Umbrella Mind

About ten years ago I was playing $4-8 limit hold’em at Bellagio and found myself sitting next to baseball great Orel Hershiser. The conversation turned to coaching, and in a conversation I’ve never forgotten, Orel told me the difference between a bad coach, a good coach and a great coach. A bad coach, he said, can tell you what you’re doing wrong. A good coach can tell you how to fix it. And a great coach can tell you one thing that will fix five things. Although I’ve written about this conversation before, it had left my mind for awhile, but came back to me in a flash the other day when I found myself contemplating something called “the umbrella mind.” The umbrella mind is the overall mindset that we as players bring to every poker session (and that we as people bring to everything we do). It seemed, and seems, to me that if my umbrella mind is not right, it doesn’t matter how good a player I am, I won’t play well. The umbrella mind – my overall emotional and attitudinal state when I play – is the “one thing that will fix five things.” Let’s take a closer look.

You’ve been playing in a tournament. It started with bright promise, but now ends suddenly and quite badly when you flop a set of threes and lose to some slackjaw who lacked the common sense to fold his 6-4 preflop and lucked into a flopped straight. As you stumble away from the table, you’re aware (or maybe not sufficiently aware) of a couple of emotions. First, there’s anger, anger at yourself for not seeing the trainwreck coming. Then there’s resentment – seriously, how could that idiot with the 6-4 have gotten involved in the hand in the first place? Behind and beneath these emotions is a certain frustration. You were doing so well in the tournament and it ended so badly. Plus, you had intended to keep playing for hours and hours and now what are you supposed to do? Go home? Pah.

All of these emotions contribute to your umbrella mind, the sum of all your thoughts and feelings as you contemplate your next move. If your emotions are negative, then it’s not an umbrella hovering over you but a dark cloud. And it’s making your landscape bleak.

For someone in your situation, it’s not uncommon to jump into a cash game. Hell, it happens every day. A guy busts out of a tournament too soon, walks away from the table with all this rage and frustration in his head, and takes it out on the nearest cash game he can find. Now, we all know that there are adjustments that need to be made in going from a tournament situation to a cash game, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about is all that negativity that the player brings with him into the cash game. Bent on nothing less than revenge against the awful unjust injustice of the world, he’ll probably play his hands too fast and too recklessly, without any regard to the real texture of the game he’s in now. He’ll run hopeless bluffs and take ridiculous draws, but these are not tactical decisions. These are decisions driven by the overall emotional state of his umbrella mind. Seriously, how can he not go wrong?

My writing partner Annie Duke describes poker as “a game of decision-making made under conditions of uncertainty.” How good do you think your decision-making can possibly be, down there on the level of the hand, if your overall mindset is fundamentally flawed up? It doesn’t matter how good your tools are if you have no will to use them correctly.

To address “the one thing that can fix five things,” then, attend to your umbrella mind. Enter every poker session with emotional balance and a clear sense of purpose and you can make good tactical decisions all day long. Enter under that black cloud, though, and anger and resentment will take your game to places your wallet doesn’t want to go.

If you think we’re talking about tilt here, we are, but only in a sense. While it’s true that tilt will cause one to make bad choices, the umbrella mind is much bigger than that. The umbrella mind controls everything. Think about this the next time you bust out of a tournament and jump right into a cash game. Is your head on straight? Do you have the right umbrella mind? If not, you’d better plan to play small because you certainly won’t play well. And by the way, it’s not just a tournament loss that can wreck your umbrella mind. Maybe you hit some traffic en route to the club. Maybe you had a fight with your spouse. Maybe you’re fighting a cold. Whatever is influencing your overall state of thought, be aware of it and be attuned to it. The umbrella mind controls everything.

One of the best pieces of poker advice I ever heard was Roy West’s classic, “Play happy or don’t play.” Whether he knew it or not, he was attuned to his umbrella mind, and determined to bring a bright, shiny one to every single session. To hear Roy tell it (and Orel, and me), if you have a positive frame of mind, you can expect positive results. If you don’t, you can’t. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Speaking of simpler, and speaking of writing partners, I’m happy to announce that Annie Duke’s and my new poker single, The Middle Zone, is available now at http://tinyurl.com/TheMiddleZone. Attractively priced at just $2.99, this dense little eBook focuses exclusively on how to play those tricky hands that are neither clearly the best nor clearly the worst. It’s the first in a series of poker singles we’re going to release, so stay tuned. They won’t fix everything, but they’ll fix important things, one slender tome at a time. ♠

John Vorhaus is author of the Killer Poker series and co-author of Decide to Play Great Poker, plus many mystery novels including World Series of Murder, available exclusively on Kindle. He tweets for no apparent reason @TrueFactBarFact and secretly controls the world from johnvorhaus.com.