© 2019 Peter Clarke (Carroters)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Alien World Problem
◦ The Luckometer
◦ Causal Feedback
◦ The Fairness Test
◦ Praise and Scorn
◦ Surrendering Resources
◦ Acting Immediately on Emotions
◦ Pattern Recognition
3. Types of Poker Misfire
◦ Survival Misfires
◦ Feedback Misfires
◦ Risk Assessment Misfires
◦ Skill Translation Misfires
◦ Fallibility Misfires
◦ Infantile Misfires
4. Rewiring Your Mind in Four Steps
◦ Allocating a Trigger to the Conscious Mind
◦ Interrupting the Bad Interpretation
◦ Watching and Waiting
◦ Running the Good Interpretation
5. Common Rewires
◦ 'I Don't Believe You'
◦ 'Ouch I Should Never Have'
◦ 'Please Fold, Please Fold'
◦ 'Don't Play. Can't Lose'
◦ 'I'm a Winner Now'
◦ 'Stay with Me'
◦ 'X Therefore Y'
◦ 'Must Cram Volme'
◦ 'I Should be Better than This'
◦ 'Gamble!'
6. Case Studies
◦ Alvaro - Years of Bad Habits
◦ Sean - Poker Dread
◦ Neil - Zombie Mode
 ◦ Kieran - The Gambler's Mentality
◦ Dennis - Negative Assumptions
7. The Top 10 Poker Roadblocks
◦ 10. Lack of Confidence
◦ 9. Being a Bad Learner
◦ 8. Anger
◦ 7. Fickleness
◦ 6. Fear of Gambling
◦ 5. Wrong Balance
◦ 4. Inability to Cope with Volume - Gary's Story
◦ 3. Gambling Addiction and Results Obsession
◦ 2. Lack of Grit
◦ 1. Insufficient Logic
8. Final Advice
9. About the Author
Introduction

Many poker players fail simply by ignoring the necessity to work on their mental
game. They leave massively harmful habits unchecked and let their emotions dictate
their fate. Congratulations! By purchasing this book, you have avoided the first hurdle.
Now, let's get to work.

Poker players often talk about going on 'tilt' - a word that immediately conjures images
of angrily throwing money into the pot or childishly berating opponents, but that
covers very little of the subject matter of this book.

This is a book about the poker player's tendency to malfunction in a variety of ways:
glaring and subtle; sudden and gradual. Instead of talking about 'tilt'; which I feel limits
the scope of mental game exploration to outbursts of a dramatic and intense nature; in
this book, I discuss the many common ways in which the human brain goes wrong in
understanding and reacting to poker's challenges. The struggles I cover belong mostly
to the domain of the mental game. Very little technical poker knowledge is required to
benefit from this book.

Our thesis is that the many faulty interpretations our brains make of common poker
situations lead us to suboptimal responses, which can seriously jeopardise our chances
of success - even when we are strategically savvy. I call these mental-game errors
'misfires' rather than 'mistakes' because they are usually nothing more than normal
human-wiring that happens not to work in the very different realm of poker. I call the
process of overcoming these mental-game obstacles 'rewiring'. This is a book about
changing the way your mind handles common poker stimuli to avoid the mental-game
traps that cost most players a great deal of money at the tables.

The principle teaching model of this book can be summarised by talking about a
mental-game problem as having three ingredients:

• Firstly, there is a trigger that is outside of the poker player's control, for
example, the pot getting big, or experiencing a losing session.
• Next there comes a faulty interpretation of the poker situation such as: 'I must
win this pot at all costs' or 'losing money = failure'. This view is often taken
subconsciously and occurs because the player has learned to interpret similar
situations outside of poker in a certain way.
• Finally, there is a response, which constitutes the problematic behaviour - for
example - calling a bet that you know is unprofitable to call or playing a four
 hour session to chase recent losses.

Have a look at the figure below. This template will become extremely familiar
throughout the course of this book.

The solutions (rewires) that I suggest for all of the poker misfires dealt with in this
book work from the premise that it is the second stage of this process - the faulty
interpretation of the poker situation - which must be fixed. The trigger which precedes
it is uncontrollable, and the response which follows it would, in fact be sensible, if only
the interpretation were accurate to begin with. Take the example of the calling station,
who has to make sure that he is not being bluffed. The trigger here is facing a big bet,
the interpretation is that not being bluffed is the primary objective of this spot, and the
response is to call without doing the proper analysis. The choice to call follows
rationally from the flawed interpretation. This is why we must fix the middle link in
the chain.

It is the way we view poker situations that causes problems; not the situations
themselves; and not how we respond to them.

This book begins by exploring how and why humans are not mentally prepared for the
emotional and logical challenges of poker. We then cover the various categories of
mental game leak, known henceforth as 'misfires' and the effects that these can have on
a player's progress. In Chapter 3, I present my four step technique for rewiring the
brain to cope with poker as efficiently as it has evolved to cope with real life. In
Chapter 4, we run through a list of the most common mental-game fixes, known
henceforth as 'rewires' that I have helped my private students achieve in the last
decade. In Chapter 5, I share some true stories about some of my recent students who
have made the most progress in improving their mental-game by rewiring their mind in
the manner recommended in this book. Finally, in Chapter 6, we move on to tackle the
top 10 poker roadblocks, which are more permanent and less situational mental-game
problems than misfires.

The title: 'Poker Therapy' comes from the idea that just as people can benefit from
therapy in life; which is an organised and deliberate attempt to change how the human
mind works for the better; poker players can improve their performance through
similar methods. I have spent the last few years of my poker coaching career ensuring
that I can assist poker players, not just technically, but in their mental-game too. I hope
that the methods in this book can help you, as they have helped my students, to
overcome the obstacles in your mental-game and realise your full poker potential.

Our journey begins with an examination of why we need Poker Therapy in the first
place.
Chapter 1 - The Alien World Problem

Most of us agree that the ability to function like a robot would serve us well in poker.
We would be able to eliminate emotional interference and focus solely on the factors
that matter to the expected value (EV) of our decisions. Unfortunately, we as humans,
shall never achieve cold, calculating machine status. We suffer from mental game
problems that are a function of our design, and in part, a function of successful real-life
programing. The thesis of this book is that most of the things we refer to as 'tilt' or
'mental game leaks' in poker are simply the reactions of a healthy human, who has
been cast into an alien world that his species has never evolved to handle, and in
which, he is supposed to feel frequently disturbed.

This sums up the Alien World Problem. To devote yourself to the challenge of
becoming a successful poker player is to sail into waters your mind has never even
seen on a map. It is no wonder that you fear losing; chase losses; behave irrationally
during bad sessions; experience anxiety that dwarfs anything you commonly feel in
real life; feel compulsions to click what you know to be the wrong button; make bad
folds due to an overwhelming fear; act impulsively in the spots that require the most
careful consideration...and so on and so on.

Despite poker assuring us repeatedly that the way we have learned to operate in the
real world is no longer compatible in this new realm, we refuse to listen. This is not
our fault. It's all down to human wiring, which makes strong and rigid judgments about
the way the world is early on in life. Some of the processes our minds run correctly in
life, and incorrectly in poker, are inherited through our genetic code. They are
completely ingrained.

Moreover, because you grew up in the same world in which you learned these rules,
your brain gets to continuously reinforce its collection of habits as 'correct'. Positive
confirmation that these habits truly work is what makes our subconscious processes
feel so natural and so difficult to unlearn. In poker, this leads to many faulty
interpretation processes becoming seen as 'reliable' views of the world by our
subconscious minds. As we saw in the introduction, these faulty interpretation
processes are our nemeses in this book.

For most of us, our poker journey looks like this:

Let's take an example. You lose three coin flips right at the end of a break even session
to end play three buy-ins down. You lament: 'this is unfair, what a load of ****.' That's
X. It would usually be very unfair to suffer such injustice in real life and so you are
programed not to put up with it. Such travesty would usually be caused by someone
taking advantage of you and so you perceive a culpable evil - in this case, luck. In fact,
in poker, losing three 50/50s in a row is perfectly fair and will happen in 125 of 1000
realities where you enter three 50/50s. You are simply in one of those 125 realities.
That acceptance is Y.

Because we are creatures of habit, we thoughtlessly run the wrong interpretations of

poker situations because taking similar views in the real world has served us so well.
Poker is a realm where Y set of universal truths are operational but we act as if X are
still true. The aim of this book is to see that poker demands a different approach. We
want to see Y for what it is and build a new set of rules with which to interpret the
poker world. The student who has read this book and put the work in will eventually
react as follows:

By making this concrete distinction between state of affairs X and state of affairs Y, the
poker player frees himself of his real life conditioning and learns how to thrive in
poker like humans have thrived on earth.

Before we learn how to adapt to our new environment, let us explore some of the ways
in which our hard-wiring is so naturally incompatible with poker. Bad interpretation
processes exist due to the following discrepancies between poker and real life.

The Luckometer

Perhaps the most obvious difference between the realms of poker and life is the
amount of luck in each. Our imaginary toy today is the luckometer - a variance
measuring device. If the luckometer reads 5 in life, it reads 95 in poker. We are
naturally equipped to deal with a reading of 5. At this level of luck, a bad thing will
sometimes occur, but almost never a will a flurry of them pummel our patience in
quick succession. When a car zooms into the puddle next to us and soaks us through,
we tend to shrug it off and get on with the day. It almost never happens a second time
and we are very unlikely to become furious and start making a series of dreadful
choices due to how it makes us feel. If that same episode happened ten times in one
day, however, it is very possible that many of us would become overwhelmed with
negative emotion and start behaving quite sub-optimally. We might snap at loved ones
over nothing or break down and cry to a stranger about how horrifically unlucky our
day has been. This is the life equivalent of going on tilt.

In poker, the eighth, ninth, and tenth soakings of the day are often just around the
corner. The reading of 95 on the luckometer warns us of this danger, and cognitively
speaking, we are well aware of it. Subconsciously, however, the circuits are still built
for a reading of 5. This is why we react with fury (fight) or panic (flight) when things
go extremely badly. The fact that we cannot control the mental circuits that govern our
responses to extreme luck fills us with a sense of helplessness; as though we are slaves
to the tantrums of our subconscious mind. We shall see later on, much to our relief that
it does not have to be this way.

Poker is an alien world because the luck involved is much greater than that with which
we have learned to cope.

Causal Feedback

Causal feedback is our process for making sense of the world. Many of the things we
do have an effect on the world and many of the things that happen in the world have an
effect on us. Throughout our lives we learn the most common cause and effect patterns
via the process of causal feedback which I shall illustrate by telling you a story from
my childhood.
I must have been about three when my Dad accidentally left a razor by the bath. I went
to grab it out of curiosity. My thoughts:[new object, must identify effect of object] but
he stopped me before I could touch it. 'You don't touch the razor, Pete, it's very
dangerous.' [Razor is mysterious, must find out why it's dangerous]. Some months
later, I wandered into the bathroom to find the razor sitting on the sink, within reach.
Excitedly, I grabbed it and cut my hand. Screaming, crying, and sulking soon followed.
[Razor bad. Razor cause blood and pain].

The causal feedback process identified an input (grab razor) and an output (pain and
blood). We can formalise the feedback it sent to my long-term memory as follows:
grab razor = pain and blood. As it almost always is in life, the causal feedback process
was successful on that occasion. I made a correct and reliable rule about grabbing the
razor and did not cut myself again.

In poker, we know consciously that good choices often cause bad consequences and
vice-versa, but our subconscious wiring does not understand this fact. When the
beginner 3-Bets the button opener with AQs and loses a big pot, the causal feedback
process initiates whether he likes it or not. [3-Bet AQs = lose money]. This is why my
student shows up to lesson one with a 3% 3-Bet stat. For more experienced players,
they know better than to just flat the AQs and the faulty feedback loop forms in a more
difficult spot, but it still happens. One of the greatest steps we can take in the mental
game is to overwrite the subconscious process of causal feedback with that of open-
minded exploration. We need to replace [A then B therefore A causes B] with [A then
B therefore nothing]. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. The automatic
clockwork of causal feedback is exactly why so many aspiring players find themselves
being proud of bad bluffs when their opponent folds and berating themselves for good
bluffs that happened to get called this time. It is normal to be outrageously results-
oriented. It is human to be so, but again, we can change this. We shall learn exactly
how to do this later on.

Poker is an alien world because cause and effect do not follow one another in a
reliable way. Rules that are formed over small samples of data often turn out to
be wrong.

The Fairness Test

In the 1950s, a white male was many times more likely to get a job than a black female
of equal employability. When a non-prejudice morally educated human appraises this
scenario, he reacts with disapproval. It is unfair.

You come home to find that your house has been burgled. The perpetrator is found but
never convicted due to insignificant evidence. Unfair.

Hard working Jim applies for a promotion, but lazy John gets it because his Uncle is
the manager - unfair.

If you agreed with my assessment of these three cases, it is because your own
subconscious mind runs its own fairness test. When the result of the test is 'unfair' and
the victim is you or someone you care about, the output is almost always anger - the
brain's active expression of unhappiness (sadness is the passive variant). Poker is to the
subconscious mind: the racist 1950s boss, the burglar, and Lazy John. It constantly
does things to you that are assessed as 'unfair.'

Running bad for the third day in a row is actually perfectly fair. Every poker player
experiences such bouts of variance at various points during his career. Poker is not so
much a matter of who runs good or bad per se but of who is currently running good or
bad. In the end we all have roughly the same overall luck.

Poker is an alien world because many things that are actually fair fail the fairness
test. Our subconscious cannot adapt the test for the realm of poker no matter how
clearly we see that it needs to.

Praise and Scorn

During our first few years in the world, we have little to no moral autonomy. We rely
on our parents for guidance as to which actions are permissible and which are not.
When we exhibit behaviour that our parents consider positive, they praise us. When we
put the cat in the tumble direr they scorn us. It is by dancing through this minefield of
praise and scorn that we shape our character and form the habits we need to fit in to
our society and thrive later in life. In doing so, we form yet another automated mental
process, and, as far as poker is concerned, yet another obstacle - the instinct to repeat
praised behaviour and avoid scorned behaviour.

It is very hard to learn to walk in poker because volatile short-term results play the role
of the parent. On some days we get beaten for playing our A-game and on others, we
are rewarded for sloppy lazy decision-making. Just yesterday, I discussed a hand with a
student, in which we agreed that he had called a pot sized bet with something like
5-10% equity against the average opponent's range. He won by making that dreadful
call and came into the coaching session proud of his action like a smug eight year-old
with a new toy. Poker is a horrendous parent. 'Yes hit the dog again son, but don't dare
clean your room or you'll be in for it.'

Poker is an alien world because praise and scorn are dished out erratically. It is
therefore very tricky to be sure that you are moving in the right direction.

Surrendering Resources

The man who tears down the street ripping up $100 bills is perceived to be either very
rich or very mad; and probably both. One of the most counter-intuitive things that we
can do as humans is to commit energy and resources to something only to throw it
away for no gain to ourselves or others, but this is precisely what we need to do in
poker if we wish to be successful. Fortune reversal tilt is the term I have coined for
situations in which the student begins a hand with a strong holding and then something
bad happens that suggests he should now fold. Perhaps he holds KK pre-flop and
4-bets the aggressive regular only to be flatted and have the flop come down Ace-
High. Maybe he flops a flush on J63 and the turn an river are both sixes. In situations
like these, and many far less extreme cases, the most profitable choice is often to fold.
Folding, however, is difficult from a mental standpoint and the student feels an almost
magnetic attachment to the pot due to his previous acquisition of a strong hand and his
investment of chips into the middle.

This attachment exists because humans who felt no sense of possessiveness over their
hard-earned resources did not survive very well. So many of the problems we face in
the mental game of poker are a direct result of successful evolution. You are supposed
to feel like folding is bad. It is bad, but possibly better than all of the alternatives.
Retraining our minds to gladly surrender big pots when the evidence points that way
will be one of the most important rewires in the chapters to come.

Poker is an alien world because it is correct to invest time, resources, and energy
into things we must often give up on.

Acting Immediately on Emotions

What is the purpose of emotion in life? To motivate us into taking beneficial action. If
we did not care about a situation, it would be difficult to generate the willpower and
energy to actually pursue any goal within that context. We experience sadness when
our loved ones are upset because that emotional process has run for millions of years
and been selected for due to its ability to increase our odds of survival. Humans who
did not care about their breeding partner's welfare were unlikely to keep said partner
alive and healthy long enough to create healthy offspring.

In many of the cases where emotion inspires action, it does so instantly. There is little
time to reflect upon or critique our own thinking. Rather, our decision-making process
is automated so as to save precious time, which could be the difference between
survival and death.

My girlfriend, who prefers fight to flight in times of physical danger, fondly recounts
the story of the time she launched herself at a mugger in Ecuador, punching and
kicking him until he released his grip on her friend's bag and went hobbling off into the
distance. This reaction had to be instant to be effective. Calm consideration would have
missed the point and the time to act would have passed. The friend would have been a
camera and a few hundred dollars poorer before there had been time to perform poker-
like rituals such as weighing up the factors or deciding upon the best line.

Because of this evolutionary need for some emotions to be acted upon instantaneously,
it can be disastrous when these emotions occur suddenly in the middle of a poker
session; where controlled thought is required. Many of the subconscious misfires that
we shall examine later are of this knee-jerk nature, and these are understandably some
of the most difficult mental-game leaks to prevent and cure.

The student has been getting 3-Bet all session. Hand after hand, his opponents refuse to
fold and insist on waking up with the top of their ranges. By the end of the first hour,
the student is reaching breaking point. His stores of willpower are all but depleted and
the cracks in his mental game are ready to cave in, spilling toxic, emotionally charged
thoughts all over the felt. With 100BB stacks, the student opens and that same pesky
reg 3-Bets for the fifth time today. The student sees red. Defiant anger reaches an
unacceptable level and the all-in button is pressed with AQo. This play is horrible
compared with both calling, and 4-bet/folding for a cheaper price. Even outright
folding is likely higher EV than shoving - so what went wrong?

The subconscious mind mistook the fifth 3-Bet of the session for a threat as urgent as
the Ecuadorian mugger. The emergency process chose the FIGHT response as most
appropriate and sent a message to the central computer that immediate action was
required. The computer rogered that and injected high levels of adrenaline into the
bloodstream. The student was powerless to prevent the actions of his rogue defence
mechanism, which had so badly misinterpreted how quickly action was required and
how serious the threat was to his chances of surviving. Once again, the root of the
problem can be traced back to faulty interpretation. The all-in button was the correct
one given the interpretation of the situation and so the act of shoving is the symptom,
not the cause.

Poker is an alien world because there are no occasions where emotionally

propelled action is immediately required.

Pattern Recognition

In life, things that look like trees are almost always trees. How often have you seen an
impostor tree that looks just like one until you get close enough to discover that it's
actually a different object altogether? It is no wonder then that we have grown up to
accept external reality at face value. If we went around closely inspecting apples to
make sure that they we really apples before taking a bite, we would waste much time
and effort.

Unfortunately, poker can be a minefield of spots, which look like something familiar
and then turn out to be something entirely different. There was a hidden factor or two
that slipped under the radar, which changed the entire makeup of the situation. The
beginner sees the rough shape of a pre-flop situation and his mind makes a quick
identification, just like in life.

'Aha! I am in the small blind where flatting is bad so I shall fold these pocket threes.'

This is pattern recognition at work. We know apples are safe to eat and we know that
flatting in the small blind is bad...except for when it's great.

The student feels fine about his line, until I explain that the big blind (BB) was a very
loose recreational looking player and that calling the button's 3BB raise with 33 would,
in fact, have been very profitable. This is due to the massive boost in implied odds
from the BB's implied frequent presence in the pot. The student had to scan ahead on
the table and look in closer detail to find this call, so why didn't he do just that?
Because his mental programing tells him that trees are trees and flatting in the SB is
bad. In order to find the highest EV play here, he would have had to examine the tree
more closely just in case it was not a tree at all, and that clashes with how the student
has been examining the external world for his whole life.
Poker is an alien world because, in many spots, the identity of a situation is not
what it strongly appears to be.
Chapter 2 - Types of Poker Misfire

Before we begin listing and curing the common mental misfires that plague the
aspiring poker player, it is important to differentiate between a few types of misfire.

