What’s Your EQ?

You probably know your IQ, but do you know your EQ?

It’s your emotional intelligence score. Wikipedia defines emotional intelligence as “the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one›s goal(s).”

At the tables it’s understanding and adjusting to the emotional forces that affect your own and other people’s decisions.

Why Should You Care About Your EQ?

Your results depend on your edge, and your EQ has a bigger impact on your edge than your IQ.

The EQ differences among players are much larger than their IQ differences, and this pattern increases greatly as the stakes get higher. The higher you go, the smaller the IQ range becomes. Virtually every top professional has an IQ above 130, but their EQ varies immensely.

The effects of reducing the range are “an extremely well-verified statistical principle. For example, research proves that Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) scores are poor predictors of grades in elite colleges because they accept only the highest scorers.” (Alan Schoonmaker, Poker Winners Are Different, p. 10)

Most top players have excellent emotional control, but you’ve seen a few act like spoiled brats. They scream at other players, whine about their bad luck, and blame their losses on everything except themselves. You wonder, “How can great players be so stupid?”

They’ve got a high IQ, but a terrible EQ.

The Strategic Literature Generally Ignores Emotions

Virtually all authorities tell you how you should play, and they ignore the emotional causes for bad play. They assume that, if people know how to play, they will play well. But nobody always plays as well as he knows how to play. We all make mistakes that we know are mistakes, and emotions cause these mistakes.

Some authorities tell you how to exploit tendencies such as playing too loosely or tightly and bluffing too much or too little. Hardly anyone tells you why you and others have these tendencies. They are caused – at least partly – by emotions. If you can read those emotions, you’ll make better adjustments.

People play too tightly because they’re afraid of losing, too loosely to reduce boredom. They bluff too much because they get a kick out of stealing other people’s pots, or they feel desperate. They bluff too little because they are afraid of looking and feeling foolish.

The fear of looking and feeling foolish can be the most powerful emotion, especially for highly intelligent people. They’ve won at school and work, and can’t handle losing, especially when their mistakes caused losses.

If you don’t understand how emotions affect your own and your opponents’ play, you’ll make many emotion-driven mistakes. If you learn how to read, adjust to, and manipulate your opponents’ emotions, you’ll gain a large, rare, and valuable edge.

Let’s Rate Your Poker EQ

Wikipedia’s definition is too general. Let’s convert it to five dimensions that affect your poker results:

• Understanding how emotions affect your own play
• Controlling your own emotions
• Understanding how other people emotionally react to you
• Understanding how other people’s emotions affect their play
• Manipulating other people’s emotions

Understanding How Emotions Affect Your Own Play

It is – by a huge margin – the most important part of EQ, and you can’t control your emotional reactions without this understanding.

Many good players are much better at reading other people than at understanding and controlling themselves. It’s a natural tendency. We want to believe that we are rational, profit-maximizing decision-makers.

Virtually all the poker literature is based on that assumption, and it’s obvious nonsense. Any reasonably perceptive player can see that emotions affect everyone’s play, including yours and mine. Yet poker authorities rarely discuss emotions, and the few discussions you’ve read usually focus only on the extreme reaction we call “tilt.”

Most authorities implicitly assume that we act rationally unless our emotions become so strong that we lose self-control. They’re wrong. For every dollar lost from tilt dozens of dollars are lost from less extreme losses of control.

Some of those dollars are yours and mine. For example, we know that we shouldn’t play certain cards, but we play them. People with poor emotional control do it more often, but there isn’t a poker player alive who hasn’t done it again and again and again.

We do it because we’re bored, or we think we’re so skilled that we can profitably play hands that weaker players should fold, or we’re on a rush, or we believe we’re due to get lucky, or we want to beat someone, or for many other emotional reasons.

Most players, certainly including me, would much rather study other players than look critically at ourselves. Critical self-analysis is painful because we won’t like some of the things we’ll see.

But it’s immensely more valuable to understand yourself than other players. You play only a tiny percentage of your hands against any specific opponent, but your emotions can affect several decisions every hour.

The first step toward controlling your emotions is taking a painfully hard look at yourself. Then ask someone who knows you well to comment on your self-analysis. Start with these questions, but you may want to go further:

On the A-F scale, how well do you understand your own emotions?
On the A-F scale, how well do you control your emotional reactions?
Why did you give yourself those ratings?
Which emotions have the biggest effects on you?
Why do they have such big effects?
What kinds of mistakes do those emotions cause?

How can you recognize that you’re acting emotionally? Many players don’t realize they’re on tilt, and they are even less aware of subtler emotions. The faster you can recognize emotional reactions, even small ones, the less damage they will do.

What triggers those emotions? If you learn how to identify those triggers, you’ve taken a giant step toward increasing your emotional control. Instead of waiting until emotions cause mistakes, you can take corrective action, including going home, before you make serious mistakes or – worse yet – go on tilt.

What’s The Bottom Line?

Critical self-analysis was the foundation of my book Your Worst Poker Enemy. Of course, that enemy is yourself. Our emotions cause many self-destructive mistakes.

Some readers loved that book. A few told me it was the first time they understood why they didn’t play as well as they knew how to play. It helped them to use their knowledge more effectively.

Some readers hated it. They didn’t want to look at themselves, and they resented my saying that they acted self-destructively. Of course, I think they were just defending their egos. If you don’t understand why you make mistakes, you’ll keep making them.

What’s Next?

If you honestly answered the questions about yourself, you’ve taken the first and biggest step toward increasing your EQ. Future columns will discuss the other steps.
If you increase your EQ, you’ll win much more money. ♠

Thanks to Roy Cooke and Jan Siroky for their help with this column. Dr. Al ([email protected]) coaches only on psychology issues. For information about seminars and webinars, go to propokerseminars.com. He is David Sklansky’s co-author of DUCY? and the sole author of four poker psychology books. You can check out many articles, blogs, videos, and books. Please visit my website, AlanSchoonmaker.com and get a free book.