Hi everyone,
Today’s excerpt from “Treat Your Poker Like A Business” pertains to revising your concept of success. This piece is actually written by Jared Tendler, a performance coach for both poker players and golfers. As you probably know by now, Jared has had an immense impact on my life, professionally and personally. I invited him to contribute a few chapters to the book, and he did a brilliant job. Here’s one Jared calls, “A New Set of Results.” I particularly like his line, “Removing emotion from poker is not an option”:
Being overly influenced by results can cause a rollercoaster of emotion that seems perfectly aligned with your graph. Knowledge of variance isn’t enough to stop the emotional ups and downs that some say is just a fact of poker. This chaos is maddening, confounding, and downright vicious. It takes some to the brink, while others go over.
Desperate to break this cycle, players use strategies that numb, detach or desensitize them to the emotion tied to money or results.
Still, removing emotion from poker is not an option. In fact, it’s a colossal mistake that fails to consider the real problem, and may cause unforeseen and potentially long-term damage. Dusty was a master at avoiding, but the rage buried within him eventually became hard to ignore. With a growing pile of broken computer equipment in his closet, he knew something had to
change or he might bust out of the game.
Breaking this habit really wasn’t that hard. It just required a smallchange in how he viewed results. Results provide feedback so you know how you’re doing. Without feedback, learning is impossible. It’s not whether you need results. It’s which ones to consider.
To most people, the word “results” means something tangible, like money, wins and losses, win rate, hourly rate or any other statistics that are easy to calculate. While clearly important, to break out of this cycle, as Dusty did, requires a set of results that measures skill and improvement.
In the long run, it’s the quality of your mindset, emotions, focus, strategy and others that produce your profit, so evaluating your game along these lines matters more than short-term money. Focusing on these factors doesn’t remove the importance of money, but it does broaden the definition of results to include:
• How well you played overall
• Quality of your thinking
• Quality of decisions
• Number and size of mistakes
• Quality of focus (“The Zone,” autopilot, distractions, boredom)
• Length of time spent focused and playing well
• Length of the session
• Ability to manage emotions, focus and thinking
• Ability to work through a tough mental or emotional spot
Take these or others that are important to you, and after each session take a few minutes to review and write out how you performed. At first they will be hard to measure, but with
practice you’ll get better. Before the next session, taking a few minutes to focus on the factors you’re measuring ensures you’ll care about more than just money.
For Dusty, recognizing the quality of his decision making, focus, and emotional stability was especially important on days when he lost money. It gave him a broader measure of the results from the day, which taken with progress previously made along these lines, made losses seem temporary. The victory of the day wasn’t measured by profit, but by the quality of play.
By shifting Dusty’s focus to skill and improvement, two-outers and coolers hurt much less, and his overall play improved. He is one of hundreds of players I’ve worked with directly or through my videos who have made significant improvement. I realize this may seem too good to be true, but the progress is real. It does take work, but if you try it for a month, I know you’ll at least
make some progress.