Previous part of the book “Mental Game of Poker”: Performance and Results.
Emotions
Emotions are not the problem; on the contrary, they are the key to success.
The widely held opinion about poker psychology and this book has one fundamental difference—a different approach to emotions. When emotions are viewed as the cause of problems at the poker table, it’s no wonder why traditional wisdom insists on becoming a robot, deceiving oneself, and detaching from one's emotions. Essentially, it is commonly believed that anger, fear, and overconfidence are inherently bad things and must be eliminated. Of course, your ultimate goal is to remove these emotions from the game, but they are merely symptoms of your weak play, not the cause.
To find the causes of emotions, you need to dig a little deeper, but once those causes become clear, the role of emotions changes completely. Emotions gain a very valuable purpose—to highlight the flaws in your psychological game. Essentially, emotions tell you which aspects of your game need improvement (when it’s not understood what emotions are trying to say, attempts are made to suppress them).
Problem-causing emotions arise when certain events at the poker table highlight flaws in your attitude towards the game. As an example, let’s examine a bad beat. The bad beat itself does not cause tilt. If it were the other way around, then every player would start tilting after a bad beat, but that’s not the case, as there are players who maintain a high level of play even after many setbacks. Therefore, it cannot be said that bad beats cause tilt; there must be another reason. That problem is a bad attitude towards poker. An example of such a bad attitude could be thinking that you are too good to lose to a weaker player. When a player with such a mindset gets a bad beat from a weaker opponent, he immediately becomes angry. So, a bad beat causes anger only when such (and other similar) flaws exist in the player’s psychology.
Complete Elimination of the Problem
When emotions are viewed as symptoms, a completely new way of solving psychological problems emerges: the complete elimination of those problems. This means that you keep all the positive aspects gained from emotions and eliminate everything negative. Negative emotions, such as anger and fear, will disappear when you solve the deeply hidden underlying causes of these emotions. Such complete elimination of the problem may seem like a strange idea, but in fact, you have already done it before and may be doing it constantly without even realizing it.
You will become mentally strong when you solve your psychological game problems. Players often talk about this concept, but only a few actually know how to build mental muscles. They think that psychological toughness happens by “turning on” a certain mindset. However, that toughness is temporary because it essentially involves pretending that no game flaws exist. So, for a while, you feel confident, fearless, and not tilting, but that psychological strength is just an illusion. Those problems still exist, hidden somewhere in the background, and they come out to unpleasantly surprise you when you least expect it.
Knowing how to completely eliminate your problem means true psychological toughness. Although it may seem complicated, this entire book is prepared in such a way that everything is done as simply as possible.
Malfunctioning Mind
There is one fundamental brain function that people know little about. This ignorance directly affects attempts to fix and control emotions and the problems they cause.
First, I briefly present general information about how our brain works. Everything in our head is organized according to a certain hierarchy. At the first level, all the most important functions we perform are stored, such as heart rate, breathing, balance, or sleep cycle. Unconscious competence is also found at this level. At the second level is the emotional system, and the third is the mental level, where all higher brain functions (thinking, planning, perception, awareness, organization, and emotion control) are located. The essential rule is this:
When the emotional system becomes too active, it shuts down higher brain functions.
In other words: when emotions run high, you make worse decisions at the poker table because the brain does not allow you to think clearly. Along with this, the following things happen:
- The mind becomes clouded
- You miss essential details in the game
- You give too much importance to certain information or focus on irrelevant things
- You know the correct answer, but it feels like your head is covered in fog
- You revert to bad habits
Unfortunately, the loss of higher brain functions when emotions are too active is inevitable. No one can control it. That’s how our brain is, and it cannot be changed. In traditional psychology, this is known as the “fight or flight” reaction, where your mind essentially stops functioning, like a computer experiencing a short circuit.
Although we cannot change the fact that the emotional system shuts down our ability to think, understanding the implications of this rule makes it easier to control our emotions and thus improve our mental game.
First, you need to try to control your emotions before they reach the emotional breaking point (the moment when emotions start shutting down brain functions). Very often, various psychological strategies claim that it is easy to think while tilting. This is not true. Your brain shuts down your ability to think.
Second, when you combine this rule with the SMM (adult learning model), you can understand more about the skills in your unconscious competence. When your emotions are too high and you cannot think clearly, you lose access to skills that are still in the learning process—in conscious competence. So what remains? Unconscious competence. When you are tilting or anxious playing for a big pot, the only knowledge and skills you can use at that moment are in your unconscious competence. For this reason, the decisions you make often do not meet your expectations; everything you are currently learning cannot be used.
The series of articles is prepared based on Jared Tendler's poker psychology book: “Mental Game of Poker”. Those who want to purchase the original, which is in English, can do so at amazon.com
