Improving The Mental Side In Your Online Holdem Game Is Like Free Poker Coaching
When I began playing Online Poker the thing I loved most was the hormone rush. „The second best thing behind winning is loosing.“ is a common quote you will hear in poker or general in gambling always. And I felt it in every vein. I did not care much about the money because the rush was involved as well in winning as in loosing too. Amazingly I was a winning player in the small stakes online poker games I had been playing the first couple of month.
Today I have been playing online poker for six years professionally and it took me a long period of time to get rid of the adrenalin rush (and still does). Soon after I decided to really learn the game I realized that it´s not only math and the kind of psychology that involves your opponent that makes you a dreaded player, no, it´s mainly yourself that stands in your way. And the adrenaline rush was my main enemy. Any emotional reaction directly affected and affects my game play and that´s directly proportional to my earnings over the long run. Today I can say that I have really learned to control my emotions. It´s not really controlling but more a kind of de-conditioning yourself. If I loose a big pot there is not a strong emotion involved anymore. And that´s really the key to a consistent online holdem game.
But how did I manage this? How did I get rid of my emotions while playing poker? At first I have to tell you that it´s a endless journey and it´s a slow journey. You will make constant improvements but you don´t realize it directly on your path. But when you look back, say one year, you suddenly realize:“Hey, I really got much better. And I did not have to pay somebody to help me, no, it was Free Poker Training.“ However, the main key to your mental game takes it´s base from one state, which is the NOW. Learning how to be in the present, instead of dwelling in the past or anticipating the future, is a mental game, is mindfulness. In fact it´s a spiritual practice and you may have heard of practicing mindfulness in Buddhism. And here is the thing: Spiritual practices such as meditation helps us with our online poker game (and obviously with many more things), but poker sessions can be treated as a spiritual practice as well, if we can decide to view them as such. This means you are in a kind of mindfulness meditation while playing poker. Crazy? May be, but quite effective.
You may ask:“But how do I start?“ I would recommend to check out some articles on meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism, … and just start out. However, if you need a useful example of mindfulness being something you can practice all the time, at every moment:
Next time you are washing your hands, take a few seconds and listen to the water running before you start washing. Feel the water, take a few seconds to look at your surroundings, smell the air. You will see that this experience is dramatically different from the thousand other times you have done it before. This, is mindfulness. And that´s it. Over a period of time you will de-conditioning yourself from hanging out in the past and in the future all the time and you will break open humankind love for attachment.
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Filed under: Advanced Holdem Strategy
