Increase Your Poker Profits by Controlling Your Emotions

Being a successful poker player is all about being in control. Knowing the odds, reading your opponent, working out the best ways to maximise your winnings.

But controlling your emotions is also a vital part of poker, to ensure you make good decisions and avoid going ‘on tilt’.

You’ve probably seen ‘blow-ups’ from the likes of Mike Matusow and Phil Hellmuth on TV – graphic illustrations of the way emotions can send you haywire at the table.

But it’s not just ‘bad beats’ that can send you spiraling out of control; there are many little things that can increase your stress levels and turn your normally calm demeanor into an angry one. And as you’ve probably already noticed, an aggravated poker player is normally a losing poker player.

If you want to be a consistent winner, then, it’s essential to keep your emotions under control.

Psychologists have long debated what it is that causes us to be emotional. Despite extensive research there’s still no consensus over the extent to which our genetic make-up (nature) and childhood environment (nurture) affect our emotional development. One thing that has been empirically agreed upon in research is that we tend to make poorer decisions when we’re angry than when we are cool and acting logically.

There’s an oft-used phrase that it’s better to ‘let it all out’ rather than suppress your anger, but when playing poker you need to ensure that you release your emotions in a controlled way. When you get angry a physiological change takes place in your body. The moment your Aces are beaten by J-5 offsuit, your stress levels soar; your heart rate and blood pressure both increase rapidly as your body becomes infused with a cocktail of chemicals such as adrenaline and noradrenalin.

While this has been great for us as an evolutionary race, in modern society there are no woolly mammoths to flee, or sabre-tooth tigers to fight and hurling yourself across the table isn’t generally accepted. So to prevent long-term harmful physiological effects and short-term impaired decision-making, we need to know how to calm ourselves down quickly.

Stress? What stress?

The ideal way to keep your emotions in check is to stop yourself from getting overly stressed in the first place.

Socrates (that’s the Greek philosopher, not the Brazilian footballer) got it right when he said that to succeed in life you need to ‘know thyself’. This rings true at the poker table. Research has identified two basic personality types that will have a bearing on whether you are more likely to keep your emotions in check.

• ‘Type A’ individuals are generally impatient and aggressive, quick to anger, overly competitive and more controlling than ‘Type B’ individuals.
• If you identify yourself as a ‘Type A’, then you’ve taken a giant stride in realising that you’re prone to letting your emotions cloud your judgement.

Another key way of retaining emotional control is to recognise the ‘triggers’ that set your emotions off in the first place. In the case of poker players, it is usually a bad beat that does the trick. However, other common ‘triggers’ to look out for are certain types of behaviour from your opponents, including things like slow speed of play, excessive (and offensive) speech, and poor play (either your own, or other players’ at your expense).

By recognising and identifying the presence of your triggers, you’re giving yourself the chance to proactively deal with the ensuing stress.

Two simple techniques for settling your emotions are:

Relaxation

Make yourself take long, deep breaths. Then start to clench and unclench your hands and feet, and feel the tension ebb away as you do so. These exercises will start to bring your physiology back under control. Then, to regain your psychological balance, imagine a place, person or object that makes you happy and fix this picture firmly in your mind along with all the good feelings that accompany it. Happiness is incompatible with anger and replacing one with the other will help to bring your emotions under control.

Cognitive restructuring.

Avoid bemoaning your fate and thinking that everyone is a fish, and how awful and terrible it is that your Aces lost again. Instead, replace these ‘automatic’ thoughts with more ‘deliberate’ thoughts that acknowledge how frustrating the situation is, and that it is entirely understandable, perhaps even acceptable, that you’re upset, but that getting frustrated won’t change anything. Say to yourself, ‘It’s just part of the game,’ and move onto the next hand. And remember that A-A only beats 7-2 offsuit 88% of the time.

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