Controlling Your Emotions In Cash Games
This text has been prepared by The Eureka Kid, on behalf of TheOmahaSplit.com
Managing Your Emotional State
Poker knowledge means little if you do not have the rationality to apply it a decent percentage of the time. For most poker players, some form of tilt or steaming is unavoidable, but most players lose control of their emotions far too easily and this costs them heavily. As such, we will take a look at the reasons that poker players tilt and how tilt can be minimized.
Before You Play
Understand your motivation for playing poker
What is your reason for playing poker? Do you play poker as an exercise of mental competition? Do you play it for social reasons? Do you play it purely to make money? Once you identify why you play the game, you can better understand why you sometimes lose control of your emotions when you play poker. For a player motivated by the mental competition, it can become frustrating when they are getting outplayed, or when they are doing the outplaying and then getting sucked out on. For social players, tilt can be caused by an antagonistic player at the table or other disruptions to their social environment. Lastly and most obviously, players who are motivated by money are going to become unsettled when they start to lose money at a certain rate, in a bad fashion or beyond a certain point.
Mentally prepare yourself for all outcomes
When you are about to sit down in a cash game, you know that in the long run you expect to win, but you also know that there are going to be winning and losing sessions. If you have played at the particular limit before, you are generally going to have an idea of the potential upswings and downswings you can experience in a single session. Say you are playing a no limit or pot limit game and in the past, most of your sessions have been results of between plus and minus one buy-in. There are then a scattering of times you’ve won and lost two or three buy-ins and then there was that one session you completely lost the plot and dropped 8 buy-ins. Before you sit down at the table you should be prepared to have all those types of days, are you in the physical and emotional state to be able to deal with being a few buy-ins down for the session with no escape in sight? If not, then don’t sit down.
Envisioning what could potentially happen really does help deal with whatever outcome does occur. If you do end up having a big losing session, you have already considered some of the thoughts and feelings you will be having and dealt with them. If you have a big winning session then you have already prepared yourself not to get over excited and just realize that it is all part of the ups and downs of the game. As soon as you start feeling like you are on top of the world playing poker, it can knock you down at any moment.
While You Play
Tilt is most destructive when it begins to snowball. What starts out as a few nasty little beats for small pots getting to you suddenly becomes over aggression, lack of patience, frustration and whatever else you do when you get emotional disturbed playing poker. The key with tilt is to constantly monitor your emotions as you progress through a session, if a particular hand is bothering you, review it, identify what exactly went wrong, deal with it and then get over it. If you couldn’t have played it any better then what is the point wasting mental energy on being annoyed about it when you could be spending that energy on playing current and future hands. If you could have played it better then there is no point in getting annoyed at yourself while you are still in the game. De-brief yourself about your mistakes after you play and just concentrate on the new situation that is facing you. If you are unable to do this, take a break from the game de-brief yourself and then re-enter with a fresh perspective.
Take a Long Run View
Remind yourself as you play that the game is scored in the long run, a single hand, round or session means little in the overall scheme of things. If you get particularly unlucky in a hand, think back to a time where you yourself got lucky in a hand, bring things into perspective for yourself.
Quitting
Sometimes the session is so bad, or your mental state is so out of whack that it really is the best thing for you to just completely walk away from poker for a bit. Even for experienced poker players this is a very hard thing to do, but there are just some days where your emotional state has deteriorated such that there is no hope for you playing winning poker.
For more information on Omaha High/Low visit The Omaha Split - The Largest Online Resource For Omaha High/Low! |
