11 Sep 2024 mindset mental game tilt discipline motivation We are not naturally suited to play poker successfully. Being a lousy poker player is absolutely natural because your brain itself works against you in poker. In this short article, we will try to clarify the reasons for this, and also give a couple of tips on how to improve it. By the way, check the 3 main signs that you are a losing player: 3 Signs You're a Losing Player What is our unsuitability for poker? Humans are the most adaptive species in the world. That is why we have managed to conquer and subjugate most of the rest of nature and even partially use it. This has a huge disadvantage: we often think that we are capable of everything. However, we are still quite limited creatures, physically, intellectually, and in every way. Often, the feeling of omnipotence is projected onto the game of poker. However, almost nothing that we have learned over thousands of years of evolution helps us succeed in a game like poker, because poker has very little in common with the tasks and challenges of normal life. For example, such as Making super-responsible decisions, With a great lack of information, Under great pressure from money, And in a matter of seconds . . . And we still have to be able to handle deep and long downswings well, doing everything right. And a lot of other things that physical life is unlikely to teach us. That's why you and most other people are initially unsuited to poker - almost all of us are set up to solve other problems. You've definitely had it happen that you play poker, are perfectly focused on it, do everything well, and then ... lose a huge pot that you should have won. For example, you are playing on the pre-bubble in a big tournament and open with QQ, and your opponent calls with 99. You triple-barrel him on a board with no overcards J♦️8♣️6♠️6♦️9♥️: open-raise - bet - bet - push. Naturally, your intention to collect 3 streets of value is entirely justified: QQ is the 3rd strongest starting hand, and in most single-raised pots, queens are worth three barrels for value. But your opponent turns over a set of 999. If you had won the hand, you would have doubled your stack, become the chip leader in the tournament and could have crushed the entire table with aggression, thereby dramatically increasing your chances of winning. And what do you feel at that moment when your excellent mood and high hopes collapse in an instant? Your feeling of happiness and anticipation of huge prizes immediately gives way to complete helplessness in front of your fate and anger at the RNG, your opponent and poker in general. You will most likely play lousy for the rest of the session, and in this tournament you will probably soon push some garbage out of despair. The reason for such a reaction is that failure affects your mind so much that you can’t let go of this move and continue playing calmly. Where do we get such attitudes? We were taught that we get exactly what we deserve. This goes back to prehistoric times, when our distant ancestors had to constantly conserve energy and carefully choose their hunting attempts, because food was extremely limited. When the plan did not work, and the then man was not able to kill the prey immediately and it ran away, then he had to urgently change something in his strategy in order to catch it and not die of hunger. This tendency is conditioned in our modern life by ideas about justice and rights, as well as the assumption that only hard and persistent work gives results. And this is why a siren and a red alarm sound in our heads when we lose an important hand, being the favorites - we put in a lot of effort to win it, but the pot went to the opponent. It's like running a race, but just before the finish line you are stopped by an unknown force, and the competitor who was 20 meters behind now crosses the line first. It's unfair, it's disgusting, and it shouldn't be like that - to the human mind, that's exactly how it is. What can we you about it? But in poker, it's a normal occurrence. Think back to your last poker session as an exercise that will demonstrate this. Write down every terrible bad beat you can remember. Once you've done that, make a list of all the times you were lucky enough to win after going all-in being behind and still bad beat someone else. With trackers, this is easy: just filter out the biggest pots you won and lost and calculate the ratio. It would also be a good idea to know how the huge pot was won or lost. I'll bet you can't remember half as many times as you've bad-beaten your opponents yourself. But you can remember every bad beat you've had. The main character in the famous poker movie «Rounders» said: Strange as it may seem, few players remember the big pots they've won. But every player will remember with amazing accuracy all the outstanding bad beats from his opponents This bad luck bias can make you feel like you're cursed, and it's a huge hindrance to your progress as a player. It causes you to focus on the wrong things, like the short-term results of your sessions and hands, which are largely out of your control. Top poker players have been through this too, and still struggle with it. But they deal with their biases well by learning to focus on what they can control: Perception, In-game thinking, Their decisions, As well as work away from the tables. They've learned to not obsess over individual session results and hands lost to their arch-rivals - something most of the rest of the poker world fails to do - but to work on improving all the factors that can increase their EV. Gambler's Fallacy - What is it and how this terrible error of perception is ruining your game Almost every poker player considers himself