I get very upset with myself when I make a bad play ...

[ QUOTE ]
Why not drop down and do 50 pushups after playing stupidly?

It gives you time to get off tilt, acts as punishment, and helps you prevent developing a poker player's signature pear-shaped build.

Come to think of it, I should do this myself between hands.

[/ QUOTE ]

I dont know if your being sarcastic or not, but this isnt a bad suggestion. I think this could do a number of things for you ...

1. Keep you off tilt. Your sitting out a hand or two to do this, and your focusing on something else.
2. Keep you in better shape. You could mix things up ... one session nothing but push ups, another nothing but sit ups, etc. It wont make a drastic change, but hey, its better than nothing.
3. Help your play. With a punishment you will be less likley to make such a mistake again.
4. Have another hobby. All you guys who play online for 12 hours a day and not much time for anything else, could say that you have another hobby. You work out.

[SlowStroke]

Cause and effect.

The action you take - is effect.

Your state of mind - is the cause.

Judging effects as good or bad is not helpful. The effect is, and can not be changed.

Using effects as reminders to examine the cause is helpful. Changing the cause will change future effects.

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Poker is so much inside your head that it is hard to see what is really happening. A more physical example would be a better.

A high jumper makes a jump that is not very high.

He could say - that was a bad jump, I made a mistake, I must try harder.

Or he could ask himself - How is my concentration? Did I get enough sleep? Have I been eating right? Have I been training enough?

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What I'm saying is this - his jump (or poker play) was not a mistake, he did the best he could at the time. If you are not happy with the jump, focus all your attention on the cause, not the effect.

SlowStroke,

Let me start by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed reading your initial post in this thread. It is packing some excellent, thought provoking ideas. I will pm you about it if you don't mind. Still, I believe that your argument is incomplete (almost to a point that makes it incorrect).

You claim that the relationship between your state of mind and the actions you take in poker is one of cause and effect (that the causal relationship between the two runs only in one direction). In other words, if I understand it correctly, your claim can be stated in the following way: "If your state of mind is optimal, the actions you take are also optimal, so concentrate on being in the correct state of mind" However, I think that the relation between the two is one of equivalence (I am using equivalence in the mathematical sense of the word). So my statement I guess then is: "Your state of mind is optimal if and only if the actions you take are optimal".

Wouldn't you agree? Yes, the state of mind you are in influences the decisions you make. However, the actions you take also help you to define the state of mind you are in (For example, when you tilt, you don't realize it at the time and you need to analyze your play later on to 'diagnose' your sub-opitmal state of mind). Being in the optimal state of mind and playing optimally are equivalent. If you achieve one, you also achieve the other. That is why I liked your advice to concentrate on improving your mental state (your awareness) when playing in order to make better decisions. Approaching the 'problem' from that point of view, is indeed more productive and should certainly make the original poster feel less frustrated about one particluar mistake.

Some of the other claims that you made, I completely disagree with. For example, you wrote: [ QUOTE ]
First realize that you never make a mistake.You always make the correct decision based on the information that you are aware of.


[/ QUOTE ]

That is not true. You always make A DECISION based on the informatin that you are aware of/your mental state, but that decision is not necessarily correct/optimal. For example, if your state of mind is one of a mentally unstable person, you might make the decision to kill somebody. That doesn't make the action correct or justified just because of your mental state. It is the same with poker. You must have some objective/frame of reference in the game - for most people it is to maximize profit=play optimally. So you must also have some notion of optimal play (probably that is to make the plays with highest expected value). I think that because of the way you defined the relation between mental states and resulting plays you dismissed the latter as simply an "effect" that cannot be labeled as correct or incorrect by itself. Thant is why i think that an equivalence relation between the two is better. Your mental state can be sub-optimal and so can your play. In fact, when either one of the two is sub-optimal, then necessarily so is the other.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the ideas in your posts. Just wanted to add my two cents.

Bate

[rid.br]

Very good thread.

I have the same problem as OP. I become really sad and frustrated if i make a big mistake. And sometimes when i'm not in the right state of mind i deny myself into thinking i MUST have the best hand, when the board has a lot of possibilities for better hands. Sometimes i just think "Oh, i'm playing heads up and i got two pair in NL. I cant fold this, even if the board is T J Q, and i have something like QT"

Slowstroke's posts were very helpfull. I think the biggest mistakes of experienced poker players comes when he is not in the right state of mind. Because experienced players know all the odds and everything. So the next step is the battle versus himself to be constantly in a good mental shape.

And i agree with MicroBob too. I think every player make mistakes. Even Phil Ivey said that every session he plays he makes at least one mistake.

