At its core, poker is basically just an endless supply of:
1) Crazy stuff happens
2) It feels bad
This aspect of the game is not really in question, nor does it ever really change (and if you do reach the point where it doesn’t hurt at all to lose, then I gotta tell you I think you’re playing the wrong game).
'Most are terrible at this'
So, the only real question is: how do you deal with this?
How do you maintain your sanity? And how can we learn to not only continue to play good poker, but also continue to feel like yourself and enjoy your time on Earth while you put in your best effort only to end up with less money than you had at the start of the month?
Most are terrible at this. Beyond terrible, would be more accurate.
The best they’ve come up with is absolute nonsense, ideas like: “Zoom out, it’s one long game” and "You should feel happy to get to play a game for a living.”
Things that are designed to trick you into no longer feeling what it feels like to be you right now — except it just makes things worse, because deep down (or not even that deep) you know it’s all bulls**t because you do feel awful and nothing anyone tells you can stop that.
When these mental gymnastics inevitably fail, you break. And from here, it doesn’t matter how much you know, because you’re no longer the version of yourself who can sit in the chair and execute at a high level.
Acceptance is the key
There is only one real solution to the pain every downswing in poker provides: Accept it all. Accept how much you’ve lost. Accept that you feel how you feel. Learn how to still feel okay, to still feel like yourself, to still have confidence in your abilities, despite the fact that it kind of hurts to be you right now in the spot that you’re in.
If you can’t do that? Then you are needy. You need to run good. You need to win in order to feel okay.
And one of the few things I am certain about in life is that the more we need something, the more impossible it starts to feel that we’re ever going to get it.
Acceptance kills the need.
It allows you to feel okay, and this is how you’ll start to play better, more like yourself, and win all that money back—not by pretending the downswing isn’t happening, but by completely facing it and accepting all of the parts you’ve been trying to avoid.
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 some say is 'the best newsletter in poker,' which you can access for free at pokerwithpresence.com.
