Emotional side of Poker
Emotional side of Poker
Jumping for joy, you really shouldn’t be!
Whenever you find yourself jumping for joy, fist pumping or cursing your bad luck, insulting your opponents via the chat box, slamming your mouse, firing a pen across the room or any other such show of exuberance or frustration with events, then it’s clear you have got overly emotionally involved with the game and it’s not a good place to be for more than one reason.
Embrace bad luck
You should examine just why you are exhibiting these types of behaviors. I mean you get unlucky in the game, c’mon now it’s hardly news to you that bad luck will happen to you, in fact it’s going to happen almost every single day you play poker so why get upset about it, it’s part and parcel of the game.
No call for insulting other players
Insulting other players rarely has any positive effect, you are merely demonstrating to others that you can be upset, and to the insultee there’s a good chance it’ll either make them leave the table and/or start playing more solidly against you, neither of which you want. No one expects you to be happy about it, but it’s not as if it should be something that has come like a bolt from the blue and you need to move on quickly.
What matters most is how you played the hand, and not the result
Also if you get lucky or win a big pot, yeah fine be happy about it, but you need to retain your equanimity too, if you played the hand badly and sucked out, that needs to be remembered more so than the fact you won the hand.
Think about the impact of the hand on future hands
Whatever happens in a big hand, whether you got lucky, unlucky or simply won a race, what matters most now is how this occurrence will affect how other players view you and how they might adjust to play you in later hands, factoring this into how you play future hands is what you should be thinking about, not how great it is that you won such a big pot, or how awful it is that the table fish sucked out on you yet again.
Getting upset reveals another flaw in your approach to poker
It’s also a bad sign from another point of view. In what circumstance would a player typically get upset if they lost a big pot or be delighted if they won a big pot? I’ll tell you, one in which they are playing above their bankroll!
Up the stakes, increase the pain
If you have a poker bankroll of say $10K set aside for poker and you lose your $20 stack in a $.10/$.20 game you can get over that pretty quickly, right!? Probably even instantly, if this upsets you badly then well perhaps poker isn’t for you! If you lose your $1,000 stack in a $5/$10 game understandably it’s going to hurt a lot though and maybe hurt so much that you berate the poker gods, curse the donkey fish who sucked out on you, but you are forgetting one thing, the biggest element in poker in the short term is luck.
Don’t look for trouble
Playing a $5/$10 No limit hold Em game with just 10 buy-in is pretty much asking for trouble. You ranting and raving is just a manifestation of the fact that it was indeed a mistake on your part to have played in this game in the first place. What you need to ask yourself, is what stakes you should be playing purely from an emotional point of view; what’s the highest level you can play at where you can take the beats that come your way without reacting negatively, this is very often the level you should be playing at, no more, no less.
Set a happy medium
No more for obvious reasons, but also no less because you should care just about enough about the money so that you do not get complacent or treat losses as virtually insignificant, it’s got to matter at least a little bit so you can play correctly. In the example of our player who has a bankroll of $10K set aside for poker perhaps stakes of $.5/$1 or $1/$2 would suit him best, anything less than $.5/$1 and he runs the danger of not caring enough, anything more than $1/$2 starts to become a significant part of his bankroll and he runs the risk of exhibiting overly emotional states that impact on his general humour and impinge on proper poker play.