I think if you wanna be a top poker player you have to have extreme control of yourself. Self control even when you are running REAL BAD is the key for winning poker.

[Voltron87]

If you play a significant amount of poker you are going to make bad plays, you are going to go through 1K stretches of hands where you botch some winning hands and make some bad calls. You have to accept that this will happen and deal with it as an inevitability rather than something that should never happen. If you set unrealisticly high goals you are going to miss some of them and you can't get worked up over it.

Mistakes happen, put them in the past. You will get unlucky, you will [censored] up, realize that and act accordingly.

[SlowStroke]

Thanks for the response. You make several good points. I really like your idea about optimal state of mind and playing optimally being equivalent. You could say that one is really just a reflection of the other. That sounds right to me.

I also forgot to mention that we are really just talking about playing up to your fullest potential. If you don't understand the game but have a wonderful state of mind - you will still play poorly.

Let me clarify my ideas about mistakes. If you are on tilt and your emotions cause you to make a play that logically you know it wrong. I don't label that as a mistake. You did the best you could at the time. This may be just a matter of definition, but it helps me focus my attention on the tilt causing emotion rather than the specific poker misstep.

There is an hidden benefit here. If I label a play as a mistake, then I will have to forgive myself before I can move on. The time gap between the mistake and the forgiveness is filled with guilt. And it is too easy to take the next step from thinking 'I made a mistake' to thinking 'I play bad'.

If instead I believe that I did not make a mistake, but rather my mental / emotional state may need attention - I get to bypass all the guilt because there is no sin to forgive. I am able to immediately focus on the next hand completely. And that is my real goal.

I often scan this forum and when I see a post on a topic that I have been thinking about I sometimes respond just to get the ideas straight in my own mind. Writing is good for that. And having to put it out in public provides the extra incentive to get it right. So sometimes my posts are really just advice from me to me.

Once again, I like the points you make. They have really helped me put things in perspective for myself - for a good player, sub-optimal state of mind is the disease and bad plays are the symptoms. You can feel bad about the visible symptoms all you want and even try to temporarily get rid of them cause they bother you. However, if you want to get to the bottom of things and find a more permanent solution, you must concentrate on treating the disease itself. (Hahaha, too bad there is no vaccine that makes you immune to that reoccuring illness called tilt [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] )

I aggree with pretty much everything you wrote, but for some odd reason I seem to resist the idea of not labeling your 'mistakes' as such. I fear that not acknowledging my mistakes would somehow make me content with them/more like to repeat them again and will also make me less motivated to work on my game. I am a donkey like that, I guess - I need a good kick in the behind once in a while to keep me going.

Bate

[rid.br]

I think the question now is " HOW to obtain that optimal state of mind constantly when playing poker? "

I tried lots of different changes in my routine to get that. And none seems to work. For me it's almost impossible to be invunerable to your emotions while playing poker.

If someone can do this. Please help.

[SlowStroke]

How to obtain that optimal state of mind constantly when playing poker? That is the million dollar question.

This is what I'm working on for myself.

It is not what happens at the table that upsets me - it is what I think about what happens at the table that upsets me. It sounds like a subtle difference, but I think it is important.

If someone gives me a bad beat or I misplay a hand - so what? If it ended there I would be fine. But often it doesn't end there. I start thinking about it. How many outs did he have? What were the odds? How big was the pot? How many pots have I lost like this in the past few days? And on and on and on. It is my own thoughts that are now causing the problem.

What I try to do is constantly monitor my thoughts. Meditating pre-game helps.

When I detect any thought that is not helpful - I notice it (non judgmentally) and let it go.

I try to pay attention only to thoughts that are relevant to the hand currently in progress, whether I am involved in the pot or not.

Of course, sometimes a train of thought gets going before I am aware of it. Once the train gains a certain momentum it is hard to stop.

I am getting better and better at this, but I still have a long way to go. I have noticed that as I practice this, the length of time I am upset about something is getting shorter and shorter.

My guess is that this is a life long practice, constant improvement, never perfected.

This advice might seem counter intuitive but i've found that when i'm playing a 8-10 tables getting mad becomes less of a problem for a couple of reasons.

1. I Make more plays that I would consider "bad", but I don't spend time worrying about them because I have to many other things to consider. I am confident that I am a winning player so I try to keep myself playing as perfect as possible on all tables which means no overanalyzing past mistakes.

2. By playing many tables i don't get bored and try fancy plays that deviate from a tight aggressive style that is the easiest for me to profit with. By playing this type of style I give myself fewer chances to screw up the way I play my cards.

P.S. Playing many tables at once may in fact have the effect of magnifying your anger more so if this doesn't sound like something that will help you just ignore everything i've said.