In this chapter we are going to learn the differences between:

1. Survival Misfires
2. Feedback Misfires
3. Risk Assessment Misfires
4. Skill Translation Misfires
5. Fallibility Misfires
6. Infantile Misfires

Survival Misfires

These are the mental-game mistakes that arise from instincts to avoid danger.
Originally, we evolved three reactionary states to deal with direct threats to our lives,
our loved ones, or our possessions. We deployed fight, flight, or freeze to keep us safe
from predators, and of course, our fellow man, who was often intent on killing us for
our resources.

Fight operated by destroying our foe before he could destroy us. Flight was effective
when fighting was deemed either unwise or unnecessary, but escape was likely.
Sometimes, fleeing would have got us caught by a faster foe, and fighting would have
got us killed by a stronger one. In these cases, freezing was likely the optimal (or least
awful) response. Perhaps the predator would assume us either dead or unworthy, or
would fail to spot us altogether.

It sounds absurd on a conscious level to claim that our mind enacts these same
responses when we play poker, over the internet in 2020. But these defences are run
like automated scripts. We cannot change that our brain uses these innate mechanisms
as a response to danger but we can change what it interprets as dangerous in the first
place. It is not the choosing of these mechanisms that constitutes the problem, but the
misinterpretation of poker situations being dangerous in the first place. Provided that
we play poker in a responsible way, the dangers to our survival are purely imaginary,
and we can take steps to dispel these imaginings.
The following figure demonstrates how a poker situation which represents no threat
whatsoever to our ability to survive can be misconstrued subconsciously and act as a
trigger for one of the three defence mechanisms.

The top box is some kind of poker situation like facing the third barrel or getting 4-Bet.
The box below is the culprit wiring that interprets this situation as in some way
dangerous. As this process floods the bloodstream with adrenaline, we have only three
choices, and one of our three survival states is initiated. From there, an emotionally
charged decision is made and, whatever the outcome, the decreased logic in the
decision-making process leads to a lower quality of choice. This is how survival
misfires cost us EV.

Of course, not every flight response is on a par with the surge in adrenaline that propels
you away from the hungry bear. Not every fight response causes a violent physical
reaction, and not every freeze response entails a one hundred percent shut down in
logical function. All out rage; terror; and complete mind-blanks are just the extremes
of these survival mechanisms. On either side of the arrow, there are two terms that
represent two different scales of accompanying emotion. When you fight, you might
just feel a little annoyed, cuss a little, and make a poor call. When you flee, you might
just feel slightly anxious and make a tight fold. When you freeze, you might just
become a little confused and miss an obvious detail that you would normally spot.
These survival misfires and their accompanying emotions may be varied in intensity
and flavour.

Let's examine, in more detail now, how three different students of mine might react in
three different ways to the same poker situation, each exhibiting a different type of
survival misfire.

Student 1 is Tom. Tom tends to revert to fight in situations that his subconscious mind
interprets as threatening, especially when aggressive regulars - who represent attackers
- take aggressive actions against him. The reasons he feels threatened are to do with his
own insecurities about his skill level relative to these opponents. By adjusting the
belief that he is fragile and likely to be bullied by these people, Tom could interrupt the
danger prescribing part of his survival misfire and avoid the following scenario.

Tom C-Bets the flop with top-pair and then decides to go for another street of value on
the turn. The aggressive regular raises and Tom experiences the following survival
misfire.

The problem here is not the turn bet being raised nor is it the brain's use of the fight
response as a remedy to a perceived threat. Rather, the issue is the mistaking of the
turn raise for a serious threat. If we can rewire how Tom sees this spot subconsciously,
then we can replace his current use of the fight mechanism with a more appropriate
and logical mental process. More on how to go about this in the chapters to come.

Student 2 is Rachel. She has struggled with flight misfires for a long time and tends to
interpret aggression as a sign of frightening strength. Her anxiety about losing a big pot
spikes very quickly, causing her to make folds before she has had the chance to process
the situation. When the pot becomes suddenly inflated, Rachel's first thoughts are
visions of losing a huge pot, never of winning one. Unusual or aggressive lines
represent power and hostility. The mind identifies the aggressive line as an
unmatchable foe, and decides that running is the best defence. When Rachel faces the
same turn raise that caused Tom to lash out in self-defence, she enacts a very different,
but equally innate survival process and chooses to flee from this situation for minimal
damage.

Again, the mental game problem resides in the student's subconscious interpretation of
the situation. The processing of the turn raise as an unmatchable and severe threat
generates emotions that initiate a flight response.

Before we go any further, it is crucial to clarify something. Rachel's outward behaviour

and conscious inner-dialog need not mirror the fear that she feels. Poker players do not
like to acknowledge that they are being emotionally driven to a decision and do not
like to act out of emotion alone. Consciously, they know this is wrong. Therefore,
many of us deploy a lackluster biased attempt at reasoning to somehow justify the
emotion driving the mouse towards the fold button.

Rachel might, at this point, start reasoning that folding is best, but this analysis is
crooked - established with one goal in mind: satisfying the desire to flee. We should
not be fooled into thinking that when Rachel says: 'If he can take this line, he must
have a very strong range' that she is seeking the truth. Rather, she knows that poker
players are supposed to use logic, not emotion, and so hides her flight instinct under
the guise of one-sided logic. The reality is that Rachel was always going to fold here.
Like a lawyer who has no choice but to defend a guilty party, her faculty of reasoning
is propelled by emotion to defend her desire to fold. It is for this reason that I call this
type of fake-reasoning 'lawyer tilt'. This biased reasoning actually reinforces the flight
response as correct by giving the conscious mind, whose domain is logic and reason,
the chance to accept the behaviour as correct. Repeating this behaviour can be fatal as
it becomes normalised and lets the mental game leak off the hook.

There are forms of survival misfire which are too strong to carry with them any guise
of logic, and so manifest as raw outbursts of desire. There are other forms of survival
misfire that are so mild that logic appears to be pulling all of the strings - until that is -
we explore why the thought process is every so subtly biased.

The final example of survival misfires comes from Martyn, who suffers badly from
episodes of freezing when decisions start to become complicated. As soon as the spot
starts to entail a more thorough analysis, Martyn panics and his mind goes blank. His
mental processing goes as follows:
This situation does not appear to entail any kind of rage or terror so in what sense is
this a survival misfire?

The brain is interpreting the sudden increase in the complexity of the spot and the
sudden decrease in familiarity as a threat. This threat represents an unsolvable
challenge and likely failure. The survival mechanism when confronted with an
unsurmountable and inescapable threat is to freeze. Remember, that freeze is the last
resort when the cleaner escapes of fight and flight are unlikely to succeed. Because
Martyn's survival response has flooded him with adrenaline which has nowhere to go,
Martyn finds himself overloaded with unusable energy that shuts down his logical
faculties temporarily.

Treatment here will be two-fold. Firstly, Martyn will need to work on the root cause of
the problem. His brain must form alternative neural connections which interpret the
ramping up of complexity as a solvable intellectual challenge instead of an impossible
menace. To do this he will need to gather evidence to refute the core belief that he is
incapable of problem solving in game. Unfortunately, the thing he needs to get going is
the very thing he lacks and so in the meantime, he will need to work on calming down
faster and bringing the logical faculty back on-line before his time bank has emptied.
This two pronged attack should eventually replace this emotional and destructive
survival habit with a calm logical process.
Feedback Misfires

We have already covered the idea of causal feedback as a major contributer to the
alien world problem. Feedback misfires concern the creation or reinforcement of
results-oriented rules to explain the game. Remember three year old Pete's rule about
the razor being bad due to its reliability in causing blood and pain? That rule was
accurate because it was formed in the realm of real life. As we know, most poker rules
that come from immediate short-term feedback are faulty. There are countless
examples of such feedback misfires, but here is one very common one:

My student, Thomas, folds too much to flop continuation-bets. In coaching, we have

filtered for these situations and come across hands where he has folded a marginal
hand to a small flop c-bet in a situation in which he had enough of a combination of
realisabile equity, implied odds, and future fold equity to make a call. This leak equates
to making a lot of significant mistakes in small but common spots. The leak is not
really a technical one as Thomas does not even initiate a fair and balanced analysis of
whether he should call. Instead, his mind goes straight to the bad outcomes of calling. I
call this 'bad branch focus'.

"In these sort of spots I feel like I just call flop, and then he always bets turn, and
then I always end up folding"

It does not take us more than thirty seconds to explore why this thought process is
faulty. Firstly, since Villain bet just one third of the pot on the flop, we only need to
win the pot 20% of the time to get our flop call back. In other words, we are getting 4:1
on our money. It would be okay to fold a lot of turns as long as we can win the pot this
often or more. Secondly, Thomas is completely ignoring the times his hand improves
or when Villain gives up on the turn and he wins on the river, either by bluffing or at
showdown. He is focusing only on the bad branches of the EV tree.

If Thomas's in-game, instinctive thought process is so inaccurate and far beneath his
maximum logical capability, why is it his initial reaction to this spot? A feedback
misfire is to blame. It is caused by the strong negative sensation that arises from the
times when Thomas did call the flop and then fold the turn. The mental processing
goes as follows:
The good flop calls Thomas makes will not always win him money. In fact, because he
was getting such good pot odds, it is permissible for these good calls to lose him
money the majority of time and then recoup it all and more by winning the pot on rarer
occasions. The main issue here is that the sensation of calling flop to meekly fold the
turn feels bad. Thomas is revolted at himself for calling the flop because he knew that
he would end up folding the turn quite often. What his subconscious is unwilling to
accept is that it is okay to lose this pot the majority of the time and still be happy to call
the flop bet. Therefore, Thomas uses the emotional charge of disgust as a catalyst to
formulate a strong rule. Because this rule is backed up by the powerful feeling of
revulsion under which it was formed, it is applied very frequently in the future and
becomes the main governor of this type of flop decision point, overpowering any
weaker rules that were born out of the rarer times when Thomas happened to win the
pot with his flop call.

Compare this process to the following one which occurs when Thomas wins the pot by
making such a flop call:
The conclusion then is that stronger emotions cause stronger rules. The emotional
charge bolds and underlines the rule, making it much more accessible than weaker
rules formed alongside weaker emotions.
And stronger rules lead to a higher chance of application. The better we know
something, the higher the chance of us relying on it in the heat of battle.
It is in this way that emotional reactions to poker situations can lead to the creation of
strong biased rules that are very hard to break.

As the brain is wired to avoid danger more than it is to enjoy small victories, most
students form weak rules when they win the pot and strong ones when they lose it. The
times Thomas's good flop calls resulted in winning the hand are quickly forgotten and
are only translated into temporary quiet rules that are easily out-muscled by those that
were powered by a stronger negative emotion. The mild satisfaction of the hand
checking down and Thomas's small pair winning at showdown seems uneventful and
only worth building a weak rule out of, at best.

Not all students are wired to form stronger rules from negative feelings than positive
ones. Rarely, I will come across a student with opposite wiring. This sort of player
becomes very excited when he wins a pot, and only moderately perturbed when he
loses. Such a player has to rewire in the opposite way from Thomas, taking care that he
spots the dangers and refrains from reveling in his victories so much. Thomas, on the
other hand, has to start noticing and enjoying when lines succeed so that he may avoid
the glass-half-empty method of rule forming.

In an ideal world, the fix for biased rule forming would be to avoid forming rules
altogether based on results and try to form them objectively out of game, based on
solid analysis. This takes a great deal of practice. It is almost impossible for a human to
avoid result-based rule forming altogether. Becoming aware of where that rule forming
is inaccurate and bypassing those faulty circuits is the way to form better habits. In the
next chapter, a few of our common rewires will be for feedback misfires such as
Thomas's.

Risk Assessment Misfires

Risk Assessment misfires occur when the mind runs a process which returns the wrong
verdict about whether a poker investment is worth it. In fact, 'risk' is a misleading term
in poker. If the student is a winning player, who deploys average to conservative
bankroll management, then each time the player has the chance to commit money to
the pot, he stands to lose such a small part of his bankroll, that the risk to his poker
longevity is negligible. In what other sense can a poker decision really be called
'risky?'. It is certainly not risky to call the river with top pair if that call stands to be
profitable. It would be more risky to fold since that would drive down the player's win-
rate closer to zero or lower, increasing his variance, and therefore, his risk of ruin. If
we avoided profitable investments because we will often lose some money, then we
would stand little chance of success.

Sadly, many of us do avoid such investments because of our subconscious

interpretation of 'risk.'

A student may fold in a big pot with more than enough equity to call because his risk
assessment test; which has been created in the realm of real life; tells him that it's too
risky to call. At this point, the EV of calling almost becomes irrelevant. The misfire
has already taken place. The player folds because of the emotions that flow from the
risk assessment interpretation process returning the wrong verdict. Take a look at the
following misfire where a micro-stakes student faces an over-bet on the river - a line he
is not used to seeing.
The problem is that the risk assessment has happened purely subconsciously and has
only focused on one question: 'Is there a decent chance of losing a big pot?' In the
process, the player has neglected everything that actually determines the profitability
of the investment. Tempting as it may be to dismiss this misfire as absurd, there is a
very high chance that you suffer from it from time to time. Let's take a look at the
deeply rooted origins that make this one of the most common types of misfire.

Imagine a situation where you are offered the choice between betting your life savings
at odds of even money (you profit by 1 unit for every 1 unit bet) and imagine that you
will win 60% of the time. Most of us will not even think about taking this bet. The
emotional fold that we make is perfectly justified by the verdict: 'there is a decent
chance of losing everything'. Clearly, the mental process that refuses profitable
investments is justifiable where there is a genuine risk to our well being. In other
words, for most people, losing everything is far more bad than doubling up is good.
The problem is that, emotionally speaking, this same risk is perceived to exist in poker
and its detection is enough to put us off making money. A stack can feel like
everything in a cash game as can your existence in a tournament.

For some of us, risk assessment works the other way round. Some students get a much
larger than average buzz out of playing, and particularly, winning big pots. These
players actually seek out extra variance instead of trying to solve the spot objectively.
If you quickly decided that you would in fact take the 60% chance to double up your
life savings, then you are almost certainly one of these players. Your risk assessment
test goes as follows:

This student's chips are often in the middle before he has had time to assess the
investment rationally. As long as there is a decent chance of winning, the urge to
pursue the big win takes over. Whether 'decent' happens to mean 25%, 30%, 50%, or
some unknown chance, it is deemed enough. 'Pursue Thrill' is not the same response
program as 'Fight'. While the latter is a defensive action, the former is an adventurous
forward lunge into something appealing.

Many risk assessment misfires occur when the student runs the 'more good than bad?'
test. This is a common metric for making decisions in life. The problem is that, in
poker, this test can often wrongfully translate as. 'more than 50% equity?'. As we know
consciously, 50% equity is usually far more than we need to make any investment
profitable due to the existing pot providing a large bonus the times we call our
opponent's bet and win. Here is a visual comparison of a 'more good than bad test'
working in life and then failing in poker.
The subconscious is only happy for us to invest when we have 50% equity or more. It
cannot adapt its good old test, which reliably returns sensible verdicts about swimming
in icy lakes. In poker, this same test returns an absurd verdict that we should fold with
7% more equity than we need to call. Remember, calling a pot-sized bet is to call at 2:1
on your money and so needs just 33% equity to break even. Look out for this one; it is
by far the most common form of risk assessment misfire.

Skill Translation Misfires

In most fields, an excessive skill advantage yields immediate and gratifying results. In
poker, money inevitably gravitates in the long-term towards the more skilled player,
but this is accompanied by many short-term victories for the weaker player. Just as
with the other types of misfire, we accept the short-term disconnect between skill and
victory on a conscious level. Subconsciously, however, our minds are often guilty of
unwarranted expectancy. This might be:

• The expectancy to win a pot vs. a weaker opponent

• The expectancy to have a winning session
• The expectancy to win in the medium-term, for example, in a week or a month
The first misfire is born from our implicit understanding of the natural pecking order in
real life. An amateur boxer does not beat a world champion. A child does not earn
more money than a fifty year old surgeon. Therefore, says the archaic skill assessment
program, a recreational calling station does not win a pot against me - a hardworking
regular. Consciously, we know that weaker players can and will beat us out of a few
pots, but subconsciously, the picture is often as below.

The problem is that the subconscious mind sees the human behind the raising range as
the enemy, when in fact, the enemy is the range itself. While a human can be reacted to
emotionally, a range can only be understood on a logical level. If we can train our mind
to recognise our opponent's range and not the human behind it as the thing standing in
the way of us and this pot, then we can run a logical thought process to replace the
pecking order script that forced us into making a dreadful call. The opponent might be
weak, but the range which raises the river bet is usually anything but. The fixed
reaction to the river raise looks like this:
This is not a solution, but an end goal. As we shall see in the next chapter, actually
removing one interpretation process from its associated stimulus and installing another
in its place is a finicky job that requires clear, consistent methodology. A doctor does
not cure your disease simply by showing you what a cured person looks like.

Winning session expectancy is much more common and harder to treat than pot
expectancy. In real life, if I possess a high level of ability and a good work ethic, I will
almost never feel like a loser. In poker, strong winning players have losing two-hour
sessions around 40-45% of the time. In real life, if I felt like a loser despite being better
than my opponents, I would either be the victim of swindling, or I would be under-
performing. Either way, the feeling of losing is interpreted as untenable. After a
situation has been labeled 'untenable', we are likely to experience anguish for as long
as we remain in that situation. The purpose of this anguish is to facilitate a speedy
escape from the problematic stimulus of defeat.

Here in lies the problem for the poker player. Losing sessions are automatically
interpreted as emotionally untenable sates of affairs. When a state of affairs is
emotional untenable, we have two choices:

• Modify the situation

• Exit the situation
The next figure demonstrates why this mental programing is so destructive for the
poker player

Insufficient win-rates and insufficient volume are the two most common reasons why
an aspiring player fails to reach his goals. Once again, the culprit mechanism is the
player's interpretation process, which leads to one of two inappropriate responses.
Replacing the interpretation with a more accurate one will be the optimal fix for this
leak, making both panicky options - chasing loses and avoiding poker - unnecessary.

Finally, we come to medium-term expectancy. Winning month expectancy, for

example, is an attempt to force variance to abide by the monthly salary system of the
real world. By obsessing about 'what kind of month' you are having, you are asking
variance to operate in accordance to the cycles of the moon; to give you some ups and
downs, but to make sure they have leveled out nicely for you by the time the next lunar
cycle begins. What insanity this is to the conscious mind. But of course, it is not the
conscious mind that enforces a loopy process such as the following:
The resilient fighter takes this frustration and channels it into a misguided
determination to start winning immediately. To perform this miraculous control of
variance, he either avoids high variance spots and ends up losing far too many small
and medium pots, or he fights too hard for pots in attempt to claw back his salary and
ends up losing too much at showdown. As this process makes his month even worse,
mental-game combustion ensues and some serious damage is done to the bankroll.

The not so resilient escaper runs away from the game until he no longer views it as
imposing upon him an unacceptable medium-term state of affairs. He does this each
time he runs bad for a prolonged period of time and ends up inevitably quitting the
game before he could develop the skills or mental fortitude to taste long-term success.

Once again, distorted interpretation of a harmless situation leads to inappropriate

behaviour. The pattern is a reliable one indeed. The cure must come at this crucial
stage where the mental software responsible for making sense of the poker situation is
so far off the mark.
Fallibility Misfires

Fallibility misfires concern faulty judgments about how often, and to what extent, it is
okay to mess up in poker.

Real life imposes strict standards of success upon us via a barrage of minor tasks. Day
to day, we conquer these many simple and minor problems to achieve our goals of
making it through the day with a sense of satisfaction. We sleep in and successfully
rush out of the house, making the smart choice to eat a banana instead of toast and
make it to work on time. We go to work and reply to emails without offending anybody
and then refrain from spilling coffee on our boss' new suit. We come home and cook
dinner without incinerating it. We brush our teeth without dropping the toothbrush into
the toilet, and finally, we rest our heads on our pillows without falling out of bed. We
navigate the frequent challenges of life with few errors.

Poker too imposes upon us many challenges in quick succession, but in poker, even
strong players get a very real percentage of these wrong. Very often, you will watch a
professional play a live session on a training site only to hear him regret and correct
many of his choices. He might say: 'In fact, I think my flop sizing was suboptimal' or
'that river was probably just a fold. I called because I was frustrated at my poor turn
call'. If professionals mess up on a regular basis, then why does the aspiring player
expect to be so infallible? Because he applies the real world standards of fallibility in
common decision-making to the realm of poker.

