Which Help Should You Get?

In my last column, I said that some people need help with guilt feelings, but may not realize it. Poker players hardly ever discuss guilt feelings because they don’t fit our macho, predatory game, but ignoring them can damage your bottom line.
Do You Have a Significant Problem?
I emphasized “significant” because almost everyone occasionally yields to guilt feelings. For example, if a nearly blind friend was flashing his cards to everyone, you’d probably tell him to stop it.
That previous column described several guilt-driven reactions: not betting the river, making small river bets in no-limit and pot-limit, avoiding cash games, chopping a tournament’s prize pool, chatting too much, and not bluffing often enough. The more reactions you have, the bigger your problem. An essential step to solving it is understanding why you have these reactions. Here are some factors that may (or may not) make you feel guilty:
Your sensitivity: The more perceptive you are, the more likely you are to feel other people’s pain. If their pain doesn’t bother you, your sensitivity is a huge poker asset; it helps you to read and manipulate opponents. If their pain bothers you, you may pass up opportunities to exploit their vulnerability.
Your motives: You play poker for many reasons, and some motives conflict with each other. For example, your profit motive conflicts with your desires to socialize, relax, and test yourself against better players. Guilt feelings aggravate some conflicts. Attacking weak, drunk, or infirm people increases your profits, but also may increase your guilt feelings.
The conflict between socializing and winning money is especially affected by guilt feelings. You can’t relax comfortably with people when you feel that you’re exploiting them. So, the more important socializing is to you, the more money your guilt feelings will cost you.
Your relationships with the opponents: Guilt feelings have greater effects when you’re playing with people you like and know well, especially close friends and relatives. If you can’t play hard against certain people, you should probably avoid them.
Your stakes: Because smaller-stakes games and tournaments are more social and less “cutthroat,” guilt feelings generally have a larger impact. Actions that would be acceptable in a bigger game may seem “wrong” in a smaller one.
Whether you are losing or winning: When you’re losing, you may do things that you wouldn’t do when winning. You may feel less inhibited about bluffing or busting someone because you need to relieve your own pain. Conversely, you’re more likely to yield to guilt when you’re winning, especially if you’re winning a lot.
The potential “victim” is losing a lot, especially if he is nearly broke: You may not want to increase the pain of someone who is already hurting badly. You may be particularly reluctant to bust a heavy loser.
The potential “victim” is obviously weak and vulnerable: You may be less willing to exploit people who are very old, sick, handicapped, and so on. You may intellectually agree that poker is a predatory game, but not want to see yourself as a predator. You may give other reasons, such as, “It’s too easy,” or, “I want a bigger challenge,” or, “I want to be a good sport.” Even if these reasons are partly true, guilt also may affect your decisions.
These factors reinforce each other. If several of them are combined, their effects can be crippling. For example, you’ll be especially vulnerable when you’re a big winner in a small no-limit hold’em game and have the nuts against a handicapped friend who is losing heavily and nearly broke. In that situation, many people just can’t pull the trigger.
What Should You Do?
The answer is the one that frustrates so many people: “It depends.” Unfortunately, there are no simple answers. The right decision depends on several factors that most players rarely analyze carefully.
1. How significant is your problem? If it’s not significant, don’t worry about it. The more significant it is, the more you need help. So, stop denying, set your pride aside, and get the help that you need.
2. How do you react to those feelings? Some people know they have strong guilt (or other) feelings, but think they don’t react to them. They’re almost certainly kidding themselves. People don’t react like computers.
3. How do your reactions affect other people? If you don’t know, find out. You may find that you feel guilty about actions that other people don’t notice or care about; or, that these actions bother some people, but not others. When you know how various people are affected, learn how to control your reactions to get the best results.
4. How much do you care about the way that other people see you? You may care a lot about some people’s opinions and be indifferent to the opinions of others. The more you care, the more vulnerable you are.
5. Why do you play poker? The more important making money is to you, the more your guilt feelings will cost you — financially, psychologically, or both — and the harder you should try to control guilt and other emotional reactions.
How Can You Control Your Reactions?
The principles for controlling reactions are essentially the same for all emotions. I’ll summarize the most basic ones here and discuss them more thoroughly in later columns.
First and most important, recognize, accept, and analyze your feelings. Far too many poker players deny or rationalize their emotions, especially ones like guilt and fear that don’t fit into our hypercompetitive game. But denial doesn’t make them go away; it just increases the number of guilt-driven mistakes.
Second, accept that you have little control over your feelings, but can control your reactions. So, concentrate on controlling your reactions.
Third, keep track of how much your reactions cost you. If you know how expensive certain reactions are, you’ll work harder to control them. Missing an occasional bet or losing an occasional pot by “being nice” may seem trivial, but if you do it often enough, the annual cost can be painfully large.
Fourth, recognize that your guilt feelings don’t fit our game’s essential nature. Poker is not a “be nice” kind of game; it’s a predatory one. Our goal is to take each other’s money, and the strong eat the weak. That reality can be tempered by your other motives, but unless you don’t care about the money, you should never forget it.
As I wrote in Poker Winners Are Different (Page 216), accepting our game as it is will let “you attack weaker players and use deceptive tactics without feeling guilty or embarrassed. You’re not a rotten SOB who wants to hurt someone. It’s just the way the game is played.” If you want to be a big winner — especially a professional one — you must accept that reality. ♠

Dr. Al ([email protected]) answers your questions on his blog at CardPlayer.com. He is David Sklansky’s co-author of DUCY? and the sole author of The Psychology of Poker, Your Worst Poker Enemy, Your Best Poker Friend, and Poker Winners Are Different.