Your Brain is Trying to Stop You Winning at Poker

[MM]

There's a new article on thehendonmob.com:

Your Brain is Trying to Stop You Winning at Poker by Nicholas Wealthall

[Seb]

My brain isn't trying anything, mister.

[Bogus]

[darrensprengers]

I am not sure i agree with the brain blue print think as i believe almost any endeavour takes time and effort to work out nuances but i will agree, wholeheartedly, with the anything that stops the bad beat stories you hear coming out of the amazon room and drive you nearly to insanity just to go to the toilet. it would not be so bad except they are either coolers or someone playing like an idiot. without people playing like an idiot you have to wait for coolers.

The thing that winds me up the most is somebody blinding down to c10 bigs and getting it in with AA and losing to a random hand and moaning like its a bad beat.
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The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing.

-- Nick "The Greek" Dandalos

[The Dean]

Good article and very true. I think poker is a tough game for the overwhelming majority of people who at least attempt to take it seriously......not so much in not being able to become very proficient at it but tough in other ways. Poker is a game that leans itself to emotionless play but this is very difficult to execute in practice......downright impossible for many.

If you are an emotional person then success in poker is tougher to achieve. On a personal level I have always found the game a battle even when things were going well and an absolute nightmare when they were not leading me to think if it was ever worth it. I think if you are emotional then the problem is a bigger one and your emotions reveal themselves in all sorts of ways like reaching for food everytime you have a negative emotion for instance like boredom or frustration or anger.

I am probably more emotional than most and psychologically probably more suited to tournaments than cash games where if I get outdrawn or suffer a beat then I am protected by being on the rail whereas multi-tabling then I am in the position to financially self harm which I have done numerous times. Its a tough one because I have played almost exclusively cash for years and so wouldn't have the right mind set and attitude to money to gamble enough to wade through these huge tournament fields like at the WSOP meaning that I would be likely dead money unless I was being backed.

At the end of the day we value both our time, our money and our own intelligence levels. All these come under threat when playing poker which makes it potentially a very tough game to master on a psychological level. Your life history and mental programming go into making you a very good player. The masses however just have to try and hammer a square peg into a round hole and like I said in a recent article......if you hammer hard enough the round hole eventually becomes a bit more square shaped.

[evelyn]

To sum up the article don't be results-orientated.

[Freddy Flares]

This article is one of the reasons I don't read many of the poker books out there that try to teach me how to play. My game in some cases can actually get worse if I do because they go against the grain and only work for the softest of games.

"We’ve been programmed that we’re supposed to get what we deserve most of the time."

This does not apply to me at all I am a realist.

"List all of the bad beats you can remember. Once you’ve done that list all of the times you got lucky and put a bad beat on someone else. I’ll be impressed if you can remember even half as many times you got lucky compared to unlucky."

Nor does this. In fact I'm well aware of all the times I got lucky. I am on a decent upswing right now actually but I know that in part it's due to getting lucky on a few hands and also that some of the players are as bad as they come.

[Seb]

Indeed. I've never had an emotional reaction to the fall of cards and I can't relate to anyone who does. There's probably a bell curve and these articles apply to the people in the fat middle bit. Also I get the impression there isn't a ton of original research in this area and it's mostly reheated self-help maxims.

[The Dean]

[Jon MW]

[Vof]

So, this article was written in... 2004?

[Rigsby]

slimy salesman

[Lego]

Interesting take. I'd certainly say the biggest thing that stops me becoming what I'd rate as a good player, is all the mental "humps" I have. I have a sort of love/hate relationship with poker, and when it's not going well, I get either frustrated, bored, impatient, annoyed, tilted. Have lapses in concentration, fear of failure, etc. etc. etc.

I think for better or worse, poker, certainly online poker, at least, is best played by the 10% or so of humans that have a bit of Vulcan blood in them and can be completely emotionally neutral about the game and just treat it entirely as an exercise in maths and probability.

The ultimate of these being players like Randy Lew, who can grid 16 tables for hours, always play the odds, never get bored, never have a lapse in concentration, never get emotional about it. Sort of human/pokerbot hybrids. Makes you sick, don't it? (incidentally, I don't hate those players, but I am very envious of their abilities)

I'd say the challenge for poker is keeping the other 90% who do get emotional about it, interested, when up against such fearsomely rational opposition. But I guess there'll always be a steady stream of people wanting to try their hand.

P.S. On a related note, Devil Fish gave me a giggle the other week when he posted a picture of the laptop screen he destroyed, when he had two bad beats in a row.
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