The typical reaction to feeling like you have failed yourself is to self-berate; get
annoyed; doubt your next move; or maybe to quit the session altogether. It will be very
unsurprising to the reader by this point to hear that the interpretation of the stimulus -
in this case the error and its level of acceptability - is to blame for the following mental
process:
The idea of 'should have done better' forces the mind into another untenable state,
where standards are not being met. There are two ways out of this state.

Some players will accept the belief that they are not good enough and via a drop in
confidence, their play will start to reflect this new perceived lower level of ability as
they second-guess every decision. The old saying pops to mind: 'whether you think
you can or you think you can't, you're right.' These players subconsciously adjust their
play to be consistent with their newfound lower perception of their skill-level.

The other equally detrimental path is to fight against the idea that you are not good
enough by taking out your frustration on the game itself. By freeing himself from the
shackles of standards completely, this player makes disappointment an impossibility by
going off the rails. In the process, he starts to make much worse mistakes that are not
within the acceptable normal range. The irony is that the initial trigger mistake, which
caused this overreaction, probably was within that normal range. We can call mistakes
that are likely to occur in a normal sessions 'forced errors' and ones that result from bad
response processes 'unforced errors'.

The process pictured above is often known as Mistake Tilt. Personally, I dislike
branding such a natural and almost uncontrollable human reaction as a form of tilt. I
prefer the term 'misfire'. 'Tilt', to me, only starts to exist when a player crosses the
boundary between typical human responses that happen not to work in poker and
purely emotional responses that only occur in temporarily distressed humans. The
intolerance of messing up many small problems in a short space of time is typical of
the most level-headed people. It is a natural human tendency to strive for high levels of
accuracy but we need to learn to view mistakes as opportunities for calm reflection and
progress.

Infantile Misfires

The final type of misfire that I consider broad enough to deserve its own category is
the infantile misfire. This type of misfire concerns child-like outbursts. These reactions
come from deep within our most primitive mental programming. The instinct to wail
and scream is learned when we are babies who are just starting to realise the crippling
extent of their helplessness. The choice is a simple one as far as the baby is concerned.
Die or cry out to attract the help of a less useless creature.

Then, we start to grow up and become adults, who, in society are expected to at least
present the illusion of being OK. Deep down, however, our wiring is set in stone. If we
ever find ourselves hopelessly powerless and in great danger, the baby-like shrieking
for help returns like an unpaused cassette tape from our childhood, but perhaps in a
more adult form such as shouting or swearing.

Poker is quite adept at instilling in us the feeling that the we are helpless and in danger.
Relentless, brutal variance very often results in infantile tilt. Compare the adult's
reaction to a brutal poker session to a child's reaction to an unfortunate incident like
being scratched by the household cat. This was an affliction I suffered many times as a
child. R.I.P Ginger - the sudden savager of human flesh.
Both adult and child identify a state of helpless suffering. Once again, this is the culprit
step in the adult's programing. He perceives a terrible run of luck as something that
reduces him to his helpless child form, with which he is all too familiar from his
infancy. While the toddler shrieks and balls, the poker player shouts and curses. He has
grown up to learn how to express this feeling in adult language, but the mental process
is the very same one that the toddler is using. The adult's graphics are more
sophisticated, but he and the child are playing the very same game.

Infantile tilts do not need to be prolonged rages. They may be as acute as a lightning
fast emotional call when a dreadful run out paired with an aggressive bet from Villain
riles the player into childlike helplessness. The symptoms here might be nothing more
than the click of a button, but this click, to the subconscious mind, is a hopeless cry for
help. It is being run by the same 'I am helpless and exposed' mental process that the
player relied upon all through infancy. It takes the form of a poker decision because
that is the arena in which the player finds himself.
Chapter 3 - Rewiring in Four Steps

Let us recap. So far, we have seen that poker is a very different realm to that of real
life. Because our mechanisms for coping with the world are a direct result of the state
of that world, they are geared to work under specifically those conditions. When we
take the natural route of applying these ingrained mechanisms to poker, we see that the
results are less favourable. We called the running of faulty mental processes in poker
'misfires' and learned how different elements of poker's alien nature caused six
different types of misfire. This is the bulk of what poker players are referring to when
they talk about 'mental game problems'. Understanding the problem, unfortunately,
does not imply the accessibility of the solution. Because these processes are initiated
subconsciously, we start off by having little control over when they occur. This is
where Poker Therapy comes in.

It was in 2016 that I really began to explore the question of why so many talented and
hardworking players were not producing the results I expected under my tuition. The
reason was that both student and coach had largely neglected the mental side of the
game. At this point, I began to reinvent my coaching program as something that
covered the mental side of the game as well as the technical side. Over the last few
years, through the implementation of the technique I am about to share with you, I
have experienced massive gains in both the amount of time the student sticks at poker
and the quality of his or her play. Naturally, these are the two most central factors to
success. Poker Therapy, as well as being the name of this book, is also what I call my
method of treating my students' misfires. I have been honing and perfecting this
treatment plan for the last few years with increasing success. The time has come for me
to introduce Poker Therapy to poker players outside of my private client base.

The last chapters concerned diagnosis. Now it is time for treatment.

We should begin acknowledging the first trap that uninformed poker players fall into
when thinking about their mental game problems. The unaware player jumps to the
fraught conclusion that because he is A:

• Aware of the problem

And B:

• Motivated to fix the problem consciously

That the problem will be fixed. He might make inspired affirmations such as:

'That's it. I will never check my results mid-session ever again.'

Consciously, he is dedicated and motivated to change. After all, such awareness and
inspiration would be enough to fix all but the most deeply ingrained of the technical
problems in his game. The difference is that the technical leaks in his game have only
been created and turned into mental processes as an adult and only since he started
playing poker. They are relatively new habits. The mental-game leak of checking the
bankroll in the middle of bad sessions, however, is deeply wired from the human
instinct to assess damage. When you cut your finger badly, do you just disregard it and
continue chopping the onions? No, you take a look and form an opinion about how
much harm has been done to you. This is the difference. This is why students need
Poker Therapy to solve the Alien World Problem. Have a look at the following figure.

The reason that frustration follows on the right hand side, is that all of the intent and
determination goes nowhere. There is a build up of charge with nowhere positive to go.
Subconscious hard-wiring does not go away due to conscious motivation to change.
Just ask any one with an addiction or phobia. Trying to fix a deeply ingrained
subconscious misfire via the medium of conscious grit is akin to being absolutely
committed to trying to open a locked door with the wrong key.
To jump to the opposite conclusion that the conscious mind plays no part in the
rewiring of a misfire would also be naive. While the subconscious mind is responsible
for the running of old reactionary processes in response to old interpretation programs,
the conscious mind is responsible for the creation of new processes. Only the
conscious mind can recognize the Alien World problem and concoct the correct
replacement programs for the old misfiring ones.

We must begin by stripping the subconscious mind of its authority to handle certain
triggers. We disable the culprit interpretation program that runs automatically when the
trigger in question arises by forming the habit of consciously processing the trigger
linked to the misfire. We then consciously create and run a more appropriate
interpretation program for the trigger and run this mindfully. Remember that the
subconscious only misfires because its interpretation is wrong. There is, therefore, no
need to treat the faulty response program, which simply gets discarded when the
correct interpretation has been accepted.

If we manage to interpret a situation as a logical puzzle as opposed to a harmful threat,

then it will feel very natural to run a logical analysis instead of an emotional protective
response. At first, this rewiring happens consciously, but after a great deal of
repetition, the subconscious mind can be trained to run the right interpretation process
by catching itself in the act of almost running the wrong one. Eventually, it stops trying
to run the faulty process. Being constantly interrupted is an off-putting experience and
the brain will not persevere infinitely if the interruption is consistently successful.
Imagine you were trying to make a point and each time you opened you mouth to
speak I sounded a horn in your face. After a few tries, you would surely stop trying to
speak. You might walk away, or you might punch me, but you would not keep trying to
make your point in a civil manner.

The rewiring of faulty interpretation processes takes a lot of time. Healthy, adult
humans usually take many weeks or even months to commit new habits to the
subconscious, but eventually, it does happen. When we do reap the fruits of our labour
and install the new interpretation software into the subconscious, the conscious mind is
free once more to pursue something else - perhaps the next rewire on the long list of
mental-game improvements.

The complete rewiring journey is represented by the three figures below. Firstly, here is
the old problematic wiring where the conscious mind is merely a spectator to the faulty
interpretation process and resulting bad response process:
And now the conscious act of rewiring how the trigger is handled.
The main difference now is that conscious mind is on stand-by. Prompted out of its
slumber by the presence of a known problematic trigger, the conscious mind gets ready
to intervene if necessary. Sure enough the subconscious runs the bad interpretation
process, but before it gets to run the normal bad response process, the conscious mind
sees the need to get involved and interrupts the proceedings. The thinking brain is now
in control and the next step is to wait for the effects of the faulty interpretation to fade
before starting up the correct interpretation process. This waiting is essential as trying
to install a calm, rational interpretation over the top of emotionally charged faulty
software is near impossible. When the faulty interpretation and its sidekick emotions
have faded, the conscious mind interprets the situation correctly. And now, finally, with
the adverse effects of the faulty interpretation replaced by the beneficial effects of the
new one, the correct response program gets run, and the poker player makes a better
choice than he would have ordinarily. Meanwhile, the subconscious, having been
stopped in its tracks, is left to watch the beneficial result of the new interpretation
program. By observing this successful conscious override enough times, the
subconscious eventually learns how to run the correct interpretation without the
intervention of the conscious mind.

Here is the end result:

It would be unrealistic to assume that because we can see the road map that we are
already at the destination. Each of the four steps to rewiring a misfire entails its own
methodology. It is now time to learn how to:

1. Allocate a trigger to the conscious mind so that it is ready to intervene when we

want it to.
2. Stop the bad interpretation process in its tracks.
3. Wait for the effects of the bad interpretation to pass.
4. Run the correct interpretation program and resulting good response program
Step 1 - Allocating a Trigger to the Conscious Mind

Allocating a trigger to the conscious mind is all about conditioning. Many people with
9-5 Monday-Friday jobs reliably find themselves awake every Saturday morning at
7:30am, even though there is no need to get up for work. The conscious mind is primed
to engage at this point in the day through the repetition of the alarm waking it up
throughout the week. In poker, repeatedly raising your alertness in response to a certain
trigger can build the essential habit of switching on the hyper-focused engine of the
conscious mind to replace the lazy pattern-following of the subconscious. Therefore,
routine breeds ease and in no time we can learn to never let a problematic trigger creep
up unnoticed. But if habit is the key to success, then how do we get off the ground to
build this habit in the first place? In the pandemonium of time and monetary pressure,
how do we learn to enter this state of conscious alertness the first few times we try the
rewire?

There are four main techniques that we can use here. They are:

1. Identifying the domain of the problematic trigger.

2. Identifying the emotional symptoms of the faulty interpretation process.
3. Identifying the physical symptoms of the faulty interpretation process.
4. Identifying the cognitive symptoms of the faulty interpretation process. I will be
calling these the 'pseudo-logical' symptoms as they often seem rational at the
time.

To illustrate, let's start with one of the most abundant misfires amongst poker players -
big pot attachment

Big pot attachment concerns the inability to make correct folds in large pots due to the
misinterpretation of the invested chips as resources that must be defended at all costs.
Its misfire diagram goes as follows:
Throughout the forthcoming discussion of this misfire, I shall always assume that 'fold'
is the correct action. Of course the misfire could occur in spots where calling is good
and result in the right action being taken for the wrong reasons. I shall ignore these
situations for now.

Big Pot Attachment is a misfire that I suffered from badly throughout my first few
years in the game and one which I am pleased to confirm is almost extinct nowadays.
The fix must start with a heightened awareness of the problem.

The first objective in delegating a trigger to the conscious mind is to clearly understand
the domain in which the trigger occurs. Here the trigger of Villain making a large bet in
a big pot can only happen when the pot is large. How large is large enough to cause big
pot attachment? That varies from student to student. To gain clarity on this, I will first
advise the student to think about which pot sizes start to make him feel attached to the
money in the middle. To do this I will tell the student to visualise pots of ascending
sizes until he registers that he normally loses control. For example, let's say that the
student begins to run the faulty attachment interpretation in 3-Bet pots on the turn after
the flop has been bet. This means that when there are around 30-40 big blinds in the
middle the bad interpretation process starts to fire up. Next we list a few situations in
which the pot is likely to become this size or bigger so that the student might recognise
the possibility of the misfire happening before the pot is actually big enough. Here are
some examples:

• 3-Bet Pots after the flop gets bet and called

• When Hero's turn c-bet gets raised in a 2-Bet pot
• When the flop c-bet gets raised and Hero calls
• On the flop in a 4-Bet pot

These situations are the alarm clock. The conscious mind needs to kick in whenever
these become realities.

The second part of allocating a trigger to the conscious mind is to become familiar
with the emotional accompaniments to the bad interpretation process. Remember that
misfiring interpretation processes almost always use some kind of emotional weapon
to convince you to press the wrong button (bad response). Students with big-pot
attachment misfires usually feel a sudden and strong sense of desperation. The
prospect of not winning the pot feels unbearable. There may also be a strong sense of
hope. The positive outcome of winning is desired so strongly that the other (far more
likely) outcome of losing extra money is ignored. At this point, I urge my students to
imagine exactly what it feels like to experience their misfire and describe their
emotional state in detail. This familiarisation is key for switching on the conscious
mind in the heat of battle.

Next, we have the physical symptoms of the bad interpretation process - in this case,
the pot attachment. Typically, there will be a restlessness which may result in the
player squirming in his chair. The mouse may begin to dart furiously around the screen
or gravitate magnetically to the call button. There might be a thrashing around in
discomfort or a helpless sigh, which represents the futility and lack of control apparent
in the situation. Again I'll ask the student to recreate these physical symptoms to
increase awareness.

Finally, what are the cognitive weapons of the culprit interpretation process? As well
as pumping you full of emotions designed to make you act quickly, the process might
also feed you a few explicit thoughts that almost seem to assume the guise of logic. In
reality, these are highly illogical attempts to coerce your behaviour and should not be
listened to. I'll ask the student to tell me some of the thoughts they experience just after
feeling the emotional reaction to the trigger. For big pot attachment, the thoughts are
very often things like: 'He could be bluffing' 'He could have the flush draw' 'This is too
strong of a hand to fold' 'I am pot committed'. All of these thoughts are impersonators
of logic. They are not attempting to solve a problem, but to effect an action - call. They
are the cognitive back up to the emotional delusion. They are the lawyers trying to
defend the criminal interpretation program regardless of its guilt.

Once the student understands the domain of the trigger and the emotional, physical,
and pseudo-logical (cognitive) symptoms of the misfire, his mind is well prepared for
conscious intervention the next time the trigger occurs.

Why not practice this now for a misfire that is bothering you?

• First draw the misfire diagram including the trigger; the faulty interpretation
process; and the undesirable response process.
• Next write down the domain of the misfire and which situations are likely to
lead to it. These could be points in a poker hand or just general situations like
having a bad session or making a few mistakes in a row.
• Now write down the three types of symptom: emotional, physical and, pseudo-
logical.
• Finally, close your eyes and try to visualise the entire experience of this mis-fire
and picture yourself becoming consciously aware of exactly what is taking
place.

Now that the conscious mind has begun learning when to wake up, we should move
onto step two of the rewire - learning how to promptly interrupt the culprit
interpretation process before it has the chance to run that undesirable response process.

Step 1 can be summarised as follows:

Step 2 - Interrupting a Bad Interpretation

Stopping yourself mid-flow is one of the most counter-intuitive skills to master. It

requires an abrupt change of mode - an sudden out-of-tune note in the middle of a
familiar song. Because the bad interpretation process usually feels very natural, the
conscious mind must be highly motivated in order to reach the required level of mental
energy to disrupt it. An ingrained mental process like big pot attachment is fast and
ruthless. It rarely fails to kick in and the emotions it generates often cause action very
quickly. We must be swift and clinical if our interruption is to succeed.

When it comes to suddenly stopping the subconscious mind, a physical ritual can go a
long way. The key to disruption is to change the environment in which the bad
interpretation program normally does its damage. If your phone starts ringing, what do
you do? Before you know it you are looking at the caller ID, and making a decision
about whether this is someone you would like to talk to at the current moment. You are
assessing the importance of the call and imagining how it might go. All of this goes on
in your subconscious and will normally be unpreventable, unless of course, something
external intervenes. For example, if a brick comes flying through your window at that
time, there is a very good chance that you will forget all about whether or not to
answer the phone. The brick is the jolt. We need to find our brick for interrupting the
malfunctioning interpretation process within the poker situation.

The simplest antidote here is to break the link between your sensory input and the
trigger of the misfire. For online misfires, this is normally the screen, mouse, and
keyboard. For a live poker player, it might be the centre of the pot; the cards on the
board; and his own chips. For other misfires that occur out of game, such as going on a
downswing, the poker player might need to take an hour away from the game
environment and go for a walk. Outside, with nature all around him, he has escaped the
environment of the misfire (his house and computer) and has a better chance of
implementing a new interpretation process for his recent losing streak. For now,
however, we shall focus on big pot attachment as we did in step 1.

The big pot attachment student, having completed step 1 and successfully woken up
his deliberate conscious mind, should take the following actions upon seeing that the
bad interpretation process ('my chips are in danger') has been initiated.

1. Sit back in the chair, removing his hands from their positions on the mouse and
keyboard.
2. Look away from the screen. Having a window behind the computer is great for
a sudden change of visual stimulation.
3. Allow the mind to become blank for a few seconds in preparation for step three
of the rewire. If any thoughts enter the mind at this point, simply let them go.

Step 2 can be summarised as follows:

We have now set the stage for step three. We have created the jolt to interrupt the usual
workings of the bad interpretation process. This process has three accomplices, who
assist in the swift running of the bad response process. They are emotion; pseudo-
logical thoughts; and psyiological changes within the body. In the case of the big pot
attachment student, his emotions are anxiety and excitement; his thoughts are all
excuses as to why it's okay to try to win the pot at all costs; and his physical symptoms
involve adrenaline and restlessness - this is why doing nothing is almost impossible
without interrupting this process. It's a good thing that step 2 comes before step 3 as
step 3 is precisely about doing nothing.

Step 3 - Watching and Waiting

When the cycle caused by the bad interpretation process has been successfully
interrupted, it is time to allow the residual emotional, physical, and cognitive effects to
dissipate. This involves watching and waiting. This step is essential before the
introduction of the correct interpretation process can be successful. If we were to move
straight from step 2 (interrupting) to step 4 (consciously running the right interpretation
program) we would be attempting to install new software over the top of residual toxic
symptoms. This would only lead to contamination and a negative association with the
new interpretation process.

Just as the wrong interpretation of the spot feels bad, we need the correct interpretation
to feel good. The incorrect interpretation of the poker situation caused unwanted
thoughts and emotions. We want our correct interpretation to induce the correct logical
and emotional states of mind. The thoughts should be clear and the emotional backdrop
calm and positive.

This step is all about waiting for the storm to pass before taking action. If step 2 has
been successful, then already, the flood of new emotions and undesired thoughts
should have dried out, but unfortunately, we still are under the influence of the initial
effects of the misfire. Now that we can see the initial interpretation of the situation as
an error, the associated emotions seem less overpowering. If we're dealing with an in-
game misfire, then taking a few seconds, or longer if your time bank allows is
mandatory. If we're dealing with an out-of-game leak, such as fear of putting in
volume, then we have all of the time in the world to allow our symptoms to pass. For
now we shall return to the big pot attachment sufferer to illustrate.

The student's desire to win the money in the middle and all of it's resulting emotional
and cognitive symptoms are not a permanent state of affairs. They will dissipate
shortly as most emotional and physical sensations do.

As the pot grows large, the student sits back in his chair detached from the mouse and
keyboard. He feels the familiar desire to shove the river and go after the chips in the
pot, but he understands that this is nothing more than the result of a misfiring process.
He tunes in to his inner state, becoming more and more mindful of his emotions,
physical sensations and thought patterns - letting go of any surfacing thoughts, neither
judging them nor acting upon them. Over the next few seconds, he feels a slight
reduction in his unwanted emotions and desires. Although there might still be traces of
pot attachment present, thinking logically seems palatable once again. The student
refocuses on the screen, getting ready to initiate Step 4, and run his new interpretation
process. Step 3 has been a success.

