Psychology of Poker

Discipline and mind set are seriously one of the most important skills a poker player can have, it can make a not so stunning player into a consistent winner and brilliant player a loser. You must have heart to call/make tough bets and discapline to wait for premium cards. Here are some random bits of knowledge to help your mental game:

Here's a quote from someone who plays for a living "I’ve had my biggest loss in turns of BB’s and dollars at 15/30, $6300 or 210 BB’s. I’ve had several 5K losses as well." It is common for even the great players to have extremely ugly losing streaks, you gotta learn to walk it off.

You have to be aggressive, you cannot play scared. You either think you have the best hand and your in there putting in raises or you don't and you fold without a second thought. Now there definately are situations where you need to just calm down and call the person down to keep them honest but usually you will be stickin' it to people. Think of your style of play as a finely tuned maniac.

My dad's friend taught Phil Helmuth that "tight is right". Phil then learned that super tight is even better. This cannot be closer to the truth: Overtime if you go in with better cards you will end up with better cards. The main reason you lose money in poker is not that small amount you pay to see the flop but rather getting second best hand and having to call them down to find out. This is where the concept of dominated hands comes into play. Being out kicked is the most common way to have a second best hand. This is why hands likes K/10, Q/10, K/J, Q/J, and even K/Q and A/J are considered dominated, there is a rumor that Doyle Brunson won't play A/Q. Now all this doesn't mean that you don't play those hands, it just means that you have to be real careful with them and play them only in certain circumstances

According to my poker tracker calculations almost exactly 70% of the total money I've won has come from J/J - A/A and A/K / A/Q / A/J. That is just 7 hands in which I have made more than two-thirds of my profit from! This statistic really puts into perspective how important it is to play those hands well and how important it is to be conservative with all the lesser hands. Consider these weaker hands the icing on the cake and take into account how easy it is to turn them into unprofitable by playing them a little too loosely or aggressively.

Never take a hand personally, you must detach yourself from emotions. Be respectful and nice to the fish you play with, they are the ones paying you.

Don't "rabbit hunt", or pay much regard to what happens after you have folded a hand. Chaos theory says that the full house you "flopped" wouldn't have happened had you called anyway.

Here's one you won't get anywhere else: Jog, I have found that physical activities keep me discaplined and overall more content which is reflected in my play. I also like to take a shower after having a bad run, seems to psychologically cleanse me.

Here is a quote from a player who derives his income from playing poker online, "I’ve had my biggest loss in turns of BB’s and dollars at 15/30, $6300 or 210 BB’s. I’ve had several 5K losses as well." This is why a good sized bankroll is important, extremely long bad streaks happen to everyone, just make sure you aren't on tilt and walk it off.

Turn chat off, don't get distracted by their drivvel

The major poker sites are sufficienty random, there is no conspiracy to have "action flops" or anything like that. The amount they could make extra by doing it would be so small that it would not dignify the risk of them getting cought. And they would get cought... with so many players getting hundreds of thousands of hands worth of data with poker tracker

I was corrected by a friend of mine recently; I was telling him about a real hot-streak I was on and how I was going to quit and go eat. He responded by saying that you should never quit on a hot streak. I told him that I'm not superstitious and knew that every hand is independant of every other but he then reminded me of how a hot-streak can make the other players afraid of you which will make them make more mistakes

This is how I stay off of tilt: I play 4-12 tables at the same time like a robot, very mechanical and straight forward. I am hypothetically-oriented as opposed to results-oriented. If I played a hand perfect but some kid lucks out on I could care less. Even if I just won a big pot I will be mad at myself if I had a misread on someone and tried to pull a risky check-raise after hitting my flush but the guy checked it down. I trust mathematics, and that in the long run I know it will even out, maybe not in 1,000 hands or even 20,000 but after 100,000 hands your profit is a very straight line. I also talk on aim, surf the web, and listen to music to keep me occupied. Don't be mad when people chase you down and catch incredible outs, that is how you are making money, smile quietly to yourself because you know you will have it in the end. Everytime they make a call without the correct odds you earn a tiny bit of money. I have never known a bad player who has not comn down from their cloud.

1) Never play intoxicated (most of us can empathize with this one)

2) Focus all your skills on 1 specific type of poker. This is a big one, lots of beginning players jump around to wherever there mood takes them that particular day: they might go from limit ring to limit tournies to shorthand, to multi-table tournies, to no limit, and then randomly play some heads up when they think they've found a "fish". This is NOT good, stick to one thing and master it. This is similar to wanting to spread your skills between the different games like omaha, hold' em, and stud. Some players justify it by saying, "I want to be flexible so I can play at any table in the country". However, this is unecessary as there always plentiful games of whatever you want available online. You do not want to be a "jack of all trades", you want to be a Poker Master, hold' em specifically.

3) Add bonus-whoring to the "nomad syndrome", don't do it, the time it takes for you to find out where the best bonuses are, move your money around on the internet, and then clear them (some are slow) you could have spent sitting and grinding at one site which probably had a single bonus anyway.

4) Almost anytime you are playing noticably different something is wrong, you have not had any poker revelations, you are on tilt... real learning is gradual

5) Break down your tables in the the smallest possible combination: don't play 2 $2/4, play 4 $1/2.