Previous part of Mental Game of Poker: Performance and results.
Emotions
Emotions are not the problem, they are the key to success.
There is one major difference between the widely held view of poker psychology and this book - a different approach to emotions. When emotions are seen as the trouble-maker at the poker table, it is not surprising why conventional wisdom insists on becoming a robot, deceiving oneself and distancing oneself from one's emotions. Basically, the conventional wisdom is that anger, fear and overconfidence are inherently bad and must be got rid of. Of course, your ultimate goal is to remove these emotions from the game, but they are symptoms of your weak game, not the cause.
You have to dig a little deeper to find the causes of emotions, but once the causes are clear, the role of emotions changes completely. Emotions take on a very valuable purpose - to highlight the flaws in the psychological game. Basically, emotions tell you which aspects of the game need to be improved (when you don't understand what the emotions are trying to say, you try to suppress them).
Problem emotions are triggered when certain events at the poker table highlight the flaws in your approach to the game. As an example, let's look at bad beat. Pats bad beats does not cause bridge. If the reverse were true, then each player would bad beat start bridging, but this is not the case, as there are players who maintain a high level of play even after many failures. Therefore, it cannot be said that bad beat caused by bridgethere must be another reason. That problem is a bad attitude towards poker. An example of a bad attitude might be thinking that you are too good to lose to a weaker player. When a player with this attitude gets bad beat from his weaker opponent, he immediately becomes angry. So bad beats only causes anger when there is such a flaw (and others like it) in the player's psychology.
Final problem elimination
When emotions are seen as symptoms, a whole new way of dealing with psychological problems emerges: the complete elimination of those problems. This means that you leave all the positives that come from emotions and remove all the negatives. Negative emotions such as anger and fear will disappear when you address the deep-seated underlying causes of these emotions. This final elimination of the problem may seem like a strange idea, but in fact you have done it before and may be doing it all the time without even realising it.
You will become mentally strong when you have solved your psychological problems in the game. Players talk about this concept a lot, but very few actually know how to build mental muscle. They think that psychological toughness comes from "turning on" a certain mindset. However, this robustness is temporary, because it is basically just pretending that there are no flaws in the game. So for a while you feel confident, fearless and non-warming, but that psychological strength is an illusion. The problems are still there, hidden somewhere in the background, and they come out in unpleasant surprises when you least expect it.
To be able to eliminate your problem completely is to have real psychological resilience. Although it may sound complicated, this book is designed to make it as simple as possible.
A poorly functioning mind
There is one fundamental brain function that people know little about. That ignorance has a direct impact on attempts to manage and control emotions and the problems they cause.
First, a brief overview of how our brains work. Everything in our brain is organised according to a hierarchy. The first level stores all the most important functions we perform, such as our heart rate, breathing, balance or sleep cycle. Unconscious competence is also found at this level. The second level contains the entire emotional system, and the third level is the mental level, which contains all the higher brain functions (thinking, planning, perceiving, organising and controlling emotions). The rule of thumb is this:
When the emotional system becomes too active, it shuts down higher brain functions.
In other words: when emotions run high, you make poorer decisions at the poker table because your brain prevents you from thinking straight. At the same time, the following things happen:
- Aptemsta mind
- Missing key details in the game
- Giving too much importance to certain information or focusing on unimportant things
- You know the right answer, but it feels like your head is covered in fog
- Reverting to bad habits
Unfortunately, the loss of higher brain functions is inevitable when emotions are too active. No one can control it. This is our brain and it cannot be changed. In traditional psychology, this is known as the "flight or flight" reaction, when your mind is essentially non-functional, like a computer that has experienced a short circuit.
While we cannot change the fact that the emotional system shuts down our ability to think, once we understand the implications of this rule, it becomes easier to control our emotions and thus improve our mental game.
First of all, you have to try to control your emotions before they reach the emotional tipping point (the moment when emotions start to shut down brain functions). Very often, various psychological strategies claim that tiltinant Thinking is easy. This is not true. Your brain switches off your ability to think.
Secondly, 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 rebellious and you cannot think soberly, you lose access to the skills that are still in the learning process - your conscious competence. So what is left? Unconscious competence. When tiltinate or you're worried about playing for a big pot, the only knowledge and skills available to you at the time are within your unconscious competence. As a result, the decisions you make very often fall short of your expectations; everything you are currently learning cannot be put to use.
This series of articles is 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
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