Let's face it - things wont always go this smoothly in practice. Sometimes the initial
emotional influx from the bad interpretation process is so strong that the best the
student can manage is to let it subside partially. This is better than nothing and will
increase the chances of the new interpretation process resonating.

It is imperative that the student does not attempt a new interpretation of the spot too
quickly. Whatever he does, he must refrain from forcing logical analysis while under
the influence of the bad interpretation. This will only lead to more crooked pseudo-
logic. It is vital that the student genuinely starts to see the spot differently and not just
force different behaviour while in the throws of his old impression. Even a few seconds
of calming down and resetting can be enough to clear away the effects of the bad
interpretation.

Step three of the rewire can be summarised as follows:

Step 4 - Running the Good Interpretation Process

Once enough serenity has been reestablished, the scene is set for seeing the
troublesome trigger situation for what it really is. Behaving as we want to behave is all
about interpreting the needs of the situation in a way that naturally leads to the desired
behaviour. Once the clutter of the faulty impression has cleared away, the true picture
comes into view.

The big pot attachment student must have rehearsed the correct interpretation of the
situation many times before the spot occurs in-game. He has to visualise that the big
pot in front of him does not represent a threat to his resources, but simply a decision
that is even more important than normal to get right. The pot growing large to the
poker player is analogous to a chess position becoming more critical (where the next
move could win or lose the game). To the sportsman, the large pot represents a penalty
kick in soccer or a free-throw to win the basketball game. Focus is what is required at
these moments. A great golfer enters a trance-like state when making a key putt, where
nothing exists outside of the green and his routine. This is how the poker player must
come to view this larger pot. The old interpretation led to him panicking and blasting
the ball over the crossbar without a run up, or whacking the golf ball miles past the
hole before even adopting the correct stance. Now it is time to get it right.

The correct interpretation process says something like:

'This is one of these occasions where I need to rise to the challenge of using more
logic than normal. I need to get this right.'

The store of mental willpower must be drained to its limits for this hand. Seeing a spot
as an intellectual challenge rather than a primal threat is a very attractive proposition
for the poker player. He has chosen this game, at least in part, so that he can pit his
cognitive muscle against that of his opponents. It is time to channel what's left of the
adrenaline from the faulty interpretation into cold blooded logical thinking.

The new interpretation says: 'Okay, it's time to enter hyper-focus mode, let me give
this spot 100%.' After this interpretation has been believed, the student's best attempt
at logical analysis is bound to follow, just as the dubious call normally followed the old
interpretation. The brain picks a response instantly once it believes a state of affairs to
be true - like clockwork. It's getting ourselves to believe the new interpretation that's
the real battle and this can often go wrong in practice.

Why might the pot attachment sufferer reject the interpretation of the spot as a key
logical challenge which provides the chance to shine intellectually? There are a
number of reasons.

The student might instinctively want to avoid intense mental effort. After all, humans
are intrinsically lazy in order to preserve energy. This is why your mind makes quick
judgments and assumptions in every day life. It wants to avoid depleting itself of
energy in case a real challenge to your survival arises. Therefore, when faced with this
new interpretation of 'this spot takes real self-control and effort' the temptation is to say
'yeah, but screw that.' It is much easier to click the button that those residual desires are
pushing you towards, even when steps 1-3 have been relatively successful. To
overcome natural mental laziness, try to build the habit of enjoying the feeling of
engaging your thinking brain in a rewarding way. You can practice this out of game in
analysis mode. If thinking ever feels like a slog, then take a break and come back with
a replenished motivation to apply your skills.

Another reason for the rejection of the good interpretation is fear, and more
specifically, fear of failure. If we don't engage our minds to the extent required by the
spot then we have an excuse for suboptimal performance. The mere prospect of getting
it wrong can be terrifying. The poker player often doesn't mind mental-game failure as
he prides himself on his logical reasoning skills - those are a more central part of his
self-esteem. Emotional infringements that lead to mistakes can be chalked up to 'ahh
well, I wasn't thinking straight.' For some players, it is okay to fail as long as the
failure is not to do with anything under the umbrella of poker skills. In fact, the subject
matter of this book is all about poker skills; just a different breed of them. Once you
see mental-game failure as a lack of skill, you become more motivated to improve it.
The big pot attachment sufferer needs to start viewing big pots as a place to practice
mental-game skills.

A third reason for the rejection of the new interpretation is that the emotions from the
old interpretation are still too powerful. Merely telling yourself that a certain
interpretation of a spot is the right one does not entail that you hold that belief deep
down. Sadly, there is no guaranteed way to fix this other than long-term dedication to
the rewiring process. Eventually, the impact of resetting and running a new
interpretation process will become more and more pronounced. At first, you might just
notice that you were thinking microscopically more clearly than usual. After a while,
you might half believe the new interpretation of a big pot as a logical puzzle.
Eventually, you will feel a shift in your attitude and know that you are capable of fully
believing it. This is when your default response process switches over to the good one
and you reap the positive reinforcement of defeating the mental-game leak. From there,
it is hard to look back. Rewiring is a work in progress.

After the good interpretation has been run, you will be aware of how much it resonated
with you. The more natural and intuitive it felt, the more likely you are to run the
correct response program. The less natural it felt and the more it clashed with residual
emotions, the more practice you still need to do. Do not give up. Rewiring your mind
is a grueling task. Just ask any therapist.

Step 4 of the process is summarised as follows:

We shall now examine some of the more common misfires that my students suffer
from on a daily basis and learn how to rewire each using the method described in this
chapter.
Chapter 4 - Common Rewires

In this chapter, we shall cover an assortment of misfires which represent the most
prominent struggles faced by the average poker player. It is highly likely that your
most challenging mental game obstacles will be dealt with here, but if they are not,
have a go at applying the rewiring strategy that you have just read to your own
problem.

I have given each misfire a name that seeks to best describe the interpretation process
at fault. Each misfire title is followed by a misfire diagram which frames the mental-
game leak in the same format that we have been using so far.
'I Don't Believe You'

This classic misfire exists in player types of all levels and feeds off of the human
instincts to not surrender resources and to distrust enemies. The chance of an opponent
bluffing provides a very convincing reason to avoid folding, which is naturally the
least desired outcome. As we saw back in chapter 2, the human brain starts off with a
strong bias towards avoiding squandering things that have absorbed time, energy, or
resources. It will therefore look for reasons not to fold. The idea that Villain is or could
be bluffing provides an irresistible reason to give in to the desire to cling to the pot.
Even worse than throwing away resources is to let an enemy (opponent) take them.

There are two bogus questions that are normally asked during the interpretation
process of the 'I Don't Believe You' misfire. They are 'Is Villain bluffing?' and the
milder but more destructive 'Could Villain be bluffing?' The first question is almost
always ridiculous and unanswerable without guesswork. Our opponents have a range
of hands for taking a certain action and without some extremely powerful live tell, or
exact knowledge about an opponent's tendencies, we cannot magically determine
which part of it they hold at this given moment or even exactly what that range looks
like. The second question is answerable, but utterly useless. Let me demonstrate.
Is the following statement true?

• My brand new laptop could break today.

Your intuition was surely that it was true. Although it is unlikely for a brand new piece
of technology to suddenly malfunction, it is clearly possible. You would not bet your
life on it not happening. What about this next question:

• I could still have two arms by the end of today.

Again, this is certainly true. In fact, it is almost certain that I will not lose an arm by
the time the day is out. The problem in both of these cases is that the word 'could' is so
vague and can be true so incredibly easily that any frequency at all of an event
occurring, from 0.00001% to 99.9999%, will make 'could' an accurate description.
Therefore, any question that adopts the form: 'could X happen' is necessarily useless.
Nevertheless, when prompted to recall an in-game thought process to explain a
dubious call, my students will very often say: 'I thought he could have been bluffing.'

When a distrusting instinct about X gets computed in the conscious mind, it often turns
into a belief that X is false, with or without evidence. This is due to the thinking brain's
laziness to accept instinctive interpretations. Believing or not believing that someone
holds a certain hand is the wrong framework to adopt in the first place. The faulty
interpretation for this misfire is that an opponent's bet or raise is trying to tell a story. A
student who suffers from 'I Don't Believe You' frequently sees the bet or raise as a
claim to hold a certain strength of hand. By running this interpretation, the student
manages to appoint himself judge and juror in a trial where one verdict is infinitely
more appealing to his instincts than the other. Which way do you think the decision
will go?

The rewire, then, is to replace the 'He is trying to claim that he has X type of hand'
interpretation with a more realistic one. I suggest that the new interpretation says
something to the effect of:

'This river bet represents a potential investment that I can make by calling. For the
investment to be profitable, I need to win Y% (pot odds) of the time. By understanding
the general population or player type's bluffing frequency in this spot, and if necessary,
the blocker effects of my hand, I can estimate whether or not I will reach this average
required equity target over a large sample of trials.
This thought process needs condensing as follows to be applicable in the short amount
of time available during the rewire:

Now let's examine how the full rewiring procedure might go for this misfire.

Step 1: Let's recap. This step is all about allocating the trigger to the conscious mind.
To do this we need to rehearse taking control when the environment and symptoms of
the misfire occur. When an opponent is considering his choice between betting and
checking, remember - there is a chance that he will make a big bet and that such a bet
is likely to lead to a bad interpretation of the spot. Prepare yourself for feelings of
skepticism, and the urge to protect your chips. Both of these things are products of a
faulty interpretation that has been constructed to help you win the pot more often than
folding would allow and this process has no consideration for the Expected Value (EV)
of a call. Try to imagine the rush of blood to the head that accompanies the pseudo
logic of 'he is telling me he has X' or 'he either has it or he doesn't'. Visualise not acting
on these thoughts as persuasive as they seem. They are filled with toxic emotions and
deceitful pretend-logic.

Step 2: This is where we interrupt the faulty interpretation before it executes the
unwanted response process (disbelieve and call). In order to disrupt the faulty train of
thought, we need to close our eyes and move back in our chair. We break the visual
stimulus of the trigger whilst interrupting our thoughts mid-sentence. Let your mind
blank for a second or two.

Step 3: Firstly, the idea of a wicked enemy trying to tell a story in order to obtain our
resources is an incredibly powerful interpretation of the situation. In order to overcome
the surge of defiant emotion that follows this perception and install some better
software, we must allow for the emotion to fade. First, pay close attention to the
physical and emotional accompaniments to this bad interpretation. These are the most
powerful catalysts and are designed to make you cave to your irrational desire. You
might feel agitated, unsettled, and like imminent action is required. If it's almost
unbearable to sit still and not press the call button, then sit still is exactly what you
must do. These feelings will pass.

Step 4 Once the initial explosion of emotion has settled down a little, turn your
attention to your impression of the spot. How do you feel about the opponent? Do you
have any reason to consider him a menacing enemy? Is the investment in front of you
really personal? Are you under attack? Are any of the chips in the pot still yours? The
answer to all of these questions is of course 'no' and now that you have calmed down
successfully, you can start to believe that. Now, what does facing this bet really
represent? That's right. It represents the opportunity to make an investment that you are
free to either accept or decline using your technical poker skills. Facing bets = being
asked if you would like to make an investment. This is a much calmer way to see the
situation.

Now onto the equity target. Let's set that number straight so we know what we're
aiming for. If I asked you if you could jump over a fence you could not possibly
answer me until you had inquired as to the height of said fence. How high is the fence
in this spot? Okay, so our target is 30% equity for calling the 3/4 pot-sized bet. Next
comes our assessment of the population's range. Do we have a player type clue to help
us narrow this down to a section of the population? If so, does this player type easily
find hands to bluff in this spot having gotten to the river in this way on this texture?
This is a complicated question so do your best. If you do not have a way of narrowing
down the player type then ask the same question of the wider player pool. You do not
need to know your exact equity as this is impossible, but by now, an impression is
hopefully forming about whether or not you can jump over the 30% equity fence.
Make your best judgment and either accept or decline the investment. Remember to
say 'no thank you' if you choose to fold. Again, this is a free choice.

In summary, we have accepted that Villain could be bluffing but that this is a mere
nonsense statement without a realistic idea of the bluffing frequency. 'Could' is not a
basis for decision-making. Strong players fold the best hand all the time because they
do not believe that they can win often enough to make a profitable investment. You
have to fold the best hand sometimes in order to make good folds against a range and
the only way you can do it if you suffer from this leak is to replace the interpretation of
being threatened by a potential fibber to being offered an investment against a range.
How much more enjoyable is the latter thought process to you - the poker geek?

It is very possible that you will get this spot wrong when you do your technical
analysis. This should be seen as a mental-game success as you have managed to do
technical analysis instead of choosing an action purely based on a faulty interpretation
of the spot. By getting this choice technically wrong, you have perceived the spot as a
situation that required explicit technical reasoning. This is a huge step. You can work
on your technical game whenever you want and you will get better at assessing
whether or not to call big river bets, but today's lesson was all about mental-game skill
and if you made either a correct or incorrect rational choice, then you passed with
flying colours.

If you did call, you will have seen Villain's cards. Use this information only to take a
note on this opponent. The information you got from showdown was not available
when you were faced with the decision to invest and will not be available the next
time. Make sure you do not criticise yourself if you happened to lose this time - this is
allowed to happen 70% of the time given your odds. If you won, do not devalue the
strides you made in rewiring your mental-game by getting overly happy about a trivial
result. One pot is a meaningless scrap. The true fight is against your own faulty mental
programing. Conquering that is what deserves praise.

If you failed to execute the rewire this time and made an emotional disbelieving call,
don't worry. This is just one attempt to perform the rewire out of hundreds. There will
be many more chances to get it right so ask yourself where the rewire broke down and
how you could improve your prospects next time.
'Ouch! I Should Never Have...'

This is a more complicated misfire than the last one. Here, the initial trigger is the
complex decision which usually occurs in a sizable pot. The student is capable of
doing some decent reasoning under pressure. He interprets the spot as both a logical
puzzle that needs solving and as a situation where there is a significant chance of
incurring a bad outcome. The first faulty interpretation occurs when the realisation that
a big pot could well be lost imminently is represented as a bad thing worthy of worry.
The extent of this worry might range from mild discomfort to full-blown dread. Either
way, it leaves behind an emotional footprint of negative energy. The student gets down
to business and starts solving the spot while harboring this unease. He settles on the
conclusion that investing is better than not investing and somewhat reluctantly goes
ahead with his call, bet, or raise. The pot does not go his way this time due to variance
and the student feels the anguish of losing.

The natural human response to any outcome that is meaningfully good or bad is causal
feedback. The goal is to find what caused the anguish so as to avoid it next time. As
the investment directly preceded the bad feeling of losing, it is blamed for being its
sole cause and is deemed 'bad'. This whole process is powered further by the original
unease which has now been given justification. 'I knew that play was wrong' - says
the student - 'I should never have...'. In reality, all that is happening here is that, this
time, variance determined that the result would be a negative one and there also existed
unease that this might happen. Neither of these things nor the two together implies that
the choice to invest was unprofitable in the long-term. The reactive part of the mind
that handles causal feedback in life cannot think statistically and infers that if X led to
Y, and Y was bad, then X was also bad. The impact is devastating - the student
temporarily doubts good investments of this nature and might start to shy away from
them.

There are two ways of rewiring this misfire. The first is to remove the interpretation
that a chance of losing a big pot is cause for worry. The second is to replace the causal
feedback assessment process with a filing process that temporarily forgets about the
hand until after the session, when proper objective analysis can take place. Let's get
into it.

Next time the big decision arises, the student needs to see the chance of losing as part
of the game:

'If I lose here, it's okay. My job is to find the right line. That's all I can do.'

When the unease starts to grow, the conscious mind must switch on to run this new
interpretation, first waiting for any feelings of dread or unease to pass. Once the
student believes that losing is okay, he can commence his analysis, probably with
enchanced clairty.

If the choice is made to make an investment, then it is time to prepare the conscious
mind to interrupt the causal feedback loop that will occur at showdown. This will be
easier now that we have treated the initial unease that normally fuels the results-
oriented conclusion. If the student loses the pot, he must instantly stop his train of
thought. By looking out of the window or closing his eyes for a second, he disrupts the
stream of input from the losing hand. Now he waits for the initial surge of regret and
anger to pass. When tranquility has been somewhat restored, he implements the new
interpretation of the spot: one that does not warrant causal feedback.

'Results are not feedback. I made the choice I believed was logically correct and
have been offered no reason to reevaluate.

It might also help to acknowledge that you can examine the hand fully out of game.
When the critical part of the mind knows that there will be a chance to analyse and
correct later, the student normally experiences less of a desire to make rash judgments
based on results. Sessions are for focusing on hands in progress, not for dwelling on
hands past.

The fixed mental programing looks like this:

As always, there are hazards to avoid during the rewire. The sudden impulse that the
losing investment was technically unsound is a result of a very successful real world
survival mechanism. It functions like clockwork and is incredibly convincing. This is
because, like all misfiring interpretations, it uses emotions to pollute your logical
capacity and disable your thinking brain. You want to proclaim that calling the river
was bad because you feel very strongly that it was. In reality, the disgust you feel is the
emotional description of losing money. You only blame it on the call because in real
life, when something terrible happens, its cause must be avoided. Moreover, the
disgust towards the cause must be felt quickly in case the same mistake is made again.
A child who gets bitten by a dog needs to learn that the dog is dangerous and needs to
learn so immediately. This is why the results-oriented judgment is so instantaneous and
powerful; if it is was slow and mild, you might just touch the biting dog again. Remind
yourself as you wait for the initial disgust of losing to pass that it is actually just a
description of the result, not the process that led to it. The real cause of the bad
emotions was variance and being disgusted at variance in poker is a bit like getting
upset when it rains in Scotland.

Another reason why the rewire might fail is that, as well as the emotional clout of the
feedback process, there is also a strong rational pull towards believing that the
investment was a bad one. The judgment is not just fast and powerful, but there is a
real coherence about it.

In poker, the outcomes which did not occur this time (like us winning the pot) were
very possible based on the evidence that was available at the time of the hand. Villain
could very easily have folded to our river bluff if held a different part of his range or
was in a better mood. It is essential that we remember that the human mind has a
natural bias towards evidence that is present; that it likes to neglect evidence that is not
currently staring us in the face. In an nutshell, our minds are lazy. If they see a
potentially convincing explanation of cause and effect, they go all-in on that state of
affairs being true. Some bad feelings of losing money are caused by bad calls, but most
are nothing more than variance doing its thing. If we could only see the other branches
of the EV tree laid out, where we got VIllain to fold, or won the pot by calling the
river, we would not be so quick to say that 2+2=9.
'Please fold. Please fold. Please fold.'

Hope, which is one of the most essential ingredients to surviving tough real world
conditions, is one of the most destructive poker emotions. Hope usually kicks in when
the situation is no longer within our control. While it is usually a passive emotion that
does not cause action, there is a type of hope in poker that causes purely emotional
investments. This phenomenon is normally observed in students who are addicted to
the rush of investing money, regardless of how profitable the investment is. This type
of mental-game problem is dealt with in Chapter 6 where we examine more permanent
roadblocks to success than mere misfires. Our purpose here, however, is to examine
the more natural and passive form of hope that is caused by making an investment and
plays no role in causing that investment. If you've ever made a bet and felt unsettled by
a desperate desire for your opponent to either fold or call, then this misfire applies to
you.
Before we look at how to rewire hope based misfires, let's explore why hope is so
destructive in poker. Hope is a creative emotion. It takes the positive qualities of absent
states of affairs and induces a partial experience of what that state of affairs might feel
like if it were to come true. Along side this partial experience of positivity, there is a
yearning for that state of affairs, which can range from a slight preference to an all-in
emotional investment. The stronger the hope grows, the more emotionally intolerable
the opposite state of affairs becomes. In other words, if a student desperately hopes to
win a hand, losing that hand will burn more than normal and winning it will create
more of a euphoric bliss than normal. Both of these things are highly dangerous
emotional states.

The negative consequence of hope - despair - will unsettle the mind to the point that
emotion takes control. The feelings of loss and anguish will commonly lead to either a
higher chance of chasing losses or a higher chance of making fear based folds. It will
cause the student to enjoy his session less and to lower his standards of logical
performance. The student's willpower will drain away much faster than normal if he is
having to recover from despair every time that bluff gets called.

