There are a couple of approaches you can take to really get to the heart of how you inhabit your online poker space. One is to spend frequent moments in quiet contemplation of the question, remembering that the point of the exercise is not to recriminate but just to ruminate, and that open, honest acceptance of all your aspects is the true path of the poker warrior. Another is to keep a notebook by your computer, or a computer file labeled “State of Mind” and in it just record in passing all your observations about the way you think and the choices you make. I divide my notes into “Sharps”—ways I play better—and “Flats”—ways I play worse. Here are a few of each I have noticed, and noted, in my play:
SHARPS
Heads up play
Playing in the morning
Not afraid to lose
Confident (even arrogant)
Fresh hot coffee
After a good day’s work
Sufficiently funded for the game
Happy
By myself
FLATS
Double dipping
Alcohol
Playing tired
Angry at the world
When I stop caring
Taking phone calls
Trying for a hit-and-run win
Avoiding work
Feeling guilty about avoiding work
Thinking about your own online playing experience now, fill in some blanks if you will.
There are many other ways to think about how you inhabit the situation of online poker. It’s a question that never gets fully answered. Nor should it, for there’s always room for improvement. What I want to stress—what I can’t stress enough—is the need to be sensitive to your mindset. Be open and articulate with yourself about what works and doesn’t work for you. From time to time your ego may take a beating. Mine certainly does when, for instance, I call a big bet when I just know I’m beat, and then have to face the sad fact of my own stupid stupidity. But ego is not the issue. Money is the issue, and it’s axiomatic that the more frequently you bring your sharp mind to the table instead of your flat one, the more money you’ll make playing poker. Only you can know whether you’ve got the sharp or the flat mind in play, and you will only know if you’re frank. Let your ego take its lumps. Your bankroll will thank you in the end.
Be aware also of how quickly you can shift from sharp to flat. It only takes a hand or two to send you spinning down…
You’re in the middle of a multi-table tournament, and you’ve got it going on, with a reasonable stack, a decent image, and a nice, crisp mind. Then you pick up pocket aces on the button. It’s folded around to you. You raise and get a loose call from someone who (a) has no business being in the hand, (b) sticks around for a ridiculous draw, (c) gets there, and (d) takes all your chips.
Check your state of mind right now. What emotions are you feeling? Anger? Rage? Despair? Resentment? Is any of these emotions conducive to perfect poker? Asked and answered, counselor, asked and answered.
Now you compound the problem. Instead of saying, “Well, that happens,” and retiring from play for the day, you immediately jump into a sitngo, desperate to purge the bitter taste from your mouth. So desperate, in fact, that you come out storming, trying to run the table through the sheer force of your bully behavior. And your strategy—no, I won’t call it a strategy, I’ll call it an attitude—works for a while because your opponents (sensible people not currently suffering from psychic lockjaw) are taking the time to size you up. While you’re doing your thing, they’re going to school on you. Well, they’re thinking, he’s the straw that stirs the drink. Or anyway so he thinks. After that, it’s a simple matter for them to lay out, play passively, and let you hoist yourself on the petard of your own uncontrollable wrath.
Trying to make J-T look like A-A, you get out ahead of a hand.
Someone plays back at you.
You’re not ready to relinquish your table captain’s hat, so you raise back.
Somehow all the money gets in the middle.
And you’re on the wrong side of pocket aces.
You bust out most heinously.
And you instantly jump into another sitngo. Now you’re really ticked! I’ll show me! you silently shout as you whack off your nose to spite your face. Understand that from this point forward you have no hope of playing well. While it’s easy to slip from sharp to flat, it’s almost impossible to go the other direction. Ghosts of recent mistakes will haunt you. Rage and remorse will degrade your play. There’s only one thing to do now. Tear yourself away from the table! Leave. Go for a walk. Go for a beer. Go for a schvitz. Just get away from your computer before you make a bad situation worse, much worse. The damaged state of mind I’m describing here is one of the leading causes of superheated online loss.
You know what? If the situation I’ve just described has never happened to you, that’s great. If it’s happened to you and you can admit it, that’s bad but not a disaster. If it’s happened to you and you know it’s happened, and you still won’t admit it, then you’ve got a problem you need to address right now. If it helps, the situation I’ve just described hasn’t happened to me since, oh, well, yesterday. And I’m the guy who writes the books! Does it undermine my credibility to tell you this? I don’t think so. I think I’m just modeling honesty. I’ve learned to accept my mistakes. But I’ve also learned to get away from the game.
So go easy on yourself, but be hard on yourself, too. Accept that you’ll have these flare ups. Accept that your emotions will get the better of you. Just don’t accept sticking around when it happens.
Without going all new age on your ass, I think the critical component of sharp play online is actually, oddly, good spirit. So many weird bad things happen to us online…we get trapped, we get unlucky, we get disconnected, we get sucked out on…the list goes on and on. If online poker is to be part of our daily experience, it needs to be something we can embrace with joy, even when weird bad things happen. Otherwise, over time, the screen becomes our enemy, and though we like to play, want to play (need to play?) we don’t have fun when we play. We start expecting weird bad things to happen to us, and when they do, partly because we bring them down on ourselves through weird bad play, we just sink deeper and deeper into the glower.
Lighten up! Remember the words of the sage:
YOU’RE BORN BROKE, YOU DIE BROKE, EVERYTHING ELSE IS JUST FLUCTUATION.
But if your fluctuation is negative because your state of mind needs tending, then you’ll just end up pouring more and more money into your online experience, and I can’t see that making you happy, can you? So, let’s boil it down to the simplest of terms we can:
1 If you’re sharp, keep playing.
2 If you’re flat, don’t.
3 See yourself as you are.
4 Have fun.
Moving on…
3
HANDLES
When you first start playing online, the information available to you seems so scant you almost feel like you’re flying blind. All the old familiar clues and cues of the cardroom or casino environment are missing. You can’t look your foes in the eye, pick off physical tells, overhear their conversations, or watch for the telltale lapses in concentration that show when they’re losing their sharp. You’ve