Right Mind

You’re in the third hour of an otherwise unremarkable hold’em session when you pick up pocket tens on the button. It’s folded around to you and you raise. The small blind folds and the big blind calls. You have a confident read on your opponent: This guy won’t defend his blind with just nothing, even if he puts you on a pure steal. So when the flop comes 9-6-2, you like your hand a lot. You bet for value. Your opponent calls. The turn is a 4, which doesn’t scare you because you know the big blind won’t have gotten this deep into the hand with swill like 5-3. You bet again, fully expecting your foe to lay it down now, but he calls. What could he have? A good nine? If he had a set or a premium pair, you think you’d have heard about it by now.

The river is a queen. The big blind checks and you check too, because a queen is an overcard he could easily have held and hit. Sure enough, he turns over the winning hand of A-Q and takes the pot.

You replay the hand quickly in your head and emerge from your brief analysis satisfied that you played every street correctly, from your preflop raise to your river check. But something about the hand irks you. Your foe called all the way with just overcards. Does he not respect you? What does a guy have to do around here to get these mooks to fold? That thing that irks you is now like a raspberry seed stuck in your tooth. The more you think about it, the more it bothers you. It’s hard enough to play this game correctly, you tell yourself, but when you play absolutely correctly and end up suffering for others’ mistakes, well, damn, that’s just not fair.

A subtle shift has taken place in your thinking. For one thing, you have mentally accused your opponent of having made a mistake when, in fact, his play may have been correct. He held A-Q, after all. You could easily have been on a pure steal and even if you weren’t, he still had outs. If anything, he might have played the hand too weakly; the river bet went begging, after all. But that’s not the problem.

The problem is you’ve swapped thoughtful analysis for righteous indignation. Your thinking is now colored by your mood. In an otherwise unremarkable hold’em session, you have reached a cusp. If you don’t get your mind right here, the whole session could go up in flames. If you continue to dwell on mistakes — and not even your mistakes — you run the risk of blowing a hole in your concentration and pouring your chips through it.

Let’s say you pass the test. You shrug off the loss and play the next hand. Lo and behold, you get pocket aces — and they don’t hold up. Next hand, pocket kings — and they don’t hold up either! Now you’ve been hit by a devastating combination of punches. You’re suffering at the hands of other players’ decisions and also the capricious whims of luck. Your steely discipline is in vapors now. All you can think about is how damn much you hurt.

When this happens, you lose. Win or lose, you lose, because as soon as you start to process your pain, you’ve left thoughtful intellectual process and entered the realm of feeling. You’re suffering, and when you’re suffering you shift your focus from playing perfect poker to wondering why the universe is so unfair. On the conscious level, of course, you know that the universe is not unfair. You know that you’re just experiencing a short-term setback. Nevertheless, you are experiencing that setback, and you’re experiencing it on an emotional plane, in an emotional way. You are, in other words, feeling the moment rather than thinking it. Once your situation starts to affect your mood, performance suffers and further bad outcomes may result. It’s a vicious cycle:

You get in a bad mood.
Your mood affects your play.
You make inferior decisions.
You get bad outcomes.
Your bad mood gets worse.

And so on.

Nor does it necessarily take a bad beat to put you in a bad mood. I remember once in the early, penny-ante, days of my playing career when I took a break from a playing session to check the messages on the answering machine on my home phone. (Remember answering machines? Remember home phones?) The news was not good: A lawsuit I thought had been settled turned out not to be settled and suddenly a $10,000 obligation hung over my head. I went right back into that penny-ante poker game and blew off a hundred bucks. That’s how upset I was!

You might say I had my priorities screwed up, and you might be right. The ten grand should certainly have been more important to me than the $100. But thinking about that ten grand, feeling the pain of it, cost me a Big Ben I didn’t have to lose.
The memory haunts me still.

Which is, of course, exactly where I go wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with holding onto memories of plays that didn’t work out. There’s certainly nothing wrong with holding onto the memory of mistakes we’ve made, for that’s how we avoid making those mistakes the next time. But if we hold onto feelings, if we hold onto regret, if we carry these emotions even from one hand to the next, we don’t have right mind and we can’t expect to win.

Philosophically savvy readers will see in this discussion a resonance of the Buddhist concept of right mindfulness, summarized thus: “Right mindfulness is the controlled and perfected faculty of cognition. It is the mental ability to see things as they are, with clear consciousness. Anchored in clear perception, it penetrates impressions without getting carried away.”

Love those Buddhists, never getting carried away. We should all be so cool.

If you’d like to know more about right mindfulness, you can investigate Buddhism at length, or you can cheat the process and read my latest novel, Lucy in the Sky. It will teach you just enough about right mind to keep you out of trouble at the table. In the meantime, heed the words of my hippie Uncle Zoomer, who told me a lifetime ago, “Be here now. Be there later.” Better advice I have never yet received.

For success in hold’em, then (or for that matter in poker or for that matter in life), do this: Focus on how you do, not on how you feel. That’s the path to right mind, and the path to profit, too. ♠

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.