Those who think that to win at poker you only need luck, do not know well how the game works. It could be the case that someone playing for the first time ends up winning, but that would only be a possibility, nothing to do with reality.
To play poker you need dose of temperance, study, concentration and psychology, a lot of psychology.
Professional poker players choose the card game as their way of life, moving away from what would be a typical 40-hour day. But in his workday, in addition to playing tournaments, a poker player needs to prepare by spending time studying different games, developing logic and preparing psychologically..
Psychology is, in many respects, an essential quality for the poker player. The first one we will talk about refers to how the poker player has to deal with himself and, therefore, with its own psychology. As an elite athlete who is alone on the court, the poker player must face his own ghosts at the gaming table and, to do this, he must resort to different strategies:
Visualize yourself before a championship with a winning attitude and status. Imagine yourself in a positive context exponentially increases your chances of winning.
It is about always repeating a gesture every time things go well and repeating it in moments of stress or anxiety. In this way, the brain is tricked into reacting with a positive feeling each time the gesture is performed..
Poker is one of the professions where people lie the most. For the poker player, it is a must analyze how your body reacts depending on the emotions you feel to, in this way, be able to dominate it at your convenience and mislead the opposite.
The second of the aspects in which psychology is essential in poker is in relation to the player's relationship with his opponents: just as we must know our gestures to control them, we must know those of the rest of the players at the table to anticipate their moves.
It is something as simple as the empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the place of the other to understand it and be able to take advantage of it. One of the ways to understand your opponent is to observe him before the game. Is about carefully observe how the opponent reacts in different contexts, analyze their gestures both off the table and once the game has started.
Observing others and understanding their reactions is the only way that we can get a clear and realistic idea of what is or could happen. But, as each person and their psychology are unique.
Each case must be analyzed individually and without generalizing. For example, if a player talks a lot and then is quiet at the table, it could be: because he has bad cards and is nervous, or because he has a good move and is anxious. We will have to see what your particular case is and not generalize with the majority reaction of the players in that situation.
Poker is a profession in which you have to lie to survive, so mastering the reactions of our own body and those of the adversary will help us to have an advantage in the game. In this infographic made by the house of online poker Full Tilt Poker, you can check the physiological reactions we have when we lie.
The third of the aspects where psychology influences poker is in regard to the perception of things.
In the article Psychology and poker: the perception and its influence on the control of your game by the poker player Matthias Brandner, he talks about how our perception can play a trick on us. Specifically, he talks about two points: when we overestimate our abilities, considering them better than they really are, and when we see the result of the game of a wrong way.
On the first point, Brandner talks about the need to be objective when assessing ourselves and to our opponent and to recognize that, in the same way that we could win, losing is within the scope of the game and you have to accept it when it comes.
Regarding the way of perceiving the result, the article talks about the selective perception. This refers to the fact that we always remember the bad moments more intensely than the good ones because our psychology tends to focus more on the negative aspects. This leads us to mistakenly perceive that bad streaks last longer than good ones..
Psychology in poker is essential to survive on the green carpet and therefore, it is one of the disciplines for the preparation of a professional poker player. But in addition, more and more studies indicate that poker skills can be extrapolated to everyday life.
At Harvard University, for example, the subject of 'Strategical Poker Thinking ' applied to managerial skills.
On the other hand, psychologists such as the emotional therapist and coach Carlos Limones have been studying the aspects of psychology in poker for a long time to find out how they influence our lives. Specifically, Limones finds many points in the psychology of poker that could help us to: be more flexible in the face of unexpected changes, more constant to, for example, follow a diet, learn to better manage stress and knowing carry situations that do not depend on us.
And so, in life as in poker, not everything is a matter of luck and you have to have a lot of psychology to win..
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