How Can Psychology Help Us In Poker
Poker Psychology is a key element of an overall poker strategy. That said, it’s not nearly as important as understanding the underlying form of poker, math. However, Psychology can help us in poker, the two actually go hand in hand, as math can explain a number of the issues that arise when discussing poker psychology. More on that later.
How Can Psychology Help Us In Poker
When I reference Poker Psychology, I am referring to areas of psychology that assist us in learning and those that assist us in understanding the behavior of both ourselves and others. I won’t be addressing areas such as “how you feel about this or that”, or your diet and exercise program, as many poker psychologists refer to. There are good reasons for my purposely omitting these types of references.
Poker is a game of knowledge. It is a game of making decisions with incomplete information based on mathematical modeling and statistical theory. Our decisions can also be influenced by another player’s behavior (tells). Or potentially by events that have transpired in previous hands. But poker has nothing to do with eye/hand coordination or your physical attributes.
Although it may be unhealthy, you can eat cheeseburgers and fries while playing poker, and it is unlikely to influence your poker playing. It may make you feel sluggish, perhaps even dull your ability to concentrate. But poker isn’t an athletic sport, and it’s not going to have a long-term effect on your ability to play the game. Nor will any physical exercise program impact your ability to have the mental capacity to play poker.
What will impact your poker game is your level of knowledge, your ability to execute that knowledge, and your understanding of other players’ behavior. This will be the predominant focus of our Poker Strategy, as it relates to psychology.
Professional Poker Psychologist
Professional Poker psychologists, such as Dr. Patricia Cardner, author of Positive Poker and Peak Poker Performance, will disagree with a lot of what I will detail here and in future articles. I would expect no less. Their livelihood is dependent upon being about to manipulate us through their misguided and/or misunderstood analysis of poker. Once you understand the reality of poker psychology, a large portion of what they are peddling will become exposed for what it is: pure nonsense.
These poker psychologists offer sub-standard explanations or remedies to issues like “tilt”, such as “if you go on tilt, just think about something you are grateful for, and the tilt will dissipate”. Well, I tried that, it didn’t help. But what if we had an understanding of what caused the tilt? I don’t mean, because you got sucked out on with your flopped set of Aces type explanation.
If math is the underlying form of poker, then fluctuations, often called variance, is the underlying form of “tilt”. Getting sucked out on with your flopped set of aces is merely a fluctuation. Without getting into all the detail here, being able to understand that, from a mathematical perspective, can help us avoid tilting when it does happen. More on that in a later article.
Four Main Branches Of Psychology
There are four main branches of psychology:
- Clinical Psychology – Counseling for mental and behavioral health.
- Biopsychology – Research on the brain, behavior, and evolution.
- Cognitive Psychology – The study of the mean process of learning.
- Behavioral Psychology – Understanding behavior.
For this article, and those that will follow, we are going to focus solely on Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology, as they apply to poker
Behavioral Psychology
There are two basic elements of behavioral psychology that we will examine. First, and by far the most important, is your own behavior. We have total control as to how with mentally deal with bad beats, etc., whereas we have no control as to how our opponents handle them. We will discuss how we can enhance our winnings in both cases.
Another area of behavioral psychology is the various types of players. You can read about the predominant styles of players here.
We also will discuss:
- How to handle Obnoxious Players.
- Table Talk – Good/bad or indifferent.
- Boredom – How to avoid it and take advantage of your downtime.
- Dealing with poker bullies.
- Poker & Emotion.
- Tilt – Why did it happen? The answers aren’t what you might expect.
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Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology studies how people think and learn. Focus on the interactions of thought, emotion, and creativity is also part of the equation. It also affects problem-solving abilities and helps explain why you think the way you do. It can also impact changes to our thinking in a positive manner.
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