Sometimes I have to poke the bear

Some more discord conversations happening today.

I can’t help myself.

I’ll give you the cliff notes.

In a discord for a major training site, someone asked how to mentally deal with the situation when you fold your marginal hand preflop, but it would have hit the flop.

One of the site coaches started his reply with –

“It is a matter of not caring anymore”, followed by some smart sounding statistics.

To which I replied – “‘don’t care about it’ as a mental game strategy tends to leave people feeling pretty empty and unhappy in the long run.”

I’m guessing that didn’t lead to any big epiphanies for him, but hey, you never know.

Someone else chimed in and replied to me –

“That shouldn’t be the case in poker. There’s lots of stuff in poker where, from a mental game perspective, we really shouldn’t care. Obvious examples are the outcomes of the next hand, or session, or month. Or whether an opponent calls our EV neutral (or positive!) bluff.”

My reply to him – “you don’t care if you win?”

The thing that sucks is, those guys didn’t start poker like that. They learned it from someone.

That someone probably didn’t know how to handle their emotions when losing.

Then their brain came up with the idea that, if they stop caring about the result, they won’t have to feel the pain of losing.

That would be cool if it worked.

It’s a nice little soundbyte.

But it doesn’t work like that.

And somehow everyone bought into it for a long time.

Most people that are into competitive games, are also into winning.

It tends to be a lot more fun than losing.

When they can’t handle the emotions of it, but they still love poker?

They have to settle for stuffing their emotions down to continue playing the game they love.

It sucks because it’s an all or nothing game with emotions. You either feel them all, or none.

Feel none?

It turns out that a lot of the magic of the game you fell in love with starts to fade away.

I don’t wish that for anyone.

If you want the game to feel like it did when you first started, while also bringing all your new experiences and knowledge along for the ride, hit me up here: