years I coached over 300 golfers (one of whom won her first trophy shortly after I started working with her).

Getting to know poker

I was lucky enough to play golf with Dusty "Leatherass" Schmidt in the summer of 2007. It was a real stroke of luck to meet a golfer-turned-poker pro at a time when I was just starting to play golf myself. Over the years of playing golf, Dusty has come to understand the importance of the mental game. So when his pro career hit its first month of losing and the onslaught of negative emotions was getting in the way of his SuperNova Elite status, he didn't hesitate to turn to me for help.

For me, Dusty was the perfect first client to come from poker because he had a background in golf. He knew that my experience as a poker player was limited to home games and a few visits to Fowwoods Casino. To help me understand poker more quickly, he often used comparisons with golf. The more we worked together, the more the similarities between poker and golf became apparent to me. Of course, the biggest differences are in the different details of the game and the amount of variation. Golf itself has a lot of randomness, but that fades away when you try to compare it with the variation in poker. Long periods when skill is not reflected in performance make the psychological side of the game far more important in poker than in golf. It takes a lot of nerve to endure a continuous series of failures, and Dusty was one of those who struggled to cope with that.

He was a good teacher and student at the same time. Using his well-known work ethic, Dusty made great strides in preventing the onslaught of bad emotions (tilt). Soon he was able to pay for my lessons with the money he was saving by no longer breaking his computer mice, keyboards and monitors. When I first met his wife, she thanked me for these changes, saying that she could now not tell if Dusty's session was a success or not.

CUSTOMER HISTORY

Dusty "Leatherass" Schmidt

$3/$6 to $25/$50 NLHE

PokerStars PRO Team Member

Author of Don't Listen to Phil Hellmuth and "Treat your poker like a business"

Before becoming a professional poker player, I was a professional golfer. As a golfer, I didn't have the benefit of a sports psychologist, but I was always aware of the great power they had. I always thought that poker and golf had a lot of similarities, so I realised that a sports psychologist could help me with poker. In 2007 I contacted Jared Tendler and asked him to help me deal with my emotions.

It took a few sessions before Jared started to catch on to poker, but I got the first benefit as soon as I could tell him. I got even more when he started to understand the game. As a poker player, I always have the goal of getting into other people's heads, and now Jared had the same goal. The biggest influence on me was not what he said, but the way he understood my thought processes. I soon realised that Jared was more or less the main detector of the manure inside me. In the true sense of the word, I could not hide anything from him.

In the end, it made me act much more logically than before. We poker players deal with a lot of illogical things. And the best example of this was my struggle with variation. Jared once asked me: "Do you get angry when the weather forecast says it's going to rain tomorrow, and you go outside and see that it is? Then why do you get angry all the time when you know there will always be variation?" I can't stand myself when I behave illogically, so as soon as he reminded me that this is exactly how I behave, I could immediately say that I will deal with variation better from now on.

Instead of teaching me mantras, breathing exercises or trying to hypnotise me, Jared helped me to learn how to approach the game more logically. As I was Jared's first client, I am now more in the after-sales service phase. When we talk, he often finds little weaknesses in my mental game. I don't think that someone is constantly superior to another. People's attitudes and emotions change, so working with Jared helps me to stay at the top."

Dusty's great improvement in his psychological game led him to persuade me to join the Stoxpoker online school. This was a great opportunity for me to increase my experience in poker, as at that time no other training site had its own mental poker trainer. But at the same time I was preparing for my first year as a professional golfer. I had to choose: chase my dream or pursue my career? And although emotions were no longer a factor in golf at that time, becoming a professional player was too risky. Poker seemed a much safer investment, even though I had very little experience in it.

 

I am not a poker player

Although I grew up playing a variety of card games, including poker, high-level poker and online poker was an undiscovered world. I had to put in a lot of work, so I began to study poker feverishly to understand what poker players wanted from me. Now, more than 3 years later, I have taught more than 170 players from 25 different countries and helped thousands with my tips, videos and magazine articles. No one with my background has as much experience working with the psyche of poker players as I do.

I'm often asked how I can help poker players when I can't play the game well myself. The best way to explain it is to use the following analogy. A mechanic working on a racing car does not have to be a world-class driver to be able to prepare the car for victory. He just needs a deep understanding of what the driver needs, what the racing conditions will be like and how the car works - enough to be able to spot problems quickly and fix them effectively. Now that I understand high-level poker, I know what poker players go through, what they need to stay in top shape and how to help them become mentally stronger. I am not a poker player, but when other players have problems, I become their mechanic.

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