The positive consequence of hope - jubilation - will unsettle the mind in the opposite
direction. Eupohoria can cause a drop in vigilance making the student less likely to
notice details or second guess shaky logic which is appealing at first glance. A false
sense of security arises from the blissful aftermath of rewarded hope. In other words,
hope that leads to positive outcomes reinforces hope as a mechanism for dealing with
big pots. Like doubling down in a hand of blackjack, winning twice your profits makes
you want to double down next time. Hope is the magnifying glass for positive and
negative reactions to the result of a hand. We often talk about having our 'hopes
smashed' or our 'expectations let down'. Implicit in these utterances is the idea that our
hopes and expectations raised the emotional stakes. In poker, the emotional stakes are
already much higher than optimal for the average human, regardless of skill-level - so
let's rewire the interpretation that hope is appropriate after making an investment.

Why do we make the interpretation that hope will benefit us? Like most innate human
tendencies, hope is prevalent due to its ability to enhance the odds of survival. Hoping
for positive outcomes provides a reason to try. If there is a state of affairs that is
beneficial to stay alive for, then we are more likely to try to survive. Even if the person
cannot bring this state of affairs about themselves, being around to reap its fruits will
be better than being dead. Our bodies respond positively to a positive mindset.
Survival rates are notably higher in patients with positive attitudes to their illness. It is,
therefore, beneficial to hope for the best outcomes in life.
As always, poker does not conform to the normal rules. In poker, hope causes a
magnification of emotions and this is a bad thing for logical clarity. We need to retrain
the mind that hope is a bad response to a situation that could go either way.

The student finds himself with the opportunity to barrel the river having c-bet both the
flop and the turn. The board has run out in such a way that Hero believes the
population is now folding more often than they should, on average. With this empirical
evidence as his ammunition, the student loads the gun and fires the third bet. This
choice is fully logical and emotional interference has thus far been negligible. Until
that is, hope steps in. Before the student fires this bet he should designate matters to the
conscious mind through healthy self-talk:

'I'm about to make this bluff, but before I do, I need to acknowledge that winning
this pot is not important. Winning and losing are temporary distractions from
EV, which is the true currency of success. Therefore, I will try to remain
impartial to the result.'

Next up, the bet gets made and the faulty interpretation process that hope is necessary
starts to boot up. As always, the student must now interrupt this process and can do so
by taking a deep breath and then turning his attention to another table or another thing.
As the clawing feeling of 'god I hope he folds' starts to invade the mind, just
remember that this feeling is nothing more than a misguided attempt to enhance your
odds of not dying. It is, through this lense, fully absurd. Wait for the feeling to disperse
a little and then try the new interpretation process that sees the investment as job done
and it being time to move on now:

'Okay, I've done all I can here, good job.'

The long-term habit to build here is the tendency to quickly remove the hand from the
limelight just after the bluff has been made. Try to practice solving decisions on other
tables before you even glance at the result of hand. This will absorb a lot of willpower
at first. Initially, checking to see if the bluff worked is an itch that is almost irresistible
to scratch, but if you resist until you have solved another spot; or even just wait ten
seconds, you will have gained control over the spot and enforced the idea that the
result is not important. This in turn will reduce the urge to hope, helping you to rewire
the process that tells you that hope is warranted. Staring at the opponent's dwindling
timebank is how the mental space for hope is created. The mind needs to shift away
from thinking that the result of a hand is the closure that lets you move on with the
hand. Actually, the investment being made is the real closure. The result is just a
distraction to future hands.
The rewired reaction to having just made an investment looks like this:

The main reason for the failure of the rewire will be hope being too strong and having
a magnetic pull that transfixes the student to the result of the hand. To prepare for this,
try actually rehearsing the 'time to move on' interpretation in smaller pots. Make a
choice and then literally remove your eyes from that table. If it's your only table, then
look elsewhere in the room.
'Don't Play, Can't Lose'

We now come to the first out-of-game misfire.

It does not take long for the human mind to identify patterns between temporally
connected events. If turning on the electricity blows the fuse of two appliances, we
fully expect it to have the same result on a third. The mantra is that if Y consistently
follows X, even over a small sample, then it will do so indefinitely. Real life constantly
justifies these patterns. The sun rises at 5am at this time of year. The baby gets cranky
in the afternoons. In poker, things are of course different. Consciously, we know that
chance has no memory at all. The flop being monotone (all the same suit) three hands
in a row does not make it any more or less likely to be the fourth time round.

A winning poker player who plays short sessions can expect to lose a significant
amount of big blinds in at least around 40% of sessions. Even if a strong pro has a
whopping 60% chance of having a break even session or better, there is still a 6.5%
chance that any three consecutive sessions will all be significantly losing and, for the
amateur, this could be a good bit higher. The odds of the fourth session being
significantly losing are of course also 40%, but it feels much worse. There is a very
strong impression that the odds of having another significantly losing session after
these three are something closer to 75% or 80%. There is a real sense of inevitability
about it, driven by the rule about Y following X. The real world has taught us to form
this opinion very quickly so that we can react to reliable evidence of trends without
expending time or energy through the practice of unnecessary second guessing.

The natural response is to avoid the negative consequence Y by abstaining from the
apparently dangerous X. In the mist of his downswing, the poker player makes a
choice between abstaining from playing poker: 'study will fix my results' and
abstaining from poker altogether: 'I give up'. This choice can be seen as an initial
flight reaction (not playing) followed by a fork in the road between another fight or
flight choice regarding whether poker will remain a serious pursuit. The flight-flight
response is to take up chess or sports betting. The flight-fight is to study harder and
come back when both technical and mental conditions have improved.

In Figure 36, I have coloured the 'quit poker' response in the negative shade and used a
hybrid of positive and negative for the study break response. The former is a wholly
disastrous reaction because it leads to a large amount of time where the player
stagnates or regresses. The hiatus from poker is usually not a permanent responsible
decision that poker is not the right pursuit, but the reaction of a wounded animal
crawling away to a safe place to rest up before giving things another go. This sort of
player almost always comes back again and again and almost always fails because
each downswing leads to a hiatus that is too disruptive to the flow of long-term
progress to ever lead to success in the tough modern climate.

The 'study-break' player's reaction comes from a slightly different interpretation. While
there is still a blaming mechanism caused by faulty causal predicting, the dangerous
activity is putting in volume, not the game per se. Consequently, the player still feels a
strong urge to pursue the game but has to do so in a way that protects him from losing.
He studies and studies, putting in tiny amounts of volume every now and then, tending
to quit while slightly ahead if he happens to have a good session, and quit while only
slightly behind in a bad one. While a very short study break can be a great way of
waiting for emotional turmoil and the flawed interpretation behind it to pass, too much
study and not enough play over a prolonged period of time can lead to a large
disconnect between theoretical knowledge and accessible skill in-game. If this gap
grows too wide, the player frequently finds himself lost in-game, cluttered with all
kinds of half thoughts that seem to conflict more than they agree.

The fix here is to push through the discomfort in order to dispel the illusion that
another losing session is just around the corner. Try to limit session length, but ensure
regularity, while at the same time reviewing plenty of hands to retain clarity amidst the
storm of bad variance. Let's go through the four-step rewire for this misfire.

When the leak is out-of-game, the usual time pressures are removed. The student can
allocate the trigger of a losing stretch to the conscious mind after it has occurred. This
makes Step 1 of the process a lot less important, but visualising during times of calm
variance how one is likely to react to a downswing can help set the wheels of the
rewire in motion long before they are required. The subconscious mind can process a
lot of information over a long period of time without us even realising, and so, while
this misfire can be handled after the faulty interpretation has occurred, it will not hurt
to remind yourself that losing stretches are around the corner when things are going
smoothly.

Step 2 concerns interrupting the faulty process. When you consider playing a session
and feel the pull of that dread in the opposite direction, simply stop indulging the fears
and anxieties. Step 3 is to observe and wait for the emotions to fade and step 4 is to run
the correct interpretation over the newly instilled state of calm. The correct
interpretation is a cold blooded apprehension of the statistical chance of having another
bad session. For winning players this will be under 50%, for break even players,
around 50%, and for most losing players, it will rarely be over 60%. These are the hard
facts. When we believe them in a determined way, we can feel the resistance to putting
in the volume fading away. It is always important during a rewire to truly feel like the
correct interpretation is true, not to force good behaviour over the effects of a bad
interpretation.

It can be tough to throw yourself into a session during a downswing and the last thing
you want to do is play long sessions or chase losses. Therefore, keep sessions short and
blend play with plenty of hand review. This allows you to overcome the urge to quit
playing while staying accountable for the standard of your play.

The rewired process goes as follows:

What could go wrong? The most obvious threat is that the next session is also losing
and the bad interpretation process comes back with even more clout than the first time:
'I knew I was just going to lose again' 'I can't win right now.' 'Variance is against
me this month'.

If this happens, the student must rinse and repeat the rewire, but if the negativity is too
strong, it might be necessary to take a few days off and wait for the stronger
impression that losing is in the stars to fade. If the player continues to fight through
this even stronger sense of dread, it will be harder to truly believe the correct
interpretation process. We want to avoid at all costs the merging of good
interpretations with bad emotions.

.
'I'm a Winner Now'

The poker student travels through many ups and downs on the journey to success, none
more frustrating than a sense of progress suddenly halted by a downswing. Over a
small sample such as 20,000 hands, upswings followed by downswings look like this:
There is a real roller-coaster of emotion for the amateur poker player over this swingy
stretch of hands. It is easy to see how his experience can start with a sense of
worthiness at its peak and end with worthlessness at the trough. The implosion which
follows comes from an emptiness, less serious, but similar in flavour to the hollow
feeling of someone who has lost it all through addiction and ended up on the streets.
The fact that there was once a feeling of elevation makes the end state much more
painful. But if we follow a truly successful player over a year where he plays hundreds
of thousands of hands, this same graph appears as a completely meaningless blip in a
very steady progression, protected by the large sample size from the claws of variance.
And now it seems somewhat silly to have invested such emotion into such an
insignificant period of results. It also seems absurd to have judged this success as
evidence of skills. Just as a winning player can experience such a stretch of positive or
negative variance, so can a losing one:
This sense of perspective can help to reduce the intensity of the misfire but it will not
remove it all together. The first step in rewiring this mental-game leak is removing the
correlation between short-term winning and the belief that skills are being well
applied. The euphoria of going on an upswing can create a sense of pride. We are not
wired to expect lucky breaks. That is why we go to university, work our way up the
career ladder, or put effort into building a business. When things go right in life, it is
usually a combination of skill and effort paying off. In life, when fruit is preceded by
labour, the labour is usually the cause of the fruit. Poker is a very strange world as
short-term rewards very often follow hard work while being completely independent of
it. Here in lies the intuitive but flawed interpretation that an upswing is evidence of
having reached a new height of success.

The student must replace this interpretation with one that accepts the acute upswing as
a simple manifestation of positive variance. It is counter-intuitive but valuable to
admit:'I have been working hard and winning, but these two events are largely
unrelated.' This admittance keeps the student in the real world. If we do not allow
variance to throw us into a state of jubilation when we win, then we protect ourselves
against the burn when it turns against us. By fixing this initial view of our upswing, we
keep our work ethic high, increase focus and avoid being lulled into a false sense of
security. Our sense of self-worth simply cannot rest on the outcome of a 10,000 hand
sample. We must be confident that we are moving forward whether we are having a
winning week or not. We can replace the instinct to link results and skill with one that
sees clarity of thought process and definite purpose behind choices as the symptoms of
progress. Here is the completed rewire:

To achieve this new perception of winning stretches, the student must resist the deeply
tempting option of chalking his winnings up to his own merit. Letting positive thoughts
such as: 'I am getting better and it's paying off' pass before replacing them with
neutral ones such as: 'I must reflect on my levels of clarity and purpose over this
sample' is a tall order - it's like trading your favorite wine for a glass of water.
Remember the importance of truly believing the new interpretation. Do not let feelings
of pride about acute upswings remain as you start analysing the sample. Humble
objectivity is the secret to conquering this sneaky pitfall.
'Stay with Me'

For a farmer, there is little point in a hen that does not lay eggs. Having the hen around
will provide no benefit and so it will likely be slaughtered for meat. For the poker
player, having an opponent in the pot who is unlikely to invest much money is the very
same thing. Yet, there is often a temptation when you flop a very big hand to keep
Villain around at all costs. This is desire-based thinking. While it might occasionally
be correct to slow-play due to your opponent having too high of a bluffing frequency
on the next street or due to the stack to pot ratio being small, building smaller pots with
big hands in most spots is a reliable way to stifle your win-rate. The main technical
idea here is that when your opponent has a hand that will fold to one bet, he is unlikely
to invest a great deal even if we size small or check. Therefore, rather than trying to
squeeze out any extra dribbles of EV from the weak parts of Villain's range, we should
instead maximize our earnings the times Villain does have a hand with which he can
call multiple times. It is for this very reason that solvers, when 100 big blinds deep,
will always raise a flop c-bet with a set in a 2-Bet pot and often overbet nutted hands
on the turn. It's what we earn when the pot gets big that really matters, so get that pot
growing.
Consciously, many students know this, but the fear of winning nothing is all-
consuming and inevitably leads to lots of missed value. This even happens to more
experienced players who are not playing their most logical game. Why? It all comes
down to the instinctive brain and its inability to think statistically.

Let's call the actual outcome of the hand in progress a 'branch', and all of the collective
possible outcomes of this hand the 'tree'. Usually, the actual branch we happen to be on
will not be one in which we win a huge pot. We have flopped bottom set on a dry
board, but of course, NLHE is a game where most hands miss most flops, and that
alone makes the chance of our opponent folding to a bet all too real. Since Villain
folding is such a common branch, we are fooled into thinking it is the most important
one. Because the possibility of Villain folding is lucid and easy to anticipate, we focus
on avoiding it at the expense of the branches which occur more rarely. The problem is
that when Villain is going to bluff catch us for three streets, which theoretically
speaking, he must do with a reasonable frequency, we have the option of betting big
and increasing the pot-size dramatically.

In the following figure, the height of each bar represents the profitability of the branch.
The number of bars shows the frequency of each type of branch. Note that the fear of
Villain folding right away and resulting slow-play of the big hand simply shifts a few
of Villain's marginal folds into calls but usually only for one more bet. The difference
between succumbing to this misfire and avoiding it looks like this:
The rewire then is to interrupt the obsession with the 'villain folds now' branches. We
must take some time to let this initial fear of getting no action pass. The correct
interpretation of the spot is that we have a chance to win a very very big pot if we build
the pot correctly. We must cater for the times we can win many big blinds and not
worry about reducing the frequency that we win just the pot as it stands on the flop.
Once we see that the far right, blue and green, branches are the ones that can be
magnified the most, we simply cater for those being the case. In other words, we play
for the situation over which our sizing can have the most influence.

The complete rewire looks like this:

'X Therefore Y'

In the mundane decision-making of everyday life, there is very often just one reason to
do something, and moreover, that reason is usually sufficient for the proposed action to
be justified. When I consider going to get a glass of water, my being thirsty constitutes
a sufficient reason for this action; no further deliberation is normally required. The
simplicity of real life decision-making prepares us poorly for poker.

In poker, there are also very striking and obvious-looking reasons for making
investments, but unfortunately, these are often insufficient. Let's say that I want to
4-bet bluff because Villain has 3-bet me twice in a row. This seems enticing but does
not tell the full story. Now let's acknowledge that my opponent is a thinking player and
my hand is 84o. Now the 4-bet seems like a bad idea. Villain knows he has just 3-bet
me twice in a row, and likely just has a balanced strategy to begin with. What would a
sufficient reason be for the 4-bet?

The only sufficient reason for a 4-bet bluff such as this is that there is likely enough
fold equity to justify it, but this is unclear. If I 4-bet my hand based solely on the fact
that my opponent has recently been aggressive, I succumb to the X therefore Y misfire.
I invest based on only one part of a much larger puzzle. Whether my choice is a good
one or not will be down to luck because I have not found sufficient justification for the
investment.

The cure for this sickness is to create one very sensible habit - the tendency to halt a
thought process in its tracks as soon as a candidate reason for a play has been
generated. Instead of reason X leading directly to action Y, reason X is subjected to a
simple test which asks: 'is X sufficient for Y'. We rarely carry out this deliberate,
careful filter on our everyday reasoning because most of our actions are caused by
simple and obviously sufficient reasons. Wanting a cup of coffee is enough reason to
make yourself one. There is no rigorous test for whether wanting coffee is truly reason
enough to get coffee. Someone who deliberates in detail about such a choice probably
suffers from a neurotic condition. In poker, however, we must be neurotic until we
know a spot inside out. Let's take an example:

Hero feels the urge to bluff the river. This urge is largely desire-based and springs from
the strong yearning not to lose a big pot. We looked a this when we considered the
misfire of big pot attachment. Hero understands that emotions are not the currency of
poker decision-making and so embarks on a train of explicit thought such as: 'If I
check here, I will certainly lose the pot'. We can view this reason as a mere candidate
reason for bluffing; closer inspection clearly renders it insufficient. But finding an
insufficient reason does not mean that bluffing is wrong - it simply means that the
search for a sufficient reason must go on.

What would constitute a sufficient reason in this spot? Either of two things might
suffice:

• Either Hero must think the bluff is good from an exploitative stand point
because Villain, or maybe the average Villain, will fold too much in that spot.
• Or, Hero must think that his bluff is theoretically profitable. This means that
Villain is defending a sensible portion of his range to a bet, making our EV zero
for bluffing with an average candidate. Our hand must then be better than
 average to bluff with - maybe because of it's blockers to Villain's main bluff
catching hands or lack of blockers to te hands he will fold. (Having a blocker is
to hold a card that makes it harder for Villain to hold a certain group of hands.)

The initial reason of: 'I can't win unless I bet' is rejected as insufficient and the
correct, rewired thought process looks like this:

It is important when performing this rewire to prepare Step 1 well in advance. The
conscious mind must be ready to suddenly halt proceedings to implement the
sufficiency test for the initial candidate reason. A failure to allocate this trigger to the
conscious mind will result in the insufficient reason being accepted by the
subconscious mind and the investment being made before the conscious mind is even
aware of the problem. This is why we have a clear four-step process for rewiring
misfires.
'Must Cram Volume

This is a misfire than originates from the law of large numbers, which states that as
sample size increases, the probability of a set of results converging to the norm
increases. Some players make two dangerous assumptions here:

• Firstly, they assume incorrectly that they are already winning players.
• And secondly, they assume that if they are winning payers, their game will
remain this good regardless of the off the table work they put in or how much
volume they force themselves to play.
In many cases, one or both of these assumptions is false and so large volume does not
increase the chance of winning money.

The integration of high volume with a continued progression in skill takes careful
management. Studying the game cannot be overdone nor underdone. In the former
case, the student ends up with a mass of unusable data that tangles itself into a big
interwoven mess; like a bag of old cables that has lived in the attic for fifteen years. In
the latter case, we see burnout slash the player's skill level in half. Bad habits form as
the student drops his standards of self-scrutiny, leading to horrible blunders initially
flying under the radar, and eventually, being normalised as 'fine'.

Increasing volume is a worthy goal and is essential for any aspiring professional or
semi-pro, but it must be done in a safe manner that leaves your game intact, hopefully
propelling it forward at a comfortable pace. The natural state of the volume-monkey's
game is not stagnation, but decline. The faulty interpretation here is that constant
volume will eventually build a bankroll in the same way that constant sawing will cut
through a piece of wood. In poker you have to stop to sharpen the saw every day, or
else it breaks.

The new interpretation for fixing this leak, then, is that success is a mixture of volume,
hard studying, and the integration of the two. One way in which you can blend
successful study with volume is to play short sessions with constant sitting in and out
to review spots while they are still fresh in your head. This teaches the lesson in a
much more practically usable way. ZOOM games, in particular, are great for this
method as you can sit in an out at no cost of finding new tables. You could also set a
clock and solve five hands every five minutes on the replayer. Creating an amount of
time to solve a problem that is somewhere in between a relaxed study pace and a
frantic in-game scramble is the optimal way to do hand review.

