A friend of mine asked me a thought-provoking question this weekend: What is the single skill one can have (or lack) that most strongly affects success (or failure) at poker?
This is an interesting question to me not so much because of the answer I gave — I think it’s the ability to never come unhinged at the table, and to quit playing the moment you feel yourself becoming so — but because of what my answer told me about the nature of poker in comparison to other card games or competetive activites.
If the question had been posed about other card games (like Bridge, Whist, Pitch, or Spades), I would have almost certainly answered with either a mechanical skill inherent to the card game (e.g. memorizing the dead cards in Whist, accurately interpreting your partner’s bids in Bridge, et.c) or a tactical/strategic concern of the meta-game (e.g. choosing to play against weak opponents, effectively incorporating past experiences into future decision-making, etc.).
These things are, of course, important in poker. But I think they pale in comparison to the mental side of the game. Of course, the mental side of Bridge or Pitch is not unimportant, but I would rank it a distant third behind mechanical skill and tactical/strategic meta-game considerations, even when playing for money. And the most important mental aspects of those games are not emotional control, but instead things like concentration and focus.
To me, this highlights the fundamental nature of poker as a gambling game. It has been said, of course, that poker is a gambling game played with cards while Bridge is a card game on which one might gamble. And it’s quite right that you can play bridge for fun, but poker makes little sense without monetary risk. But I think it is less often appreciated how divergent the ramifications of this difference are, particularly when considering the current question on what makes one successful at the game.
Part of this is because all of the following are true about poker:
(a) It is very easy to come emotional unglued while playing. This is fundamentally derivative of the poker-as-gambling thesis. There’s a distinct feature of the game that allows a player to quickly become a high-probability favorite to win a significant amount of money, and then seconds later instead lose an also-significant amount of money. This is a recipe for emotional breakdown. And it happens constantly. I can’t remember the last time I played in a card game where someone didn’t lose it, at least momentarily, at the table. And by that I don’t mean that they became enraged or yelled and screamed. I simply mean that they stopped playing the game with any logic, due to the psycho-emotional pain inflicted upon them.
(b) It is very costly to become emotionally unglued while playing. Simply having potential winnings snatched away, however, isn’t enough to make emotional control the central skill of the game. The key feature of the game on this dimension is that as soon as the money is snatched away, a new opportunity arises to win it back. The emotional urge to recoup the loss is instantly presented, only the situation is no longer a high-probability one, but merely an average one. Emotion replaces logic, and the consequences are ruin. This can create a self-reinforcing cycle which repeats roughly every two minutes.
(c) You and your opponents directly benefit when the other comes unglued. All of the money that is lost through emotional breakdown in step #2 go directly into the pockets of those sitting across the table. It’s a zero-sum game, and it’s been my experience that a large portion of one’s profits in any give poker session come not from playing better than your opponents, but from getting the easy money when your opponents go on emotional tilt.
I believe this to be of such central importance to the game that if I was trying to help someone get better at poker as fast as possible, I wouldn’t mention the cards or the play of a hand or any sort of tactical strategy in the first five things I told them. Everything on my list would be in one way or another a strategy for not coming unhinged. My list would look something like this:
(1) Play for stakes seemingly trivial to your bankroll. In the long run, nothing — and i mean nothing — can save someone playing poker at stakes that make them uncomfortable. It’s the easiest way to set yourself up for emotional breakdown at the table. If winning or losing a pot gets your heart racing in the moment, you can’t possibly be emotional unattached enough to be making proper logical decisions. I think people tend to vastly overestimate how low they need to play to avoid this trap. In my experience at seven-card stud, it’s not possible to get truly financial detached from the game until you’ve got a bankroll 500 times bigger than the big bet in the standard structure. If I’m going to play $10/$20 Stud, that implies a bankroll of $10k. And even that probably isn’t ideal.
(2) Enjoy the game for something besides the money. Most people object to the bankroll advice because they don’t think they can take the game seriously at the stakes it implies. And that might be right — it’s tough to have a $1000 bankroll and be playing $1/$2 Stud, where an good winrate over time would be something like $9/hour. It’s easy to get bored or lazy or not care when the stakes are so small. Such people need to find a new game. In effect, they are stating that they can’t play poker without the emotional-financial attachment. That’s a recipe for ruin. The best strategy is to enjoy some aspect of the game unrelated to winning money. Personally, I spend my time when I’m not in a hand memorizing the dead cards and trying to figure out what the participants have. I like the logic-puzzle aspect of it.
(3) Develop a get-set routine prior to each hand. Mine goes like this. Sit up straight. Deep breath. Repeat phrase Play this hand logically. Justify your decisions. Smile. This serves two purposes: first, just like a pre-shot routine in golf or a pre-foul shot routine at the line in basketball, it gives you a repetitive action to lock me into the right groove for the next hand. But more importantly, it short-circuits any psycho-emotional breakdown. If I can do those four things on utter instinct (which, after years of practice, I can), it’s a lot harder to have an emotional breakdown carry over into the next hand.
(4) Disregard all discussions of past hands. It’s attention-consuming. It’s irrelevant to the future. And it’s 80% bullshit lies. Better to just keep your mouth shut, no matter what the situation. Because that way after you do take a bad beat that could result in total meltdown, you won’t be tempted to engage in the kind of banter that can make it worse.
(5) Beware of emotion manipulators. The best poker players I’ve known in my life were not only incredibly good at the mental side of the game, but they were also excellent at getting other people to come unglued. It far from against the rules to prey on people’s emotions in poker, and it can be done a million different ways: fear and pride being the most common mechanisms.
