Those who think that to win in poker you only need luck, do not know well how the game works. There could be the case that someone who played for the first time ended up winning, but it would be only that, a possibility, nothing to do with reality.
To play poker you need doses of temperance, study, concentration, and psychology, a lot of psychology.
Professional poker players choose the card game as their way of life, moving away from what would be a common 40-hour day. But in their workday, in addition to playing tournaments, a poker player needs to prepare by spending time studying different games, developing logic and preparing psychologically.
Psychology is, in many ways, an essential quality for the poker player. The first one we will talk about is how the poker player has to deal with themselves and, therefore, with his own psychology. As an elite sportsman who is alone on the court, the poker player must face his own ghosts at the gaming table and to do so, he must resort to different strategies:
Positive viewing
Visualize yourself before a championship with an attitude and winning status. Imagining yourself in a positive context exponentially increases your chances of winning.
Bonding
It's about repeating a gesture every time things go well and emulate it in times of stress and anxiety; That way you'll cheat your brain and your body will react with a positive gesture in adversity.
Body language
Poker is one of the professions where most people lie. For the poker player, it is essential to analyze how their body reacts depending on the emotions they feel so that they can dominate it at their convenience and mislead opponents to the contrary.
The second of the aspects in which the psychology is essential in poker is related to the relationship of the player with their opponents: just as we must know our gestures to control them, we must know the rest of the players at the table to anticipate their plays.
It is as simple as empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the other's place to understand it and to take advantage of it. One way to understand the adversary is to observe him before the game. It is a question of carefully observing how the opponent reacts in different contexts, analyze his gestures both outside the table and once the game has started.
Observing others and understanding their reactions is the only way for us to get a clear and realistic picture of what is happening or can happen. But, as each person and his psychology are unique.
Each case must be analyzed individually and without generalizing. For example, if a player talks a lot and then the table is quiet that can be: because they have bad cards and they're nervous, or because they have a good play and they're anxious. You will have to see what your particular case is and not generalize with the majority reaction of the players in that situation.
Knowing how a liar thinks
Poker is a profession in which you have to lie to survive, so mastering the reactions of your own body and the opponent's will help us to have an edge in the game. In this infographic made by the online poker house Full Tilt Poker, you can check the physiological reactions that we have when we lie.
The third of the aspects where psychology influences poker is when it comes to the perception of things.
Perception sometimes can trick us; when we overestimate our abilities, considering them better than they really are, and when we see the result of the game in a wrong way.
On the first point, we need to be objective in valuing ourselves and our opponent and to recognize that, in the same way, that we could win, losing is within the possibilities of the game and must be accepted when arrives.
Selective perception.
This means we always remember bad times more intensely than good ones because our psychology tends to focus more on the negative aspects. This leads us to perceive, in the wrong way, that the bad runs last longer than the good ones.
The psychology in poker is essential to survive on the green carpet and therefore, is one of the disciplines for the preparation of a professional poker player. But in addition, more and more studies indicate that the skills of poker can be extrapolated to everyday life.
At Harvard University, for example, the subject of 'Strategical Poker Thinking' is given to management skills.
On the other hand, psychologists have spent time studying aspects of psychology in poker to find out how they influence our lives. In particular, poker psychology might help us to: be more flexible in the face of unexpected changes, more constant and committed, for example, follow a diet, learn to manage stress better and knowing how to handle situations that do not depend entirely on us.
And so, in life as in poker, not everything is a matter of luck and you have to have a lot of psychology to win
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