Alan Longo is a performance psychologist who works with professional poker players on the mental systems behind consistent, high-level play.
Every Monday he sends a practical training protocol to players who want to perform at a high level week after week. Get it here: alanlongo.com/newsletter.
You called knowing it was wrong.
Not a close spot you misplayed — a spot you had figured out, where the answer was sitting right there, and you clicked anyway.
The hand's over. You know exactly what you should have done.
And then the explanation shows up, and it's always about you. I'm impulsive. I don't have the discipline. That's just how I am.
Everyone who plays has had that thought. It feels honest. It's also the least useful thing you can take away from it — and it's probably not even true.
It's not that you have less self-control than everyone else
That's the usual story: some players are built with more self-control, some with less, and if you're on the wrong side of that, bad luck.
People have been trying to prove that story for decades and it doesn't hold up. There's no single dial that some players have more of.
What does show up, again and again, is something else. It's not about how much self-control you have. It's about what happens to your decisions when you're activated.
What 'activated' means
Nothing mysterious. Activation is your body getting ready to act. Heart rate up, breathing shorter, attention narrowing onto whatever is in front of you, everything feeling like it needs an answer right now.
You know the feeling. Three hands after someone rivered you. Hour five. Sitting stuck and doing the math on how much you need to get it back.
It's not a bad state in itself — it's useful in short bursts. What it is bad for is patience.
When you're there, the decision doesn't take longer — quite the opposite. Not because you forgot the theory. Because acting now feels more urgent than getting it right.
You're not impulsive — you have impulsive moments
This is the part worth sitting with.
When this gets measured in real life, asking the same people several times a day over weeks, most of the variation isn't between people. It's inside each person, moving from one moment to the next. The same person is a different player at noon than at 2am.
So 'I'm impulsive' is the wrong size of statement. You're not impulsive; you have moments, and the moments have a pattern.
And here's the part that stings a little: how you describe yourself doesn't predict much. The people who say 'When I'm frustrated I do stupid things' aren't reliably the ones it happens to most. We're all surprisingly bad at judging this in ourselves.
Which is annoying, because it means being honest with yourself isn't enough on its own.
But it's also good news. Moments are visible. You can catch them.
Two things that get called the same thing
One more, because it sends people to the wrong place.
One thing is playing badly when you're activated. A different thing is wanting it now — taking the result you can have today over the better one later. Moving up because you want the money back tonight.
From outside they look identical. They're not connected. You can have one and not the other.
And they need different things from you. If it's activation, studying more won't fix it. You already knew the answer when you clicked — more theory doesn't help a moment like that. What helps is knowing when you get activated.
If it's the wanting-it-now version, that's about the rules you set when you're calm — how much, how long, when you stop — and don't renegotiate while you're sitting there.
Most people guess which one they have. Most people guess wrong.
One honest note about where this comes from
Almost all of this research is done with students and with people in treatment. Very few people have studied players who sit down and make expensive decisions, for hours, for real money.
So take it as a decent starting point about you, not a verdict. That's also why what comes next is about looking, not about fixing.
Something to try in your next session
For a week, notice the urge.
Not the mistakes — the urge. That feeling of needing to click before you've finished thinking.
Every time you feel it, make a note. 10 seconds on your phone, a notebook, whatever's there.
What was going on: how long you'd been playing, what happened in the last few hands, up or down. How activated you felt, roughly — low, medium, high is enough. And whether you went with it or not.
Two things matter. You note it whether or not you gave in, because the urge is the interesting part, not the outcome. And you note it before you find out whether the decision was right — once you see the result, you'll rewrite the story without noticing.
After a week, read it back. You're only looking for one thing: do they keep showing up at the same kinds of moments?
If they keep showing up when you're highly activated — hour three, after a certain kind of loss, late at night, one specific stake — good. Now you know where the work goes, and more importantly, when.
If they're spread out with no emotional pattern behind them, it's the other thing, and the work sits in the rules you set away from the table.
Either way, you stop arguing with a description of yourself and start looking at your own week.
That's a much better place to work from than 'I'm impulsive.'
