Alan Longo is a High Performance Psychologist with five years of experience coaching high-stakes poker players. Passionate about sports, he educates and empowers players with the tools to build their mental foundations, professional routines and competitive planning for consistent, high-level performance. Find out more at his website.
The poker table is an arena of intense emotion. It’s a place where a single card can trigger a surge of frustration after a bad beat, a wave of anxiety during a prolonged downswing, or a rush of great happiness from a significant win.
For serious players, navigating this emotional landscape is as critical as understanding pot odds or ranges. Yet, many approach their emotions with a flawed objective: control.
From a psychological perspective, the goal isn't to control or eliminate feelings but to skillfully regulate them. Understanding how emotions work is the first step toward managing their impact, allowing for clearer decision-making and greater resilience.
This article introduces the foundational concepts of emotional regulation to provide a solid framework for improving your mental game.
What is an emotion?
At its core, an emotion is a complex and brief psychological and physiological response to a personally significant event or thought. Emotions are characterized by a few key features:
- They are automatic. You don’t choose to feel a flash of anger when an opponent hits their one-outer on the river. The initial emotional response is triggered automatically by the brain.
- They provide information. Emotions act as internal signals. Annoyance might signal that a specific opponent's strategy is challenging you, while fear before a big bluff could be a warning about the risk involved.
- They are temporary. No emotion lasts forever. They are passing states that rise, peak, and eventually subside.
Recognizing emotions as automatic, informative, and temporary is the starting point for making them less mysterious and reducing their power to overwhelm your decision-making process.
The three levels of an emotional experience
When an emotion is triggered, it unfolds across three interconnected levels:
- Feeling: This is the subjective, internal experience — what you label as 'anger,' 'anxiety,' or 'joy.' It’s the conscious part of the emotion.
- Body (physiology): This involves the physical reactions that accompany the feeling. A surge of adrenaline, an increased heart rate, tense shoulder muscles, or a pit in your stomach are all physiological markers of an emotional response.
- Behavior: This is the resulting action or, more often, the urge to act. It can manifest as the desire to slam the table, make a quick, ill-advised call (revenge), or physically celebrate a win.
These three levels create a feedback loop. Tense muscles can intensify the feeling of anger, which in turn fuels the urge to act impulsively. Understanding this allows you to intervene at any point in the cycle — for example, by relaxing your muscles to lessen the intensity of the feeling.
Adaptive vs. maladaptive emotional responses
Emotions are fundamentally adaptive; they evolved to help us navigate the world effectively. A hint of anxiety before a massive bluff can sharpen focus. Frustration can be a catalyst for analyzing a losing session and identifying strategic leaks. In this sense, no emotion is inherently 'bad'.
The problem arises not from the emotion itself, but from the maladaptive response it can trigger. When frustration from a lost pot leads to three consecutive poorly played hands, the response has become maladaptive. It is no longer serving a useful purpose and is actively harming performance. The goal of regulation is to encourage adaptive responses and reduce maladaptive ones.
Your mindset, as explored in my previous article on 'Mental Foundations', is the lens that shapes your emotional response. A player with a 'results mindset' often has a maladaptive response to a bad beat, viewing it as a personal failure. Conversely, a player with a 'performance mindset' interprets the same event as a neutral outcome, making an adaptive response like refocusing much easier to achieve.
What is emotional regulation?
Emotional regulation is the process of influencing which emotions you have, when you have them, and how you experience and express them.
Notice the keyword: influence. It isn’t about building a dam to stop a river of feeling. It’s about learning to redirect the flow. Regulation involves a set of skills that allow a player to modify the intensity and duration of an emotional state to better align with their goals — like making optimal decisions at the poker table.
Why emotions can't be 'controlled'
The idea of 'controlling' emotions is a common misconception. Because the initial emotional spark is automatic, trying to simply will it away is like trying to stop a reflex. This effort is often counterproductive. The attempt to rigidly control or suppress a feeling can paradoxically intensify it, a phenomenon psychologists sometimes refer to as the 'rebound effect.'
Shifting the mindset from 'control' to 'influence' is a crucial step. You can’t stop the initial wave of frustration from hitting, but you can learn skills to ensure it doesn’t turn into a tsunami that wipes out your chip stack.
Simple examples of emotional regulation
Here are a few brief examples of what regulation can look like in practice:
- Cognitive reappraisal: Actively reframing a situation. Instead of viewing a bad beat as a personal injustice ("I can't believe he hit that card"), you can reappraise it as a statistical event ("I got my money in with the best hand. The outcome was out of my hands, but my decision was correct").
- Attentional deployment: Shifting your focus. After a tough hand, you might deliberately take 30 seconds to close your eyes and focus only on the sensation of your breathing, pulling your attention away from the negative loop replaying in your mind.
- Situation modification: Changing your environment. If you recognize the signs of overwhelming frustration or fatigue, a powerful regulatory strategy is to decide to end your session, thereby removing yourself from the triggering situation.
The hidden cost of emotional suppression
Suppression — the act of consciously pushing unwanted feelings down and hiding them — is one of the most common and intuitive emotional strategies. However, research consistently shows it is a costly one.
Suppressing emotions requires significant cognitive energy. This mental effort drains the exact resources you need for complex strategic thinking, calculating odds, and staying focused during a long session. It’s like running a demanding software program in the background; eventually, it slows everything else down.
The emotions you push away don't disappear — they often linger and resurface later, sometimes with even greater force.
Regulating emotions is a core competency for any player dedicated to long-term success. It begins not with control, but with influence — accepting emotions as natural signals to be skillfully managed.
By shifting from a battle for control to a practice of influence, players can build a more resilient and high-performing mental game.
