Poker players are extremely predictable.
I can pretty much tell you exactly how it will go from the moment that you find and fall in love with the game — how you feel like this game was made just for you, how you can’t get enough of it, how much you love learning, playing, experimenting, and just can never wait to play again.
That’s the first part.
After that, not as pleasant.
You get better, you win some money, and you listen to all the terrible advice that other players and mindset coaches are dishing out about how you need to always “be logical” and “reframe the situation” and “not get overemotional,” until one day you realize that all the happiness you once experienced with poker has vanished.
You’ve stopped learning and growing.
You get annoyed and upset quickly.
And it’s just not that fun.
When you land here, it’s easy to blame your emotions — but the emotions were always there, and the real problem is that everyone’s advice to you once you got serious about poker was to try and stop having them and make them go away.
But when you first started?
Nobody told you this.
You felt the pain of losing.
You didn’t try and rationalize it away by saying: “I played it fine, so I shouldn’t feel bad.”
You allowed yourself to feel the happiness of winning.
You didn’t try and downplay it by saying: “I ran good, so I shouldn’t feel that great.”
Instead of trying to be logical at every point, you were accepting and feeling the feelings that came with every win and loss, and with this acceptance you were always able to learn and grow from each session.
And you were much, much happier.
Poker has a reputation for wearing people down, but in reality it’s the culture of the players and mental game coaches that wears everyone down by robbing them of the best part of the game:
Feeling it all. Accepting each situation and emotion as it comes.
Being present, sensing what you want to do, then going after it with no regrets.
You can get all that back, and pretty quickly find yourself all the way back in love with poker again, because the game never changed — you did.
Jason Su is the author of The Joy of Poker and coaches many of the world’s top poker players on how to perform their best when it matters most.
Learn more with Jason on YouTube and through what many of poker’s top players say is 'the best newsletter in poker,' which you can access for free at pokerwithpresence.com.