As with all poker misfires, however, this leak has deep roots and it takes more than a
change of protocol to remove it from your mind. The fascination with volume leading
to success does not just exist to pursue success itself - it also keeps you on the tables
and out of the proverbial library. The tables are a much more fun place to wile away
the hours and so we have a convenient excuse for having more fun. To truly treat the
Success = Volume misfire, we must accept all of the benefits of holding this faulty
belief and see that they are not real. When you find yourself jumping back into the
pool instead of looking over that hand you tagged, interrupt yourself and ask: 'What is
my desire to play trying to achieve here?' If the answer is 'success' then you have a
deluded impression of what that requires. If the answer is 'fun' then you need to take
the game a bit more seriously - you're reading this book, after all.
Here is the completed rewire:

There is an equally destructive time-allocation misfire that goes in the other direction.
Players who avoid putting in volume, spending all of their time analysing and solving
become poker philosophers not poker players. Their webs of ideas are deep, tangled,
and often removed from reality. They fail to gain awareness as to how the pieces fit
together intuitively and every decision is a laboured stumble to a half-formed thought
on the rare occasions when they put in some hands. Studying for a year and then
jumping on to the tables would be a dreadful idea in poker. Just like a student doctor
does placements in the hospital throughout med-school, the poker student's placement
is at the felt.
Finally, you can see from Figure 49 that I have not recommended an equal allocation
of study-time to play-time. This is because the need to play volume is directly
necessary for winning money where as the need to study is only indirectly so in that it
makes your play winning. The idea is to keep the saw sharp, but still spend the
majority of your time sawing.

'I Should be Better than This'

Here we see a misfire born out of a misunderstanding about the frequency and severity
of mistakes a player is likely to make as he advances in ability. The student makes two
problematic assumptions in his interpretation of the large mistake or blunder (very
large mistake) that he has just committed.

• He assumes that this mistake alone is sufficient to define his overall skill level.
• He assumes that large mistakes are only ever made by weak players.

This process of self-berating is especially prominent in poker players because their

mistakes tend to cost them their own resources. Before governments and currency,
resources like food or weapons constituted the difference between life and death. The
more meat you had, the longer you could hunt to find more meat to stay alive. In our
day, survival tokens are money, and even though we have consciously set aside a
bankroll for poker that we have deemed unnecessary for the daily funding of food and
shelter, we are wired to think that we need it. Losing pots due to our own blunders
feels like throwing away our own prosperity and so our reaction to making errors can
be highly emotional.

Some players make a blunder and explode right afterwards; flying into a frenzy of
aggression and spew. Their self-image collapses into that of a weak and worthless
player. Why should a failure have any concept of discipline about how he plays? He
has already failed, after all.

For others, the harsh judgment that they are not good enough leads to abstinence from
poker. They may stop for the day or longer after making a blunder - or play on in an
evasive, timid manner.

Whether the misfire leads to a fight or a flight response is irrelevant. Both reactions are
caused by a feeling of fragility and worthlessness. It is the interpretation of the mistake
that is the culprit - the chip flailing that follows it is merely a symptom.

The sufferer of this affliction must first understand how players progress in terms of
the frequency and severity of the mistakes they make.

• A beginner will make many mistakes of all varieties. Due to his lack of skill,
blunders and small mistakes will occur with fairly equal regularity. He does not
have the skill to avoid huge errors yet and so they are far from rare blips.
• An intermediate player has cut out blunders and most larger mistakes for the
most part but will still make them from time to time. Most of his mistakes will
be smaller oversights and lapses in concentration, but he still lacks the
fundamental skills to avoid going massively wrong from time to time.
• The professional makes far less mistakes than the intermediate player and the
vast majority of his missteps are trivial to his win-rate. However, even a
professional player will occasionally make a big mistake, and from time to time,
he will blunder and wonder how on earth he ever got to this point with such an
error still in his locker.

The overall picture looks like this:

Forgive yourself for lapses in concentration even when they lead to blunders that you
would never tolerate as common practice. Move on by accepting that as a human, you
cannot entirely eliminate your potential to make disgustingly bad plays, no matter how
good you get at the game. As long as you make such a mistake less often than you did
last month, then you are moving in the right direction. Disgust should be replaced by
self-compassion and self-understanding. Your session need not implode due to an
unnecessary feeling of vulnerability. We produce our most logical thought processes
when calm and confident. These mental-states are necessary conditions for playing
your A-Game.
The completed rewire goes as follows:
'Gamble!'

Most poker players have at some point in their careers experienced the rush of blood to
the head and rash thought process that can accompany a sudden increase in pot-size.
This is one of the hardest misfires to treat because it all happens so fast. It happens due
to our archaic urge to prepare the body and mind for battle. This process once
protected us from dangerous predators and was no doubt strongly selected for due to
the times in history when humans and their ancestors were commonly prey.

At the poker table, the surge of adrenaline that accompanies the interpretation that
quick action is required can be destructive. It often leads to money being invested
before any kind of logical thought process can take place. Unused time banks and a
heightened emotional state are the most common symptoms of the 'Gamble!' misfire.
The impulse to gamble arises from the anesthetic properties of adrenaline. We become
temporarily desensitized to the importance of getting the decision right and to the
dangers of losing, as battling to win the pot becomes the main goal. Of course, being
overly afraid of losing is no good either - we need something in the middle.

It is nearly impossible to disable the automatic release of adrenaline that comes from
playing a game of chance for a meaningful amount of money. The release of this
adrenaline usually diminishes after a player has gained a lot of experience and has
become very comfortable at his current stakes, but this can take years and the
adrenaline is likely to return whenever a big pot is played with deeper stacks, or when
the player moves up in stakes. Consequently, our focus will not be on rewiring the
mental process that releases adrenaline, but the process that acts on it.

The key moment is that tiny window between entering a state of emotional arousal and
pressing the call or bet button. We need to be quick and reliable with our interruption
of the ingrained 'adrenaline = fast action' mental program. Practice makes perfect in
this respect. We must set up a protocol - a rule which states that feeling the effects of
adrenaline actually means it's time for inaction. We can achieve this in the following
way.

Train yourself to look at your time bank in an on-line game as your gut reaction to
feeling a spike in arousal. Allocate a small portion of this time bank immediately to
simply not acting. This is your buffer time in which the only goal is to let normal
thinking conditions return. When the adrenaline has subsided a little, it is time to get
on with your normal regular thought process, which flows so freely in smaller pots
where adrenaline is levels are lower.

Whenever you fail to interrupt the impulsive button clicking soon enough, and end up
falling victim to the 'Gamble!' misfire, do not be too harsh on yourself. The key to
understanding rewiring is knowing that the first phase of replacing your default
reaction with a better one is laboured and fully conscious. The conscious mind simply
cannot carry out a process with the same level of dependability as the subconscious
mind can after that process has become a habit. Forced intervention is the domain of
the conscious mind. Routine is the domain of the subconscious. You are allowed to fall
victim to your own adrenaline many times during the quest of not acting on it.
Eventually, after you succeed a few times and reap the benefits, the sub-conscious will
take over and your success rate will spike dramatically.

The mental wiring to aim for is as follows:

Chapter 5 - Case Studies

Not every misfire falls under the umbrella of the common rewires we have just
leanred. Some mental game issues contain elemetns of multiple misfires, while other
are completely unique to a student and his personal journey. We shall now examine
some cases where I have used the ideas of Poker Therapy to help students who all
struggled with their own unique blend of misfire.

While any names I use in this chapter are fictional, as I describe each case, I usually
have a real student in mind. In some cases, I am describing a combination of real
students' experiences. These stories are based on the years of coaching that inspired the
creation of Poker Therapy. If you are someone who has personally worked with me,
then there is every chance that you will find your own journey documented in here,
under a different name. These stories do not just illustrate how the rewiring process is
used in real life, they also document the common struggle of the aspiring player. There
is a good chance that much of what you are about to read will resonate as not too
dissimilar to your own poker journey.

'Alvaro - Years of Bad Habits'

Meet Alvaro - a fifty-year-old doctor from Brazil. For over a decade he has been a
losing poker player and has never really found any one who could help him organise
his poker thoughts and sort out the clutter born from years of implementing bad
thought processes and confused concepts.

On top of having a messy technical game, Alvaro also suffers from fight tilt that is
deeply ingrained from childhood experience. Having grown up in Brazil, where soccer
ability is one of the main indicators of a young boy's social status, and having never
been very good at sports, Alvaro developed a strong fight impulse to protect himself
from bullies. This instinct not only helped him gain respect from his peers but it also
deflected the overly-strict teachings of his father, who used to openly call him a failure
from a young age.

Alvaro is highly intelligent and is very successful in his field, but his archaic defence
mechanisms still operate behind the scenes. Whenever an opponent takes an aggressive
action at the poker table, Alvaro feels like he is immediately under attack. When asked
why he is making some of the more dubious calls in his database, he usually explains
that he felt as if the bet was a personal attack on him. Once, while reviewing a multi-
way pot on the river, he described his opponent's aggression as: 'I feel as if he is
bullying me because I checked'. Even with other players in the pot, the bet he faces is
perceived as aimed solely at him, highliting the extent of the misfire.

Here we see history repeating itself. Not being good at soccer is a weakness just as
checking is perceived to be here. The opponent's bet when checked to is just like the
school yard bully smelling weakness and attacking. Alvaro handled these bullies by
standing up to them and making himself seem scarier than he perhaps was. In poker,
this manifests as a series of thoughtlessly bad calls, bets, and raises.

My approach with Alvaro was a two pronged attack on his technical and mental leaks,
which are actually quite intertwined. For example, if Alvaro could sort out the tangled
mesh of technical ideas in his head, he would have a more easily accessible logical
framework - one that he could use even when experiencing symptoms of fight tilt.
Similarly, improving the mental game also helps the technical game. if Alvaro could
reprogram his mental game to avoid feeling victimised and defensive, then he would
have a calmer thinking space to apply the technical organisation that we were working
on during sessions.

Regarding the mental-game, Alvaro's continued quest is to become very familiar with
the qualitative differences between experiencing calm rational thoughts and
experiencing victimised defensive thoughts. To do this, we worked through some
visualisations of: on the one hand, analysing a situation that did not affect him
emotionally, and then, imagining facing extreme aggression - his worst nightmare. We
noted how his self-image changed wildly between the two cases. While in calm
analysis mode, Alvaro saw himself as an intelligent and proficient individual who was
making progress. He described this as a similar feeling to how he sees himself at work
- someone who has the respect of those around him, and deservedly so.

On the other hand, when we visualised facing a large river bet in a heads-up pot, he
described himself as a bratty child, throwing a tantrum in the corner. He felt self-
disgust yet was unable to control his behaviour.

Our mission in mental game coaching was for Alvaro to get so used to there being two
different versions of himself that he would be able to see things clearly enough in-
game that his conscious mind could detect instantly when he was in threatened brat
mode and interrupt the behaviour. The next step was to replace the faulty impression
that he was under attack with the correct view that he had a logical puzzle to solve, and
moreover, that he must solve it in respected doctor mode.
The rewire we are still practicing as I write this book looks like this:

As we noted previously, the logical brain functions much better when it is calm and
secure. Feelings of being threatened only produce irrational fight or flight responses at
the poker table.

When it came to how Alvaro was constructing his technical thought process during a
hand, we also had rewiring to do.

Alvaro's approach to studying the game for the last decade was all to familiar to me
from years of coaching students who felt as though they were bashing their heads
against a brick wall. Alvaro would watch hundreds of training videos every year and
understand many of the concepts in a receptive superficial way. When it came to
articulating these concepts in his own words, or using them at the poker table, Alvaro's
thought process was a babbling mess of contradictions. Such a wide yet shallow grasp
of the game is very common in students who do a lot of what I call 'learntertainment' -
the habit of watching instructional content passively and mainly for enjoyment without
ever really making an attempt to organise or reproduce the material for themselves.

When asked why he was betting the flop, Alvaro could spout out three reasons to bet.
 • 'Villain can have a lot of draws'
• 'I have range advantage'
• 'I want to keep the initiative'

But when asked to explain how these things affected his EV, or when asked to compare
the EV of betting to that of checking, he had no idea where to start.

To fix this disorganised mess of jargon, we first built a PowerPoint slide that featured a
giant dustbin. Every time Alvaro quoted some arbitrary echo of some half remembered
training video, we threw the statement into the trash by literally writing on top of the
trash can. Alvaro learned to reject these half thoughts as insufficient reasons to act (See
'X Therefore Y'), and instead got into the habit of consulting his new framework with
which I had provided him. This simplified decision-making model started with the
most basic concepts necessary for an understanding of how to estimate the EV of
different options. Anything from the old mess of ideas became taboo and only new
framework thoughts were allowed. Gradually, Alvaro began forming a foundational
new web of ideas where more complex concepts were supported by simpler ones. It
became impossible for Alvaro to make decisions based on old archaic excuses. Simple
logic governed everything and simple logic is a great deal more reliable than complex
irrationality.

If this story sounds in any way familiar, then fear not. The four-step rewire was used
successfully to retrain Alvaro's mind on both the mental and technical sides of his
game. By preparing for unsound technical thoughts via the dustbin exercise and then
interrupting the mind mid-thought, Alvaro was able to introduce a correct
interpretation of the spot that required him to use his new technical framework. Over
the course of 15 lessons, he has gone from a losing 10NL player to a winning 25NL
one. He still enters fight tilt mode from time to time, but this is now much less frequent
and he can usually limit the damage caused by snapping out of it quickly.

'Sean - Poker Dread'

Dread in poker is a silent epidemic. The typical student is not generally keen to tell his
study group about how he feels anxious whenever the pot gets big and expects the
worst case scenario all the time. Negativity can become a habit, especially for the
losing or break-even player who often ends up taking the worst of it. Even for winning
players, defaulting to the worst case scenario is not uncommon. As we saw earlier, the
human mind has been trained through millions of years of evolution to prioritise the
most dangerous potentialities, thereby putting survival before all else.

The first time I had a lesson with Sean, I could tell that he was far more open and
willing to accept his mental-game problems as a large piece of the poker puzzle than
most students. He attended therapy regularly to improve his quality of mental life and
emotional intelligence. He described one of his biggest mental-game issues as:

'I feel as though I know how the hand will pan out in advance and that I will
invariably lose. I'm sitting there wondering how I'm going to get screwed over
this time.'

The trigger here is a high variance situation that sometimes goes wrong. The faulty
interpretation is that it will go wrong, and the undesired response process is to give up
hope and play thoughtlessly. After all, if destiny has already decided that Sean will
lose, why should he try to play the hand well?

To get to the bottom of a faulty interpretation process and replace it with a better one, it
is vital to understand why the mind chooses to run the bad process in the first place.
Usually there is some perceived benefit. We are not typically in the business of self--
sabotage so when our subconscious misfires, it usually has our best interests at heart.
The bad interpretation process is more of a well meaning idiot than a wicked saboteur.

Sean and I got to the bottom of this issue through a series of questions. I asked him
what the potential gain might be of adopting the position of hopelessness. We
compared losing a big pot having run this negative interpretation to losing a big pot
having been more optimistic and found that optimism built up expectations and led to a
greater fall. The dread, then, served as a preemptive cushion - it dampened the shock
factor of losing in an attempt to prepare Sean for the worst. Needless to say, this well-
meaning process went too far in this pursuit in that the overly negative expectation
actually prevented Sean's decision-making logical mind from functioning. It had to go.

We started off, as always, with step one of the rewiring process. How could we prepare
Sean to recognise the on-set of the dread interpretation process? The key, just as with
Alvaro and his childish vulnerability, was to capture the flavour of those thoughts and
emotions and distinguish them from the normal rational state that is essential for good
poker. Sean found that his dread thoughts had a certain attitude attached to them that
was easily discernible from his normal inner monologue.

Thoughts caused by the preemptive dread process were:

 • 'Haha, let's see how I'll lose this time'
• 'Ohh I have AA, guess I'll just lose a stack again then.
• 'Go on then, show me the nuts.'
• 'Of course he had the set. It's so predictable, it's quite boring.'

The tone is very clearly that of a sarcastic, aloof cynic but of course the aloofness is an
act there to mask the fact that losing a pot feels the opposite of a small deal. If Sean is
already wise to the bad beats and awful swings in poker, and moreover, is above their
petty attempts to inflict damage, then they can't hurt him. This attitude perfectly
captures the dread misfire.

The fix was not for Sean to simply ditch the dread program, leaving him defenseless to
the sting of a bad-beat, but to learn how to be at peace with bad-beats so that the
original fear which incited the dread did not occur in the first place. We did this by
working on understanding the true effects of a losing hand to the progress of a
professional poker player. Sean is in the process of transitioning from part-time to full-
time poker and so this outlook was essential.

The professional poker player who has made a huge success of himself over three
years has lost many big pots in a variety of unpleasant ways. We started by accepting
this simple truth. We then practiced picturing losing in a few different ways that
constituted a sudden reversal in fortune, or an unlikely suck-out or cooler. We explored
the negative thoughts that came from this experience and found that they were hollow
and meaningless. These thoughts were generally to do with failure. In some part of
Sean's mind he equated losing a big pot with not making it as a poker player. Once we
debunked this myth, by acknowledging that coolers and suck-outs had nothing to do
with success or failure, we had a healthy interpretation of playing bigger pots to run
instead of the old dread process. We called it: 'time for coldblooded indifference'.

Coldblooded indifference is the outlook that nothing matters apart from making the
best possible choice. Losing is just noise as is winning. Maximising EV becomes the
one and only goal and whatever follows is in no way feedback about how well this has
been achieved. Once you separate the result of individual pots from your sense of your
own worth as a poker player, you emancipate yourself from your own dread. There is
no need for a preemptive cushion when the impact won't hurt in the first place. The
rewire looks like this:
Now Sean is able to apply the material we have covered in strategy sessions on the
tables, mostly free of prematurely negative thinking. His sense of self-worth as a poker
player now resides firmly in how well he applies himself to the game, and not how the
game treats him in the short-term. Of course, Sean is still human and is not ambivalent
to losing a pot, but coolers and suck-outs are now nothing more than the sour afterglow
of making a freely logical decision.

Neil - Zombie Mode

Neil, from New Jersey, is a 20 something guy who quit his job to become a
professional on-line and live player. Between long weekends at the Borgata casino and
Monday-Thursday spent grinding 200NL on-line in his apartment, Neil would play
poker seven days a week. He was so obsessed with putting in volume and making
money, that when he came to me for coaching, he had neglected studying entirely,
relying on hard work he had done a year earlier to scrape a modest living. But Neil was
nowhere near to realising his ambition neither in terms of skill level nor income.

His biggest problem he described as: 'Going into a mode where I play like a fuckin'
zombie'. He continued:

'I just sit there and click buttons, then it's like three fuckin' hours later and I've
had a shitty session.'

This sort of zoning out behaviour is not uncommon in high volume players. What's
going on here?

In the flavour of Poker Therapy, I sought to understand the root-cause of Neil's

tendency to switch off during sessions. It came down to two things:

Firstly, Neil was completely burnt out. His sessions were too long; he took very few
rest days away from poker; and he was playing so much that just maintaining some
level of C-Game was consuming all of his energy. Imagine that you had to run for six
hours straight with no rest? What pace would you choose to run at? Probably as slowly
as could be called 'running'. Neil was forcing himself to run for so long that his brain
was choosing to never get out of first gear. This was its only way of coping with the
volume Neil was forcing himself to play.

To fix this leak, we introduced strict session timers and mandatory rest days. We
introduced focused study blocks of around 25 minutes to separate playing time. I also
introduced Neil to the idea of 'focus sessions' where he plays just one third of his
normal amount of tables and concentrates 100% on every decision that arises - no
matter how trivial. This practice forces the mind to adopt the habit of switching on
third and fourth gear even when the pot is relatively small. Finally, we introduced a
warm-up routine where Neil would review the notes on one hand that we had already
solved in coaching and then visualise how he was going to play his A-Game during the
45 minute session. This warm-up routine was just two minutes long and was easy to
get into the habit of completing before each session.

But we found that there was also a more sinister ingredient to Neil's auto-piloting.
Deep within his subconscious there was a huge disrespect for his opponents that he
described as having mostly cultural origins. He explained that growing up in New
Jersey where there is a ideological drive for money and success bred an overly
competitive mind-set. Although Neil himself was not constantly bragging and trying to
out do others, he told me that he was surrounded by people who were doing just this.
Neil's habit of feeling resentment towards competitors made him disrespect them.
During our lessons, he would very often pull himself up for in-game thoughts such as:
'This guy's an idiot - I can just call and outplay him' or 'He's brain dead so he just has
the nuts - I fold.' Very often, these opinions were held about completely unknown
players. The idea that the competition was worthless made Neil believe that thinking
about hands was overkill - a waste of energy. He made quick, lazy poker decisions like
you might lazily swat at a fly that was bothering you. His opponents were just idiots so
why should he expend any effort?

