Understanding Your Own Emotions

Part one of this series defined EQ as your emotional intelligence score and listed five components for poker players:

1. Understanding how emotions affect your own play
2. Controlling your own emotions
3. Understanding how other people emotionally react to you
4. Understanding how other people’s emotions affect their play
5. Manipulating other people’s emotions

Parts one is, by far, the most important part of your Poker EQ, although many players will disagree. Even if they are skilled at reading and manipulating their opponents’ emotions, they may not seriously try to analyze their own emotions.

It’s a huge mistake. If you don’t understand your emotions, you will probably make costly emotion-driven mistakes. You may even go on tilt and blow your whole bankroll.
It happens every day.

Here are some steps that will increase your self-understanding and self-control.

Which Emotions Are Most Dangerous For You?

Nearly everyone has the emotions listed here, but your personality determines their intensity and effects. You may ignore ones that seriously hurt me and vice versa. As you read, write your answers to the questions.

You may think that writing them is unnecessary, but memories of emotions are notoriously unreliable.

Hope is the driving force behind most gambling. If we didn’t hope to win, we wouldn’t play poker, and this hope can make us deny reality. Bad players deny it frequently; good players only occasionally; but everybody occasionally denies it.

We know the odds don’t justify calling, but call. We see that a game is too tough for us, but play. We make other mistakes because we hope to get lucky.

• Does hope cause mistakes?
• Which mistakes?
• How often do you make these mistakes?

Love for action makes some people take foolish chances. If we didn’t like action, we wouldn’t play poker, but we can’t afford to love it. Virtually all action-lovers are heavy losers.

• Do you love action?
• How does that love affect your play?

Fear of risk is the opposite of the love for action, and it’s much less expensive. Fearful players can win if they play only against weak players, but they can’t win much. They fold too much and “save money” in foolish ways.

For example, they save bets by checking when they should bet or calling when they should raise, but giving free or cheap cards costs them entire pots. Their timidity also makes them easy to bluff, which good players sense and exploit.

• Are you too afraid of risk?
• How does that fear affect your play?

Conflict-aversion makes some players act too nicely. Poker is the exact opposite of a “be nice” game. Our objective is to take each other’s money. Excessively nice people check when they should bet, call when they should raise, rarely check-raise or bluff, and may even show down winners without betting (especially when they’re heads up).

• Are you too conflict-averse?
• How does it affect your play?

Anger is the most visible emotion and the one with the most obviously destructive effects. We’ve all gotten angry, and we usually paid for it. We tried to punish someone, continued to play when we should have gone home, and made steam raises or other stupid mistakes.

• Do you get angry too often?
• Do you get too angry?
• How does it affect your play?

Aching to get even has caused countless players to take foolish risks, get deeper into the hole, become more desperate, go on tilt, and lose much more than they can afford.

• Do you ache to get even?
• Does it happen often?
• How does it affect your play?

Pride can make us play better, but excessive pride (arrogance) is extremely destructive. It’s related to many other emotions. For example, one reason we ache to get even is that losing hurts our pride, especially if we think the game is easy. We essentially ask, “How could these weak players beat a superior player like me?”

Arrogance also makes us believe we can beat games that are too tough for us, play weak cards, or play well when we’re exhausted, sick, or distracted. We’re too arrogant to accept reality.

• Are you arrogant about poker?
• How does it affect your play?

Identify Your Triggers

An important step toward reducing emotions’ destructive effects is identifying your triggers and their effects. A trigger is anything that causes an emotional reaction.

Triggers are extremely individualistic. You might shrug off something that greatly affects me. If you understand which emotions are dangerous to you and what triggers them, you can greatly reduce or even eliminate some emotional dangers. For example, if you know that you excessively ache to get even after losing three buy-ins, go home after losing the second two buy-in.

Here’s a short list of triggers. Most of them are unpleasant, but a few are pleasant. Unpleasant triggers are more dangerous, but pleasant ones can cause expensive reactions. For example, after winning a big pot or several pots in a row, you can go on “happy tilt” and become too loose and aggressive.

Check the ones that cause strong emotional reactions and insert words or numbers in the blank spaces.

__ Bad beat when your opponent made a stupid mistake.
__ Bad beat when your opponent didn’t make a mistake.
__ Losing $___
__ Winning $___
__ Losing several pots in a short time
__ Winning several pots in a short time
__ Losing ___ sessions in a row
__ Winning ___ sessions in a row
__ Nasty players
__ Very slow players
__ Drunks
__ Very friendly players
__ Attractive members of the opposite sex
__ Maniacs
__ Rocks
__ Calling Stations
__ Bad dealers
__ Being card dead for ___ minutes
__ Making a monster hand and getting no action
__ What other triggers do you have?

Keep An Emotional Journal

Most players can’t answer some of these questions because they don’t keep records of their emotions and their effects, especially emotionally-driven mistakes.

An emotional journal can greatly increase your understanding of:

• Which emotions are dangerous for you
• How they affect your play
• What triggers them

Jan Siroky, a respected tournament coach, calls it “taking your emotional temperature.” He recommends that, shortly after any significant event (negative or positive), you should honestly and thoroughly answer these questions:

• How do I really feel?
• How important is what just happened?
• Am I overreacting?
• Why am I overreacting?
• How has it affected my play?
• What should I do now?
• Why?

Record your answers in a journal. Otherwise, you’ll forget some of them, especially the most painful ones. The more painful an answer is, the more important it is, and the less likely you are to remember it. You naturally want to forget your emotionally-driven mistakes.

If you keep an emotional journal and review it frequently, you’ll see patterns. For example, you’ll realize that certain kinds of people cause specific emotional mistakes, or perhaps you can’t handle losses larger than $X.

You can then make much better decisions such as avoiding those players or quitting before you’re in danger of losing $X.

If you understand your emotions, their triggers, and their effects, you’ll make much better decisions and much more money. ♠

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.