Poker: Skill & Psychology

They can work hand in hand with you in crushing the game OR they can join forces to destroy you and your bankroll. So, which will it be? It’s up to you of course, but you must be ever vigilant of where your mind is at all times during your play. Knowledge, after all, is power (or so Sir Frances Bacon told us)…

They have entire books dedicated to this subject, and I would highly recommend picking one (or two!) up if you have the chance:

1. The Poker Mindset by Matthew Hilger & Ian Taylor

2. Your Worst Poker Enemy by Alan N. Schoonmaker

But I will take some of the more key concepts I’ve learned from reading and playing and paraphrase…

It’s Poker. I’m not going to get into the exhausted argument of whether poker is a game of skill or a game of chance/luck (because it’s both no matter how you slice it!) Being cognoscente of this fact will help you psychologically, emotionally, and… financially.

Poker is a game where playing correctly means finding edges and exploiting them. So, if you think about it, it will make sense that (since luck is sometimes a factor whether we like it or not): playing solid poker comes with variance (upswings, downswings, lulls, plateaus, etc).

Now that you are armed with this knowledge, you can practice what the pros do, and that is “playing for the long haul”. That’s right ladies (and gents), it’s all just one big session. If you are playing well, then it shouldn’t matter that you finished any one session up or down because that’s short sighted thinking and, frankly, irrelevant.

So YAY! Now we can all stop making the silly little blunders that many of our poker peers are guilty of and begin the fun process of watching our bankrolls snowball.

These blunders include, but are not limitied to:

-Blaming things on “bad beats” (You can always peg how bad a player is by the amount of “bad beat” stories he/she tells, so concentrate on improving. No one wants to hear your whining anyway right?)

-Quitting while you’re ahead (quitting JUST because you’re ahead),

-Playing to get even (playing under subpar conditions JUST to try to get even),

-Tilting (playing emotionally and/or while flustered),

-Getting mad at other [bad] players (talk about biting the hand that feeds you!)

So, to reinforce: All poker players (good, bad, and ugly) have ups and downs. The difference is that expert poker players accept this fact and can play confidently knowing that over the long term their ups will outnumber their downs and THAT’S where the money is!