The trigger in Neil's case was any poker decision at all. The faulty interpretation was
that his choice revolved around his opponent and that his opponents were not worth
caring about. The defence mechanism of not caring about the people around him was
formed at an early age as a way of shutting out those with overly aggressive and macho
personalities. The response process at the poker table was a sloppy careless decision.

Neil learned how to prepare for his misfire before the session even begun by becoming
very accustomed to the character of the disrespectful thoughts (Step 1). I asked him to
personify the faulty interpretation process. He named it 'They're all Morons'. To avoid
entering this mode, we established that it was an archaic process that he had learned as
a youngster that no longer served him in his current life as a professional poker player.

Neil's homework one week was to physically pinch himself every time he felt 'They're
all Morons' mode rear its head (Step 2). This sort of interruption is similar to how you
might get a dog to stop chewing your shoes. Interrupt the process and disrupt whatever
gratification it brings. Neil had to intervene before he felt too much satisfaction from
internally berating his opponent. He would wait for the feelings of disdain for his
opponents to pass (step 3) and then try to see the situation differently, from his own
point of view, not theirs (step 4).

Neil's new interpretation of having a decision to make was: 'poker is not about them;
it's about me and my job right now is to use my full potential.' This worked well
because we used something Neil was passionate about - meeting his own goals - to
replace tired jaded thoughts about those around him - whom we agreed, did not matter
to his journey. Neil's rewire looked like this:
Culture; family life; and the social/economic conditions in which we grow up
determine the habits we rely on later in life. That extends to how we think and behave
as poker players. If you're struggling with an irrational misfire that seems to come out
of nowhere, try replaying your younger years in your head. What thought/behavioural
patterns are you exhibiting now that you learned back then? What ideas do you have
that are set in stone, yet false and unhelpful? Neil's set idea was that, in competitive
situations, people are 'morons'. He learned this in New York bars full of young
bragging executives and ego-mad bankers. Where did you learn your bad poker habits?

Kieran - A Gambler's Mentality

Whether we like to admit it, poker is at least in some sense, gambling. We risk money
with a high possibility of losing it and our short-term monetary outcomes are governed
largely by chance. For some aspiring poker players, like Kieran, it is all too easy to
respond emotionally to poker investments in the same way that a gambler would feel a
rush of joy or a surge of despair upon winning or losing a bet.

When I first started working with Kieran, his technical knowledge impressed me but
much of his play shocked me. How could a guy with such a firm foothold on poker
theory be so prone to making horrible investments and folds? Kieran described a
sudden onset of emotions including hope, fear, and desperation. During bad bouts of
variance Kieran would move from 25NL to 200NL. When asked to explain this habit,
he told me: 'I feel as though I've lost so much that the only way to make things
right is to win it all back instantly'.

This behaviour is typical of problem gamblers. The fear of losing even more money is
drowned out by the lure of making everything okay. Things already feel bad enough
that a plateau of badness has been reached and further damage seems minimal
compared with the potential upside of getting the money back. In small pots, fear was
stronger than hope and Kieran would often make bad folds to 'avoid losing $4.00'.
Note that the poker transaction is described in monetary terms and not in big blinds, or
EV. As soon as the pot grew larger, the desperate urge to win back the money he had
invested in the pot became overpowering and this led to many bad calls and bluffs.

Kieran's problem was that his subconscious interpreted each poker decision as an
opportunity to risk or not risk his money. He interpreted losses as disasters that had to
be instantly rectified, and he interpreted winning as a rush of joy and relief. Through
the madness of these wild emotions, it was impossible to have the serenity necessary
for a logical thought process. The right thought process was there, but it stood idly
behind the curtain as his emotions acted out the tragic, predictable play.

The perspective of the emotional gambler usually comes from one flawed belief.
Kieran had to change his innate subconscious view that the goal of poker was to win
money in the short-term. If we could replace this goal with a more realistic one, we
could start to rewire his mind to see investing and folding as making informed
judgments; and to see winning and losing pots as tiny peaks and troughs that level out
to no longer matter in the long-term. Only if the subconscious could stop interpreting
poker as a desperate battle for money, could it stop generating destructive emotional
reactions.

Kieran's rewire involved performing the same visualisaton each time he sat down to
play (Step 1). Kieran pictured money as the thing you use in real life to buy
hamburgers and refill your car. He then pictured poker chips as tokens that you wield
when applying your skills. They are simply the bullets in the gun of a skilled
marksman and for a winning player, who manages his bankroll, they are infinite. Good
investments would eventually result in the number of tokens growing, but in the
context of one hand, there was no such thing as winning or losing.

In game, Kieran's mission was to become skilled at detecting the onset of the gambler's
perspective and its loss of emotional control. Upon detecting such a shift, his next task
was to interrupt these feelings whenever he experienced them. He did this by closing
his eyes for 5 seconds (Step 2) and then allowing the tension to fade (Step 3). Once he
was no longer so heavily under the influence of his emotional reaction, Kieran had to
erase the view that caused a spike in emotion - that poker was all about gambling
money and winning pots. This was replaced by the idea that poker was about investing
tokens which were nothing to do with his real life bank balance (Step 4).

Kieran's full rewire looked like this:

The idea of poker chips as investment tokens helped calm Kieran's emotions in two
ways. Firstly, tokens are not a currency used to buy things in real life, therefore they do
not affect our wealth or prospects outside of poker. This is a more dramatic way of
seeing your poker bankroll as separate to your bank balance. It is not just different
money, but isn't money at all until it's cashed out one day. Secondly, the word 'invest'
conjures the idea that one day tokens spent will pay dividends and removes the feeling
that this has to happen every time or immediately.

This rewire was necessary not just during losing sessions but also when feeling
overwhelmed by the positive emotions of running good. What many poker players fail
to realise is that by celebrating internally whenever they are running good, that they are
reinforcing the belief that short-term results matter. This makes it harder to break free
from anxiety and anger during losing sessions.

Dennis - Negative Assumptions

Making unjustified negative assumptions about the expectation of a play was a leak I'd
witnessed in quite few students, but no one suffered from this affliction to quite the
extent that Dennis did. If I suggested that Dennis might consider investing money in a
spot he would normally pass on, he would recoil in horror.

• Pete: 'Did you consider over-bet bluffing this turn? Your range is uncapped, his
range is capped, and you have a very premium bluffing hand.'
• Dennis: 'But surely they just aren't folding!'
• Pete: 'Ahh, in that case, I assume you over-bet a wide value range?'
• Dennis: 'But they won't pay me off if I bet that big!'

Dennis is an extreme example. His subconscious mind interprets many poker options
as 'that will cost me money and here's what will go wrong.' Of course, logically
speaking, Dennis cannot have his cake of pessimism and eat it. His mind is playing a
trick on him. Because the potential reasons against a certain action jump out at him
before any reason for the play can establish itself, the reasons against easily win the
battle. These reasons are so convincing that the illogical absurdity of Dennis' argument
slips under his radar; and they are so convincing because they are driven by the
powerful catalyst of fear.

It is possible that you suffer from this leak to the same extent as Dennis, but more
likely, you have a much more minor, but still harmful version of the misfire. Do you
ever find yourself wincing in the face of investment due to fear and quickly finding the
most convenient way to give this fear the guise of logic? Examples of fear
masquerading as pseudo-logic include the following.

• 'There's NO fold equity here.'

• 'I can't bet because getting raised would be dreadful.'
• 'He won't call with anything worse.'
• 'I've just seen people call with such stupid hands.'

Very rarely, such statements can be close to true, but more often than not, they are
nothing more than fear put into a sentence that sounds like poker logic.

Dennis and I had to discover why his mind went into pessimism mode in order to find
the right interpretation of the situation. What is pessimism at it's core? It is an attempt
to preempt and/or avoid a bad outcome. Remember Sean, the victim of poker dread?
His pessimism was a way of bracing for a potential painful outcome. Dennis's
negativity was more than that however - it was the stored memory of isolated instances
where bad outcomes had caused him anguish.

A dog which has suffered abuse will flinch when a well-meaning person attempts to
stroke it. Outcomes that cause suffering have a much greater impact than those which
cause pleasure, relief, or satisfaction. The many strokes the dog has received from
numerous people are far less vividly stored than the pain inflicted by that one abusive
owner. In humans, the same correlation can be witnessed. Positive feelings do not aid
our chances of survival quite like avoiding suffering does and so it is less important for
our subconscious to form a program that seeks to maximise them. Such a program is
weak and quiet compared to one which seeks reduce suffering. This is why Dennis's
negative thoughts are the first to permeate into his decision-making.

How do we treat this very natural affliction?

Step 1 is about preparation as always and that requires familiarity. Do irrational

negative thoughts have a common flavour? Yes, they are very black and white. They
are also assumptive and are based more on a feeling of dread than on actual evidence.
Dennis' first job was to make a list of all of the different ways this negativity is
expressed, capturing the language in which the thoughts appear in-game.

Step 2 was for Dennis to master the art of spotting these thoughts during a session and
quickly terminate them before they determined his action. As fear is at the root of such
negativity, Step 3 - watch and wait - was essential. In-game, time is short, but even
taking five seconds out to observe the effect that fear is having on your body and brain
can create an awareness sufficient to overcome the effects of the emotion. I advised
Dennis to take a tiny amount of time out to be mindful of his internal state. Step 4 was
to run the correct interpretation of the chance to make a bet, raise, or call. This went as
follows.

The opportunity to make a poker investment is not something that can be decided
without an appropriate logical framework. I taught Dennis about the theoretically
correct parts of his range to bet, raise, and call in different situations. We started out by
forming a golden rule: that he was only allowed to deviate from what he suspected the
game-theory play to be in the event that he had a very strong player type read on his
opponent. Of course, Dennis was allowed to refrain from double-barrel bluffing a
blank turn against a calling station, but he was not allowed to deem an unknown
opponent a calling station because it justified his fear about investing. The fear had to
be acknowledged then ignored to formulate a healthy view of the situation that could
become permanent through practice.

Here is Dennis's rewire diagram:

Getting a basic grasp on game theory is an excellent way to prevent your mind from
being influenced by emotional impulses and resulting pseudo-logic. Understanding
GTO is like an anchor which protects your poker ship from being coerced by emotions
like fear. Of course, the last thing I want my students to become is theory-mad robots
who cannot adjust to exploit other players, but for people like Dennis, it is usually
better to become too strategically rigid than too free. The freedom to exploit is easily
abused and, for players with a negative disposition, is often used to make up reads that
justify bad folds. I would recommend a similar treatment for players who compulsively
make excuses in favour of investing.
Chapter 6 - The Top 10 Poker Roadblocks

This chapter is about what could have been and what normally prevents it. It will not
surprise you that in the modern climate, the vast majority of players do not reach their
poker goals. Some want to turn professional and never do. Others simply want to beat
25NL on-line and fail. For some, they just want to stop losing so much money and
enjoy their hobby more cheaply, but they remain eternally losing players.

Even if you successfully address and treat your poker misfires, there is still a chance
that you will fail. Of course, you might be in the minority who breezes through poker.
You might achieve all of your goals without succumbing to one of the following
pitfalls, but if not, here are the most likely 10 reasons for you poker demise. We shall
call them roadblocks.

A roadblock is different to a misfire in the following ways. Firstly, if a misfire is an

treatable ailment then a roadblock is more of a chronic obstacle that has to be gradually
dissolved. Roadblocks are less like diseases that you catch, and more like problems
that are fused into the makeup of the poker player. Roadblocks are often part of a
player's personality or nature. Many poker roadblocks also occur outside of the game.

Secondly, a roadblock may not be treatable just by reading mental-game literature and
performing exercises like the four step rewire taught in this book. It might be necessary
to change things outside of the poker in order to make progress within the game.

Thirdly, while misfires come and go depending on variance and how well the student is
playing, roadblocks are always there.

I have had students who have managed to overcome the roadblocks in this list, but for
many, one or more of the following 10 problems have ended their poker journey. As
we move down our list in this chapter, the roadblocks in question become harder and
harder to defeat. However, no matter how many of these roadblocks stand in your way,
there is still hope. For each of the roadblocks addressed below, I shall list the
symptoms and causes to help us detect and understand the problem before I suggest a
treatment plan based on what has worked best for my students over the years.

10. Lack of Confidence

A lack of confidence in poker is usually just a manifestation of a lack of confidence in

life, or at least in the intellectual and competitive areas of life that most closely
resemble poker. Poker players who suffer form a lack of confidence exhibit thought
patterns and perceptions which severely impede their chances to progress in the game.

The first symptom these players might exhibit is the tendency to constantly question
their own game. An under-confident player might start changing things as soon as a
bad run costs him a few stacks. In this sense, he will never have a solid base from
which to build a strong, permanent game. The self-worth of the insecure poker player
depends on being stroked and not punched by variance, when it should depend on
measurable development as a player. The misfire: 'Ouch I Should Never Have' is
usually a common guest in the mental game of such students.

Another problem is that players with poor confidence are likely to make decisions
based on fear and anxiety and will be prone to developing fear related misfires. The
technical game that they are building is often drowned out by anxiety, anger, or fear,
which come from a deep-down lack of self-belief.

Being insecure about your game creates a state of permanent vulnerability. This
usually leads to extreme fight or flight reactions when things are going badly. It is not
uncommon for under-confident players to become calling-stations or even maniacs in
an attempt to mask the fragility felt underneath. While they will often suffer from
misfires such as 'I Don't Believe You' and other forms of fight-tilt, it is equally possible
that a player like this will react with flight. In this case, he will make many bad folds in
an attempt to avoid losing bigger pots because big losing hands bitterly reinforce his
low opinion of his own abilities.

The cause of this roadblock could be a generalised lack of self-esteem in life, but it
could be that you are a confident individual in general, but that there's something about
poker that rattles you when you sit down to play. A game with high variance can throw
normally stable and secure people out of their comfort zone. Some of my students are
highly successful businessmen, lawyers, doctors, etc. but find the logical complexity of
poker terrifying. In fact, it is often the most professionally successful individuals who
are the most shell-shocked when they realise just how deep and confusing poker can
be.

Finally, a lack of confidence might also be caused by unrealistic expectations. When I

ask tentative students why they feel insecure about their game, they often tell me that
they hate feeling unsure and confused all the time. The conversation then goes
something like this:
 • Me: What would help you feel more confident at the poker table?
• Student: I would know how to think about situations and wouldn't feel
confused.
• Me: So you would like to have a good idea about how to play most situations?
• Student: Yes
• Me: You are miles away from that, even with coaching, so what are we to do?
• Student: Ohh..
• Me: So are we going to feel insecure for months and months until we finally hit
that point in the journey?
• Student: I suppose I need a more realistic goal.
• Me: Yes, let's forget about having a clear understanding of how to solve every
spot for now and focus on being okay with uncertainty. We can treat your lack
of confidence without becoming a crusher overnight.

This is where the treatment begins. We cannot eliminate uncertainty from poker
decision-making. It will be there all the way through our development. I have coached
thousands of hours of poker. I have studied solver outputs for hundreds of hours and I
still experience uncertainty in many situations. I try to embrace this and see it as part of
the mysterious beauty of the game. Complexity will cause unsureness but that does not
need to hurt confidence. What matters is your level of certainty compared with that of
yesterday. Compare your problem-solving skills today with how you want them to be
next week, not some deluded ideal about always knowing what to do. You will never
find an honest professional who tells you that they almost always know how to handle
poker situations.

If your lack of confidence is more general and exists outside of poker, then try to shift
your focus. Feeling insecure about your abilities only makes sense when you look at
what you CAN'T do. Maybe you're not yet a winning player, so what? What can you
do now that you couldn't a month ago? Which concepts have you newly and
successfully integrated into your game and what mistakes do you now make less
frequently? Which concepts are you going to tackle next? Perhaps, at the moment,
there are 2000 poker situations that baffle you; that you are liable to often misplay. Try
cutting that number down to 1999 by tackling one in depth during your next study
session. Technical progress is incremental but you can reform your mental-game with
one shift in perception.

When you feel anxiety over your own abilities, try to remember - it's just you on this
journey. When we try to become skilled poker players, we are competing against
ourselves. The other players are mostly failing to meet their own goals, most of them
are break-even or losing so do not measure yourself up against the few who are killing
it until you reach the technical point where you might surpass them.

In summary, a lack of confidence in poker is one of the most fixable common

roadblocks. It can be treated by setting attainable learning goals, accepting uncertainty
as part of the game's charm, and avoiding the temptation to compare yourself to others
or any some perfect version of yourself. If your lack of self-belief has deeper
emotional roots, it is possible that these fixes will not work and you will need to seek
help outside of poker, but this applies to all of the roadblocks on this list.

9. Being a Bad Learner

This is a lengthy topic. The roadblock of bad poker learning consists of many different
individual pitfalls which stifle the progress of many a promising player. A bad poker
learner normally falls short in the following areas:

• Making sure new concepts are well understood before trying to implement
them.
• Watching and reading training material in an engaged way that attempts to
reproduce learned concepts in the learner's own vocabulary.
• Being able to extract useful heuristics from training material and/or software
output.
• Seeing the bigger picture. Understanding that reasons for different plays can be
sufficient or insufficient.
• Scrutinising the advice of peers before adopting it.
• Using game time as means of reinforcing recently learned material

Let's break these areas down one by one.

Firstly, copying an idea from training content with very shallow understanding is a sure
way to destroy your own game, but this leak is incredibly common. When I first meet a
student who has been watching training content for a long time and feels stuck, it is
very often because his web of poker concepts is overloaded with poorly understood
and conflicting ideas. The dialog goes like this:

• Student: I'm confused about the turn. Should I double barrel? I mean, my range
hits this card better than his so I bet because I have range advantage
• Me: What's your hand strength?
 • Student: Well, I have second pair with a bad kicker
• Me: So does this hand have anything to gain by betting?
• Student: That's what I wondered. I felt all the better hands would call and the
worse ones would fold, but I remembered hearing that when you have range
advantage you should bet.

Here, the student has absorbed a one-liner about range advantage and taken it out of
context. Range advantage does permit you to bet more frequently, especially when you
can deny equity to large parts of your opponent's range and make him fold a lot of air-
hands that have live outs. This is very common on the flop. On the turn, however, after
the flop has gone bet and call, Villain's range is more filtered. We have already folded
out a lot of his air on the previous street and so denying equity to these hands is no
longer a relevant factor. A medium strength hand usually wants to check now since it
cannot extract any further value nor can it make Villain fold anything better. Hero does
not want to bet the turn just because his range contains more nutted hands than his
opponent's. Student's who bet for this reason are succumbing to the X Therefore Y
misfire.

This leak is an epidemic. There are often hundreds of these badly learned concepts
playing on repeat like broken tape recorders in the student's mind. They shout out some
barely logical echo at the wrong times and cause large mistakes like making a big turn
bet with a mediocre hand. If this mistake seems trivial to you, it might be that your
own lack of organisation occurs in more complex spots.

The best remedy is not to get into this mess in the first place. Try to make sure that you
unpack a concept fully before taking it to the tables, and feel free to put it on ice if its
usage is not clear to you. Instead of hearing 'I bluff because I have good blockers' and
using the concept as an excuse to bet whenever this is true, ask yourself how the
concept fits into your current framework for understanding the game. How does it
compare with other reasons for an against bluffing that you have used and accepted for
a long time? Ask yourself questions such as:

• Are blockers more or less important than the showdown value of my hand?
• Are blockers enough to outweigh a read that Villain is a calling station?
• Does not having blockers stop me from bluffing a player who folds too much?
• How much extra fold equity does having good blockers grant me on average?

This is the sort of responsible learning that gets you somewhere in poker. Your web of
poker beliefs is a precious structure that must be built from the ground up (it is no
cooincidence that my course on runitonce.com goes by the very same name.) If you
are too lax with allowing overly general and poorly understood concepts into your
web, then chaos is inevitable. It takes a very long time to clean out the overloaded
game of a player who has lazily copied half-learned advice for a long time. It is far
easier to teach a complete beginner than a losing experienced player who has built a
mess of contradictions for a thought process.

Compare the poker mind of an organised learner to that of a player who lets anything
into his web of beliefs. Poker concepts need to be clarified fully and then organised
like bricks in a house.

The next good habit is about learning productively, not just receptively. Being more
proactive about the intake of new material and trying to produce it in our own words is
a great way of gaining clarity on the material before throwing it into your web of poker
ideas. Too many players rely on passive learning or, worse still, 'learntertainment'
where watching training content is more enjoyable than educational.

