Success at the poker table is about more than just knowing which hands to play. It’s a mental battlefield where your greatest opponent is often yourself. Mastering the mental game is a lifelong journey that involves managing your emotions, focusing on long-term strategy, and even addressing issues away from the felt. This guide provides a comprehensive strategy to help you conquer tilt, embrace variance, and eliminate the “life leaks” holding you back.
🧠 Conquering Tilt: Your First Mental Hurdle
The first step is to understand and manage tilt. Tilt is a state of emotional frustration that causes you to adopt a suboptimal, usually overly aggressive, strategy.
Identify Your Triggers
You must first figure out what triggers your frustration, and you’ll likely realize the cause is a bit silly. Tilt is often caused by factors outside of your control, like a dealer mistake or an opponent winning with an absurdly bad play.
However, getting angry when an opponent makes a bad play and wins is illogical. You need opponents to make blunders for you to be profitable in the long run. The only thing you can truly control at the table is the quality of your own strategy and how you implement it.
Fortify Your Baseline Strategy
You need to know how to play very well so that even when things are going poorly, you still play effectively. If you find yourself playing worse for any reason, it may imply you don’t know how to play well enough to begin with. The best players in the world often do not let tilt impact how they play their cards.
Know When to Walk Away
You must recognize the signs of tilt before you start playing poorly. Be aware of tells like putting your chips in the pot too aggressively. When you feel yourself tilting, take action. Consider standing up to stretch, taking a five-minute break, or, if you’re really steaming, quitting the session entirely. Taking a break is a “bandage,” but it’s far better than losing money by playing badly.
📈 Embracing Variance: Play the Long Game
You have to accept that sometimes you will lose even when you do everything right; this is a core part of the game called variance.
Your focus should be on the process of playing correctly, not the outcome of any single hand. Realize that variance is a nice feature of the game, not a bug. In the short run, it’s gigantic, and it’s what allows bad players to keep playing for high stakes. You are definitively going to experience large downswings.
In the long run, volume cures variance, provided you play with an edge. Your goal is to make as much money as possible in each hand you play, which requires you to play a lot of hands. Stop worrying about trying to “get even” in a single session. Winning or losing each session is irrelevant because the start and end times are just artificial markers. Your true focus should be on being profitable over a long period, perhaps even three years.
🎯 Stay Present, Stay Profitable
It is vitally important to stay present and pay attention at the table. You win by taking advantage of your opponents’ mistakes, and you can’t do that if you’re distracted.
Hunt for Exploits
- Eliminate Distractions: Stop scrolling through Twitter or texting your friends. Watching the big game on TV also prevents you from seeing your opponents’ errors.
- Observe Abnormalities: Look for anything your opponents do that deviates from good, strong GTO (Game Theory Optimal) play.
- Take Detailed Notes: When an opponent makes a bad play, don’t just label them “bad”. Take specific notes on their exploitable mistakes. For example, if a player folded the third-best possible hand to aggression, write that down. Physically or electronically writing notes helps keep them clear in your mind.
Develop a Re-centering Routine
Distraction is inevitable, so find ways to re-center yourself. A great strategy is to get up and walk around the table every 20-25 minutes when you’re not in a hand. This lets you look at chip stacks and rest your mind, which is essential.
💧 Plugging “Life Leaks” for Peak Performance
To play your best, you must get rid of your life leaks. A life leak is anything done in excess that negatively impacts your game; maintaining a healthy, positive life is critical.
- 🎲 Avoid Other Gambling: Stay away from other gambling games, especially while playing poker. They distract you, cause giant bankroll swings, and are detrimental to your focus.
- 🏦 Practice Bankroll Management: Use good bankroll management and resist the urge to rashly move up in stakes when you’re frustrated or losing.
- 🧘♂️ Have a Clear Mind: Get off detrimental substances that mess up your brain. Ensure your mind is clear when you play, which might mean skipping the party before a session or even limiting caffeine if you’ve built up a tolerance.
- 🏃♂️ Maintain Physical Health: Get into reasonably good physical shape. Eating well (avoiding fatty carbs and sugar) and exercising will help you both in poker and in life.
- 😴 Prioritize Sleep: Highly value your sleep. It’s common to lose focus when you’re tired. Maintain a good routine and avoid late-night partying that interferes with quality rest.
- 🤝 Cultivate Healthy Relationships: Seek out beneficial people in your life and avoid toxic relationships that cause angst and steal your focus.
🌱 Never Stop Growing
To succeed long-term, you must focus on continuous growth. Ensure you are always improving your poker skills, because you can bet your opponents are trying to improve theirs.
Dedicate your time to activities that make you more money, healthier, smarter, or super duper happy. If something is done in excess and takes away your focus, energy, health, or money, it’s time to cut it out. By fortifying your mental game both on and off the felt, you set yourself up for sustained success.