Poker And Stress: How to Handle it - Part 2
"Stress is one of the aspects that are part of poker and cannot be avoided, so it is necessary to learn to live with and control it."
After analyzing and knowing better stress and how it can affect poker players, in this strategy article we will see how you can control it, offering some tips to help you deal with stressful situations in poker, and how to control it. You can not avoid stress, but you can learn how to control it
Poker players cannot avoid stress when playing poker, in fact, they really do not want to do it, either, because a little pressure is needed to not play with too much relaxation and make unnecessary mistakes.
The player needs to understand the stress to learn to control it and keep their emotions at a level that does not negatively affect their game. You have to try to keep it at a comfortable level so the concentration increases but without spoiling your game.
A few years ago, Andy Beal, a Dallas billionaire, challenged the best poker players in the world to head-to-head games with chilling sums of money. Beal is one of the richest men on the planet and had a very particular goal, to try to force professional players to overcome the limits of stress to get them out of their comfortable play area.
To counter Andy Beal, the players joined financially and in the game made shifts, this way the stress and tension of the game were shared among all. After the games were played, Beal returned to Texas with several million less in the pockets as the players, especially Phil Ivey, showed their potential and won to Andy Beal in the direct confrontation.
In this case, we have seen that professional players are able to handle the pressure and did not lower their level of play despite playing in really high limits of money.
Usually, the money invested can be a factor that affects stress, but there is an example that attracts attention and shows that there is no need to go the stress associated with budget impact: Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and one of the richest men on the planet.
Bill Gates is a regular poker player who could sit in games with more money in bets without felling it in his pockets, but is known in Seattle, where he usually enjoys poker, he doesn't usually sit at tables more than $ 10 / 20 $ as he has acknowledged, he does not feel comfortable playing at higher levels.
Probably he has not researched about stress, but he has found a game in which his stress level is manageable and does not affect his game.
Two key points when analyzing stress
- Stress is not necessarily bad, but it is another emotion that, knowing how to handle it can be beneficial for the player.
- With the same amount of pressure you can feel completely different emotions, but not only in different players, but the same person can have different sensations in a similar context.
Both statements sound strange and it may seem impossible to handle stressful situations, but it really is not so difficult to understand the reason why there are players who are better than others, especially when it comes to stressful situations.
Stress is not bad by nature
As we pointed out above in point one, stress is simply another emotion, so it does not necessarily have to be bad. Studies show that too much stress is bad for any human being, but the reality is not that simple, it is a bit more complicated.
Stress, when it does not exceed tolerable limits by the player, can be a very important motivation factor, even there are people who when they are in situations of stress near these limits can do unimaginable things from a positive point of view, without being the poker game is an exception.
There have been cases in which due to the high level of stress and adrenaline there have been parents who have taken their children from a burning car even with a broken leg, but there are situations where stress is not an ally, can be an enemy, as in an operation, so a surgeon needs to control his emotional stress when he is operating someone in a situation of life or death.
In poker you have to know how to handle stress so that you can act as if you were in both situations because you have to know how to throw yourself into the fire in some cases, while the rest of the time you have to know how to remain calm and choose the decision that, coldly, more benefits offer the player statistically speaking.
In short, this point means that sometimes you have to keep your head cool and act with absolute precision as if you were a surgeon, while in others it is necessary to act in a risky way in order to take advantage of the situation.
Stress depends on the task to be performed
Known in the world of psychology as Interaction, the stress level is usually influenced by the task to be performed. According to the law of Yerkes-Dodson, well known by the two psychologists who formulated it, stress is intimately related to the difficulty of the task to be performed.
As Goldilocks and the three bears in the well-known children's story where you need to always be at the intermediate level of both temperature (neither too cold nor too hot) or hardness (neither too hard nor too soft), the poker player must know how to place himself at an intermediate point of stress.
If a person has a permanent adrenaline rush when playing poker, he will act at all times as the father who wants to save his son from the flames, being harmful to him, while if he plays passively and without motivation, his lack of aggressiveness will not help, so it is necessary to be able to find the average where the player is rational but is able to risk when it is due.
Two examples of limit stress level
- Playing with a low a level of stress.
There are many $ 5 / $ 5 levels players that when faced at $ 1 / $ 2 tables players who normally play at such tables are not able to beat them. The explanation for this is usually that they play with a level of stress too low, that the result does not affect them enough so that their level of play is not optimal.
These players act as if the game was not with them, so they do not have the minimum level of tension and act as if the situation was not important enough for them, so they do not get involved in the game necessarily to get the most out of it.
- Playing with a high level of stress.
As in the previous case, players who are accustomed to playing at $ 5 / $ 10 tables, there are usually losers sitting at the tables of $ 10 / $ 25 as their level of stress increases to surpass the advisable limit
This happens because the game cares too much and the pressure to win is much higher than they usually have at the usual tables they occupy.
In this case, the player has an adrenaline level similar to the father that acts to save his son in flames, saving the distances but is in an operation where the accuracy must be exact. Players find that their emotions are too high and the high level of stress makes their game suffer.
It draws attention that in both cases can be the same player and that in addition to its levels of game out to be victorious because it controls the stress without a major problem. The knowledge of the game is the same, but the situation influences enormously and causes him to lose the "Goldilocks touch", which is not able to maintain the intermediate point where they are able to remain calm and are able to take risks when necessary.
You can feel different emotions with the same amount of stress
The experiment mentioned in the first article on stress on the drug to improve memory that turned out to be adrenaline shows that the same level of stress or the same amount of adrenaline can trigger completely different sensations.
People had very different sensations depending on the room in which they had waited, whether with the man in a good mood or with the depressed. Same drug, same doses, and physiologies of similar volunteers in different settings trigger really different, even opposing, effects.
Little Lesson for Poker Addicts
It is necessary to take into account that the interpretation of the emotional state that a person has is very important. For example, when you are going to play a major tournament, you do not always have the same feelings before you start playing.
A player can feel optimistic and with options to do something important or can see the tournament completely out of reach, influencing their sensations in the way they see the tournament and in the way they act, generally being the best results when is convinced that something good is going to happen.
The level of stress, if you tackle the game with a positive vision usually stays within limits that are feasible to support, also having a high level of adrenaline, so that the game is usually optimized, offering more options to achieve positive results.
Final Advice
Stress is part of poker. It is impossible to avoid it, so you have to know how to live with it and use it for your own benefit. You must always keep within the levels of stress that can be supported considering that not always the same situation will create similar feelings in the player.
An important point to manage stress is to be positive from a negative point of view can extend the tension until you reach a point that can not be supported, in addition to knowing the limits and not creating situations that are known to be difficult because in that case decisions are usually not the most appropriate.
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I find my stress increases the closer to the bubble I get. I also find I play better short-stacked. I think I am more focussed and less second guessing myself, as the options are fewer (usually fold or all in).