STATE OF MIND

STATE OF MIND
By John Vorhaus

It's so easy to flip from effective to ineffective poker play online. Sometimes it takes nothing more than a brutal hand or two to send you spinning down.

Consider...

You're in the middle of a multi-table tournament, and you've got it going on, with a reasonable stack, a decent image, and a nice, crisp mind. Then you pick up pocket aces on the button. It's folded around to you. You raise, and get a loose call from someone who A) has no business being in the hand, B) sticks around for a ridiculous draw, C) gets there, and D) takes all your chips.

Check your thinking right now. What emotions are you feeling? Anger? Rage? Despair? Resentment? Is any of these emotions conducive to perfect poker? Or even adequate poker? In fact, take a moment right now and write down all the things you feel when you're playing poker in a sour mood. Be articulate and detailed in your self-examination, for these things taken as a whole amount to your state of mind - or at least your state of mind when things are not going well.

Back to our scenario. Let's say you don't have quite enough clarity to get away from the game. Let's say that you have just enough negativity to compound the problem. Instead of saying, "Well, that happens," and retiring from play for the day, you immediately jump into a sitngo, desperate to purge the bitter taste from your mouth. So desperate, in fact, that you come out storming, trying to run the table through the sheer force of your bully behavior.

And your strategy -- no, I won't call it a strategy, I'll call it an attitude -- works for a while because your opponents (sensible people not currently suffering from psychic lockjaw) are taking the time to size you up. While you're doing your thing, they're going to school on you. Well, they're thinking, he's the straw that stirs the drink. Or anyway so he thinks. After that, it's a simple matter for them to lay out, play passively, and let you hoist yourself on the petard of your own uncontrollable wrath.

Trying to make J-T look like A-A, you get out ahead of a hand.

Someone plays back at you.

You're not ready to relinquish your table captain's hat, so you raise back.

Somehow all the money gets in the middle.

And you're on the wrong side of pocket aces.

You bust out most heinously.

And instantly jump into another sitngo. Now you're really ticked! I'll show me! you silently shout as you whack off your nose to spite your face. Understand that from this point forward you have no hope of playing well. While it's easy to slip from effective to ineffective play, it's almost impossible to go the other direction. Ghosts of recent mistakes will haunt you. Rage and remorse will degrade your play. There's only one thing to do now. Tear yourself away from the table! Leave. Go for a walk. Go for a beer. Go for a schvitz. Just get away from your computer before you make a bad situation worse, much worse. The damaged state of mind I'm describing here is the one of the leading causes of superheated online loss.

You know what? If the situation I've just described has never happened to you, that's great. If it's happened to you and you can admit it, that's bad but not a disaster. If it's happened to you and you know it's happened, and you still won't admit it, then you've got a problem you need to address right now. If it helps, the situation I've just described hasn't happened to me since, oh, well, yesterday. And I'm the guy who writes the books! Does it undermine my credibility to tell you this? I don't think so. I think I'm just modeling honesty. I've learned to accept my mistakes. But I've also learned to get away from the game. And by the way, I've learned to make it my habit to keep my finger on the pulse of my thinking, as it were. I'm constantly checking to see if I still have the proper state of mind to play good poker. If I do, I play; if I don't, I quit. I don't beat myself over the head about it. I just quit, that's all.

So go easy on yourself, but be hard on yourself, too. Accept that you'll have these flare ups. Accept that your emotions will get the better of you. Just don't accept sticking around when it happens.

Without going all new age on your ass, I think the critical component of effective online play is actually, oddly, good spirit. So many weird bad things happen to us online... we get trapped, we get unlucky, we get disconnected, we get sucked out on... the list goes on and on. If online poker is to be part of our daily experience, it needs to be something we can embrace with joy, even when weird bad things happen. Otherwise, over time, the screen becomes our enemy, and though we like to play, want to play (need to play?) we don't have fun when we play. We start expecting weird bad things to happen to us, and when they do, partly because we bring them down on ourselves through weird bad play, we just sink deeper and deeper into the glower.

Lighten up! Remember the words of the sage:

YOU'RE BORN BROKE, YOU DIE BROKE
EVERYTHING ELSE IS JUST FLUCTUATION

But if your fluctuation is negative because your state of mind needs tending, then you'll just end up pouring more and more money into your online experience, and I can't see that making you happy, can you? So let's boil it down to the simplest of terms we can:

1. If you're effective, keep playing.
   
2. If you're not, quit.
   
3. See yourself as you are.
   
4. Have fun.

Online poker is simple if we let it be. The trick is the letting part.