If fear is driving a lot of your decisions at the poker table, you might be tapping into some very old memories and responses, and it could be costing you a lot of money. Finding out where those fears are coming from and reframing them through hypnotherapy is one way to address your biggest leaks — both on and off the felt.
To help with your final prep before the big summer series, Elliot Roe and Adrienne Carter will appear at Phil Galfond's Beyond the Game Summer Summit from May 26–28 to dig in on what might be behind those emotions and what you can do about them. Roe is a sought-after mindset coach for elite players, and Carter is a former poker pro and coach with Roe's Primed Mind program who has worked with Olympians, poker players, and many others to nail their process.
The work is about mindset, and the mindset is about how we react in stressful situations, Roe says.
“You have an awareness that this is the correct play, but for whatever reason, you can’t bring yourself to make the right play. You find yourself calling too light, or you find yourself not bluffing in spots where you should bluff."
If we were looking at the situation as another poker player, what would we say? If we could remove all of the feelings from the thought process, what would that look like? Roe says it's about finding out exactly where those feelings are coming from.
"Anxieties, frustrations, and insecurities are something you’ve learned along the way. You bring your issues to the poker table, rather than the poker table creating the issues."
Trust the process
The process is key to unlearning your response to those issues and understanding how they derail your decision-making skills.
“Success looks different for everybody,” Carter adds. “Everyone is there for a different reason.”
Poker has space for all of those players, Carter explains, so the first step is defining success. “Then we set the expectations.” From those expectations comes the process.
“Where mindset comes in is in the fourth step," Carter continues. "The fourth step is staying in your process. It’s starting to understand what derails you.”
That level of awareness of what interferes with your process is a good entry point. “The work we do, leveraging the subconscious mind and leveraging hypnosis, is to open up where you learned this, where did this program become installed that’s running behind your desktop?”
“The work that we do is predominantly regression-based therapy,” Roe adds. “An example that I always use is a cash game player who gets extremely anxious when he’s repeatedly three-bet. When we use regression in that situation, there’s no magic to this, it’s not like the stage shows — it’s like guided meditation. It brings up different memories from their life where they felt that same emotion that’s being triggered at the table. In nearly all cases, when I deal with this specific issue of the repeated three-bets, it leads them to school bullying. It’s almost always that.
We then go back to the school bullying memories and reframe them, adjusting the way the emotions felt and the memories. It goes from ‘I’m seven years old, I’m terrified, and this is life and death’ to ‘This is two seven-year-olds fighting in the school yard.’ From an adult perspective, this doesn’t need to be a fight-or-flight situation. As we resolve the background emotions to these things through the memories, it becomes something to adjust to, rather than something that puts them into fight-or-flight.”
Find your community
Another group of players who approach Roe all the time are those who are concerned about appearing on TV tables. “They’ll either self-sabotage to not end up on stream or they’ll play terribly if they do.”
The theme Roe sees is how those players discuss other players on the stream. “They’re typically extremely judgmental when they’re watching the streams. The more judgmental the player is of others, the more difficult it is to put themselves in that situation.”
These ideas will serve as a foundation for building community, one of the core goals of the Beyond the Game gathering every year.
One of the biggest indicators of success is being able to have community, Carter says. “Have repetitions, have people that are peers, but also hold that light for where you want to be. Maybe if you don’t exactly know what success is for you, putting yourself in position with other people who are looking to explore and develop is going to give you that rocket fuel to have the success that you want, and have that community to deepen the relationships you can have within a very solitary game.”
Sign up now for the Beyond the Game 2025 Summer Summit, running at Virgin Hotel Las Vegas from May 26–28.
Images courtesy of Antonio Abrego/PokerGO/Primed Mind.