to be pretty unlucky: that he is underdealt, that he is dealt a lot of setups, that his opponents always have the nuts, and so on. Try this simple method - convince yourself with actual results that things are not as bad as you think. On average, you are lucky and unlucky with your opponents about the same, if you take a larger sample and, if possible, go into detail. Another tip Write a mini-mantra for yourself or an affirmation about the reason why you play poker is to win easy money from players worse than you. Something like «He got lucky this time, but if I continue to invest my money in poker correctly, eventually I will inevitably become truly rich. So I should be happy that this fish managed to win here. Players like him are my profit.» Also, whenever you get stuck on a move, find another hand with a more interesting decision to study and ask yourself - did you play your best? Shifting your focus from frustrating failures to the quality of your game and focusing on bad players as a source of money will quickly begin to change the way your brain reacts to the unpleasant events that happen in poker + will pump you up as a player. There are several other ways in which our brain prevents you from being a great poker player. You are afraid of losing and jeopardizing money, because it is in our nature to protect and guard what we currently have. In big pots, we often put more and more money on the line precisely because of the emotional acceleration. But this is exactly the moment when it is worth saving your chips and evaluating what is happening three times. Losing affects the brain in a terrible way, and long losing streaks - even more so. You get upset because you cannot understand why you are losing and why this happened to you. And the next time you play even worse because you are now very limited by the victim mentality. We try to focus, but we focus on the wrong things, and that's why we live in a world with attention deficit disorder. All these problems (and many others) arise because we almost never encounter the difficulties of poker in other areas of real life. We do not get into long series of failures in ordinary life - having seen how our plan did not work, we quickly draw conclusions and change our behavior, so that in the future the result becomes different - in life it depends directly on our actions. And the result appears very quickly. And in poker, to be sure of the loss / profit from our decisions, we need to collect a reliable sample for each necessary situation before we begin to analyze the game and make adjustments to it. And it takes a lot of time to roll out such a distance for each spot, during which we can easily not understand how correctly we perceive what is happening and how we behave in the game. This article can be useful: Poker Variance: How to Prepare for Downswings and Upswings In addition, in the real world, we extremely rarely make very important decisions on which much depends, being under great pressure from money and rapidly running out of time, the expiration of which means a new loss. We either don't get into these situations, or we acquire the time/helpful tips to successfully solve the problem. In general, Almost everything you've learned in life makes you naturally unsuitable for poker. Poker is such a thing that we need to turn off the human in ourselves as much as possible. Our brain is completely unsuited to poker and behaves extremely stupidly in terms of poker. Most positive actions in poker contradict our intuition and logic. The good news is that we can reconfigure ourselves. We can significantly improve our knowledge and get much more satisfaction from poker, simply by changing our perception of this activity and developing the habits of top players, which were written about a little above. If we do what successful players do, then sooner or later our results will resemble theirs. Bonus: How can you combat negativity bias? There are ways to stop it from affecting you so much. Phil Galfond himself shared a few tips not long ago: The first way Celebrate all the good things that happen to you. React to negativity in the opposite way that you usually react. I don’t know how it works in the universe, but focusing on the positive will attract it into your life. And into your poker game. Whatever it is, you will feel great when you celebrate your successes and just try to ignore the failures and not make a mountain out of a molehill. I had a friend who taught me the following concept (and I couldn’t grasp it for a long time because of my personality). Every 3 hours he would set himself something like a «Happiness Alarm». When this alarm goes off, my friend would ask himself a few questions like Am I financially secure? Do I have people who love me? Am I living a good life overall? And so on - he looks through his personal list of them and answers, recording and confirming that he has something to be happy about and grateful for. And then he celebrates it as he wants. It's like you're in a bar, and your team just won, and you start celebrating, feeling great. I remembered this way of «attracting luck to yourself.» And I still try to celebrate any - even small - successes, but in my own way. The second way Express gratitude You can thank yourself, God, people and things in writing or verbally - for what you are grateful. Again, I do not know the scientific explanation for this pattern, but when you express gratitude and celebrate successes, you will remember all the good things much better than all ordinary people who do not do this. And yes, luck will gradually be attracted to you more and more. And finally, an article about Finding Positives in Life and Poker: A Strategy for Emotional Resilience.