If you can articulate a concept to a friend in a way that makes sense, you can claim a
high degree of comprehension, at least out-of-game. Coaching others has accelerated
my game more than any other activity. This is because explaining something to another
player forces you to organise and produce material you have learned to a high standard.
Students are often beguiled by the way I can play three tables of ZOOM poker and
articulate my thought process fluently at the same time. I assure them that I am no
poker genius - rather, I have traversed these same logical mental pathways so many
times while under the scrutiny of paying students. This is where the sense of cognitive
ease originates.

It is only when concepts can be easily spat out in your own words that can you claim
out-of-game mastery of them (in-game mastery being another thing altogether). My
belief about studying poker is that anything we struggle to articulate was never known
fully to begin with.

The poker learning model looks like this:

Now onto heuristics; the holy grail when it comes to simplifying the game. While we
can rarely afford to create general rules without exceptions in poker, we can form our
own heuristics to explain trends and patterns. An example of an overly general rule
would be something like: 'Bluff the river when it's a scare card for your opponent's
range.' The test here is to think of some counter-examples such as: 'Villain was calling
a lot of Ace-High on the turn so the Ace river actually hits his range a lot' or 'Villain is
a huge calling station.' If these exist in abundance then the rule is too strong.

A heuristic is different from a rule in that it describes a pattern that helps us understand
the essence of the game without forcing us into rigid boxes. The way to form a good
heuristic is to observe how good players handle certain situations and pick out the
common factors that motivate their decisions. The same thing can be done when
studying the output of solvers or range building programs.

Examples of good heuristics include the following:

• From a Training Video: When the turn completes a flush we should

downgrade our top pair hands and treat them as closer to medium strength
hands. We will check more of them than we would on a blank turn, all else
being equal.
• From a Solver Output: All else being equal, it is better to bluff with hands that
do not block missed flush draws as we want our opponent to hold these weak
hands, which he will fold.
• From an equity calculation The best hands to shove over 4-Bets, if we want to
have a bluffing range, are pocket pairs as these have the most equity against a
4-bet/calling range such as [QQ+ AK]

From good heuristics comes an understanding about which reasons are sufficient and
which ones are not. Many people qualify as bad poker learners due to their inability to
weigh factors and reasons. Very often, a student's reasons for or against a play are valid
but just hold very little weight when considering the bigger picture. I often use the
following analogy to treat this problem.

Imagine a decision point in a hand of poker as a tree. The trunk represents the decision
we face, for example, deciding whether or not to bet the turn in position after calling
Villain's flop c-bet and facing a check. From the trunk of the tree there are a few main
branches. On the left there are betting branches; each one with its own bet-size to
represent a mixture of different betting options. On the right there is the checking
branch. From the left hand branches, on which we bet, there are two further main
branches where Villain either calls or folds. A third, thinner branch also comes from
each betting branch to represent the rarer times when Villain check/raises us.

When we choose to bet and happen to get called, there are thousands of new branches
that represent all of the different river cards and the various actions each player takes
on each. The tree gets very large very quickly, but what matters most is how often the
most immediate and common branches occur - the ones which are thicker and closer to
the trunk. Contrast these common and important possibilities to the scraggly twigs on
the end of rare river branches.

A student who uses insufficient reasons for his actions is often obsessing about rare
branches. This is exactly what is going on when I hear my student object: 'But what if
we get raised and then call and get a bad river?' As negative an EV branch as this
one is, its frequency renders it almost meaningless to the bigger picture. To check
behind on the the turn only with this possibility in mind is as clear an example of 'X
Therefore Y' as you will ever see. A student who does this has no ability to properly
weigh up the significance of different reasons for or against his options.

Good poker learners are those who can decide how central a branch is to the EV tree in
order to assign a weight to a candidate reason for or against a play. When taking in a
new concept, a good learner thinks about how large a role it will play in certain
situations. The impact of a branch on our EV is determined by the average chips won
or lost on that branch multiplied by the frequency with which the branch is likely to
occur.

The poker tree analogy is depicted in Figure 62 below. Note how the relevance of each
possibility to our EV is represented by the thickness of the branch. Getting raised when
we overbet the turn in the spot described above is such a rare occurrence that we can
practically ignore it.
8. Anger

Anger is the most destructive of the poker emotions because it is incompatible with the
controlled temperament needed for success. Just as the angry flailing fighter has little
chance against a disciplined professional, the raging poker player is a disaster waiting
to happen.

We have already discussed fight responses to poker situations that can be called
'misfires'. These outbursts originate from mental processes that are quite appropriate
outside of the game. The roadblock of Anger is far more general and severe. The
students who succumb to it are often those who struggle to control their anger outside
of poker. Moreover, the mental processes that cause anger as a roadblock would not be
considered reasonable reactions in everyday life. For players like this, the anger felt
can be very physical and all-consuming. The red mist is so thick that any thoughts
about self-control are all but a distant whisper. This leads to thoughtless play and
desire-based decision-making.

Anger is an emotion designed to effect change to remedy an untenable state of affairs.

Therefore, angry poker players force big pots and make bad investments in an attempt
to fix the unacceptable feelings of losing due to bad luck, bad play, or lucky opponents.

Controlling my anger was an ongoing battle for most of my twenties. It was my biggest
obstacle to poker success. Having now mostly succeeded in my quest to understand an
disarm my own anger, on and off the poker table, this is a topic in which I feel
qualified to help from a first person perspective; not just through the experience of
coaching students.

First off, the roadblock of anger is not just a one off fault in the circuit, but a habit. In
poker, the stimulus is usually bad luck or making mistakes, both of which are
interpreted as unacceptable. The stimulus of losing leads to a very fast psychological
and physical response which changes the player's role from that of the unlucky loser to
that of the empowered maniac. This empowerment is addictive and quickly becomes
habitual due to its ability to make the player feel like he is self-righteous and taking
action against the vile scattering of cards, or unacceptable blunder, that caused him to
lose.

The mindless flailing of chips exhibited by the raging poker player feels satisfying
because it is a fighting response. In assuming this role of the fighter, the player is
removed from the intolerable role of the victim. When confronted with bad results, the
player becomes either a victim of others' decisions, variance's cruelty, or his own
inadequacy. Because these states are helpless and pitiful, anger is chosen as a quick
remedy. The empowerment which follows causes more losing and leads to more
helplessness which again transforms straight back into anger. It is not that anger is an
enjoyable state, but it is a lot less miserable than that of helpless suffering - and so it
should be - otherwise, we would prefer to die than fight off a predator. The cycle looks
like this:
What I learned with my own anger problems was that if I could accept the feeling of
losing/suffering for a second without getting angry, I could usually regain enough
composure to rationalise the situation before anger took too firm of a hold. This is very
much to do with seeing things as they are, and not as you wished that they might have
been. Since anger is an attempt to bring about a different reality, the first step is to
settle for the situation you are in. If you can do that, anger becomes an unnecessary
leap. Let's see how we can learn to defuse poker anger pertaining to the three main
triggers:

• Being unlucky
• Making mistakes
• Bad Opponents getting lucky
Let's start with suffering caused by bad luck. When the jack comes on the river
completing Villain's gutshot straight draw, try acknowledging that you are now in a
situation where you have lost a pot, and not in one where you should have won. If the
next card in the deck was a jack this time, then how could you possibly have been
supposed to win?

With this acceptance comes a feeling of powerlessness. There is no way to rectify that
the river was a jack and the sooner you let this thought resonate, the sooner you will
feel that there is no point in getting angry. All that matters having accepted this
outcome is how you react to it and this is where you want to channel your energy.
Poker anger is irrational because, when we get angry, we are dedicating our energy
towards rejecting an unchangeable state of affairs. In life, this might be productive
when it spurs you on to lodge a complaint with your energy provider or send back a
disgusting dish in a restaurant, but in poker it is beyond futile.

When the suffering is generated by your own error, this perception shift can be even
more difficult. The task now is to accept that you have made a mistake and sit with the
discomfort and shame of that without trying to reject it. Your thoughts at this point
need to be something along the lines of:

'I made a mistake and I am feeling bad about it, but mistakes are inevitable and
generate learning opportunities - they only feel bad temporarily.'

If the suffering is temporary, then there is no need to use anger as a means to escape it.
You will feel the start of anger building, but you must bring yourself back to this state
of acceptance. The sooner you accept the real state of affairs, the better your chance of
calming down before anger has empowered you. Anger leads to more anger. It is
intoxicating in a deeply satisfying yet hollow way. While the stubborn part of you that
refuses to accept reality gets a power-mad kick out of the tantrum, the rest of you wilts
in even deeper embarrassment.

If you have ever listened to the Carrot Poker Podcast, you might have heard me tell the
story of when I punched myself in the face after making a bad river call. This
happened in my early twenties when I had dreadful control over my anger both on and
off the poker table. This extreme reaction was caused by a refusal to accept that I was a
fallible player with a pot attachment issue. I got angry in an attempt to reject that I was
fallible...how pointless.

Instead of jumping into the tide of anger, what I had to do was sit with the shame for a
few seconds and let the feeling wash over me as I accepted fully that I had made this
mistake and that it illuminated an avenue for improving my game. We punch people
when we cannot tolerate their behaviour and see no other recourse. I suppose punching
oneself is no different! My intolerance for my play became too strong. I used anger and
self-harm in that moment in an attempt to become the fighter instead of the failure. I
lacked the self-compassion to accept my own behaviour in making that river call. Had
I accepted it and rejected the option of anger, I could have got to the bottom of the leak
that caused the bad call sooner and had a higher EV for more of my career.

In this light, self-love is an essential ingredient for resisting anger caused by mistakes.
To accept that you messed up requires inward compassion and understanding. Lashing
out in an attempt to effect a different reality often means neglecting your own welfare.
Even when our poker anger does not result in a sore face, it might cost us stacks, undo
progress, humiliate us, or make us quit the game for a week. Anger in poker makes
everything worse for the victim because he cannot change the reality of losing through
getting mad like he can change poor treatment by an energy company by writing an
angry letter.

The reason I tell this story is that it was the first real wake up call for me to start
dealing with my anger roadblock. I worked hard on my mental game after that day and
the results ten years later are incredible. Nowadays, I try to accept that every mistake I
make at the table is caused by a specific and very fixable problem in my game.
Because I care about myself as a serious poker player, I accept that mistakes exist and
try to fix them. Yes, I still experience shame and disgust when I make a bad pay, but
this is now quite short-lived and rarely progresses into anger. It is so much harder to
get angry when you look after your own internal reality instead of trying to force a
different external one.

Finally, when the suffering is caused by other players doing things you disagree with
and profiting from them at your expense, the battle against anger might be even harder.
In this case, the feeling you must sit with is something between injustice and outrage.
These emotions are already quite close to anger, and for some students, the injustice
can feel very personal - almost as though Villain's play has breached your own human
rights.

By seeing your opponent as a horrible enemy, you are simply finding a scape goat on
whom you can pin this perceived atrocity. In doing so, you are entering the trap of 'he
should never have...' The language of 'should' is fodder for the beast of anger.
Remember that the role of anger is to reject a state of affairs in an empowered way in
order to avoid victimisation. By making your opponent the bad guy, you give anger a
target to latch on to. You encourage it to grow stronger.
The key here is to sit with the feelings of victimisation for a minute until you realise
that they are temporary and that you have not actually had your rights infringed upon.
Your opponent was trying his best to play a hand well. You only saw his play as an
assault because it happened to hurt you. This was caused by variance - a benign entity
which favours no one person over another in the long run. Once you feel a little better,
try to have some compassion and respect for your opponent. He is just a person like
you trying to win at a difficult game. If his play is worse than yours, then in the long-
term, he will suffer far more losses like the one you just endured than you will. Let him
have this one and look after yourself by focusing on the next hand.

The good news is - and I can promise you this from personal experience - the more
times you successfully allow yourself to suffer a little without running to the fake
empowerment of anger, the easier it gets to endure the unpleasantness of losing and the
shorter the time these emotions last. The only sure way to prolong suffering is to enter
into the cycle of anger (Figure 63). Here's how we break the cycle:
7. Fickleness

Fickle poker players rarely get anywhere due to their lack of commitment to finding
the right path and sticking to it. Sometimes they will stumble across something that
works, but because they seek immediate gratification from the game, they will reject
the good methods as soon as variance hands them a bad stretch or boredom sets in.
Fickle poker players are looking for magic beans that will give them a smooth ride to
the top - a phenomenon which does not exist in this game. If you find yourself thinking
in the following ways, then fickleness is probably a roadblock for you.

• I found a new instructor and his videos have really spoken to me. I have had
four winning sessions in a row and can finally see the way forward.
 • I switched sites recently and the games are actually beatable.
• I bought X course for $1000. I have decided to become a winning player.
• I've been playing tournaments instead of cash lately. I think they're more suited
to my style.
• Over-betting is the way to beat the games.
• I moved back to 2NL to gain confidence. I'm going to go all the way through
the stakes to start from scratch.
• I deleted my database as there was a lot of tilt in there. This is my new
beginning.
• I had to move up in stakes as 10NL isn't real poker. 25NL is going great so far.
• I find that when I play in the living room, I have better sessions.
• Playing more tables has helped me focus recently. I've been getting better
results.
• 4-Bet bluffing works almost always.

These thoughts are attempts to force a smooth happy state of affairs in a way that
simply does not exist. Here are the real explanations of what us happening to the fickle
poker player.

• This instructor is good at explaining things and the student has been running
good
• The games were beatable on both sites. The student is a losing player on both.
He has been running well since switching sites.
• This course may or may not be worth the price to a dedicated player who will
put in lots of consistent work. For the fickle player, this course is a huge waste
of money. It will not be a magic fix. You do not pay for poker success. Rather,
you pay for tools with which you must graft to improve.
• The student has recently run good in spots where he has over-bet even though
these are often the wrong spots. The student over-bets in many bad situations.
• The student has been losing and wants to force a feeling of winning. He dreams
that by beating a really soft game again he will become good enough to beat a
tougher one. This is invariably false and he is better off moving down only one
stake or continuing as a slight loser at his current stake.
• The student thinks that if he does not have to look at the results of tilted play
that it will no longer be a problem. A blank slate very quickly turns into the
very one that was erased. Nothing has actually changed in the student's mental
game.
• The student attempted to force a feeling of winning and has run good so far at
this new stake where he is actually a larger loser than at his previous stakes.
 • The student is unable to accept variance and is very desperate to find his magic
beans.
• The student has decreased his win-rate by adding more tables and has happened
to run good so far
• 4-Bet bluffing has worked a lot recently because opponents happened to have
hands nearer the bottom of their ranges the times the student 4-Bet.

The fickle student would rather chase feelings of short-term satisfaction than accept
what it takes to succeed in the long-term. He is completely unwilling to accept the
extent of variance in the game as it would devalue his delusional links between lucky
results and his current magical remedy. In a sense, these players are addicted to
changing things every time the situation feels intolerable. Just like the anger roadblock
sufferer, the fickle player tries to force a different reality from the real one. He deludes
himself instead of getting angry and lives permanently within the following hopeless
cycle:
The way to break this cycle is to fully accept the effects of variance and to stop
changing something dramatically every time you hit a bad stretch. In poker, the current
state of your game is like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces are in the right place
while others are missing or wrongly positioned. When things do not work over the
long run, this is evidence that too many pieces are out of position, but you must keep
the ones which are in the right place intact as you find and replace the problems.
Imagine that you had placed a piece of sky in the sea by mistake. Would it be easier to
remove that piece and search for which part of the sky it was or start a different jigsaw
puzzle altogether? Which strategy would lead to a finished puzzle the quickest?

The fickle poker player is forever trashing a partially made puzzle in search of one he
can assemble in a second. He is looking for that puzzle where no pieces will ever be in
the wrong place and that does not exist in poker. This is a game in which you will fall
over 999 times before succeeding on the 1000th attempt. Each time you fall however,
it is important to stand back up where you left off and remember what concepts and
ideas in your current game are clear and effective. Then you can go about the arduous
but rewarding task of finding out which pieces are missing or misplaced. Fickle
students are impossible to teach because they can never pursue the right things for long
enough to make any progress.

• Me: 'How did your homework go this week? As I recall you were going to
review five turn probe opportunities in an attempt to exploit capped checking
behind ranges.'
• Student: 'I didn't do this because I realised that my real problem was playing too
low of a stake. I moved up and I think you'll be pleased with my results so far.
• Me: '.....'

I despair as a coach at times like these. Until the fickle player manages to step outside
of his cycle and see it for what it is, he has almost no chance of success. He will spend
a lot of money and time on his flavour of the week and never master any one thing well
enough to use it effectively. His game will become a clustered confused mess of ideas
and eventually I may advise him that coaching is probably not going to help him unless
he is willing to see his long-term pattern and amend it. Of course, this student does not
mean to sabotage his prospects - he is merely chasing the dragon of short-term
happiness. Emotions are more powerful than logic. The problem is that while the
former preside over the short-term, the latter is needed to see the bigger picture.

If I manage to help a fickle student understand why his poker journey has been
unsuccessful thus far, then we break the cycle of fickleness in the following way:
By making small consistent changes, we ensure that we are always working towards
the same goal with a constant overall strategy. We identify leaks and learn how to fix
them, while simultaneously providing positive reinforcement for well understood
concepts and well applied ideas in-game. It is better to fix 3 out of 3000 leaks than to
switch to a game where you have 10,000.

If this sounds like you, then break your fickle poker cycle by first admitting culpability
and getting ready to stick with your current jigsaw puzzle until it is complete; no
matter how messy or unpleasant the task of fixing it.

6. Fear of Gambling

Fear of gambling does not necessarily entail a moral disagreement with gambling or a
strong anxiety about losing money. While this roadblock might sometimes be extreme
enough to cause physical symptoms, we are usually just talking about a recurring
discomfort about risking large amounts of chips that prevents the highest EV line from
being taken.

A fear of gambling in poker is likely to cause win-rate crippling issues such as:

• Being unable to fire profitable stone cold bluffs

• Checking too often in an attempt to manage the pot-size and missing good bets
• Being unable to make thinner value bets
• Folding in spots where people bluff too often due to arbitrary rules about the
absolute hand strength needed to call.
• Trying to avoid big losing pots at all costs and missing out on a lot of EV in the
process.

To be a great boxer, you have to get punched. To be a great poker player, you
have to get stacked.

The problem with this roadblock is that the instincts which argue for keeping the pot
smaller and avoiding bluffing the river with Jack-High are the same ones that have
kept us out of danger for our whole lives. These impulses are inherited from our
ancestors precisely because they served them well enough to survive and reproduce.
You are probably supposed to feel some resistance to placing large amounts of money
on the spin of a roulette wheel, but when we are playing a game of skill and chance in
an attempt to maximise our earnings, we need to disable these fears just as the boxer
no longer fears a left hook.

When our poker brain becomes infiltrated by the fear of gambling, it becomes
impossible to think straight. Imagine the mental process in the following way:
Because the fear of gambling is so innate, it is far more persuasive in this hand of
poker than the logic, which is quietly and moderately in favour of making the bluff. Of
course, the logic is correct and the bluff would have been profitable in the long-term,
but unfortunately, fear will win out every single time because it is backed by the
emotional propaganda that gambling is bad.

As long as the student leaves his fear unchecked, it is free to run riot and will have no
difficulty in persuading the conscious mind to press the check button with a sigh of
relief. But what happens if we call our fear out for exactly what it is? If we can first
acknowledge what fear is trying to do, then we can fight through its truth distorting
effects. Fear of gambling is trying to help us out by protecting us from bad variance.
But it is not bad variance that threatens our win-rate, but bad choices. The variance
will even out but the missed opportunities to bluff will not. It is logic that protects us
from failure, not fear, and so we must respond to the fear by saying:

'I'm okay, thanks. Could you please be quiet so I can hear what logic has to say.'
I teach students who suffer from this roadblock a process I call logical empowerment
which seeks to reverse the emotional weighting of logic and fear. We work on the
student's ability to trust his logical faculties and distrust any thoughts that are
accompanied by strong emotion. This technique is rehearsed out of game and practiced
in-game. The procedure goes like this:

• Pay attention to the feeling of fear and view it as an intruder to your normal
thought process. Note the emotions that you are experiencing and see how
unhelpful they are for unlocking your best problem solving skills. Decline the
advice of these emotions and dismiss any convenient excuse to act on them.
• Now focus on the logical dialog which has been there all along. Notice it more
and more as it gradually becomes louder now that you have silenced your fear
related thoughts. See how useful the logical faculty is and how well it is solving
the problem in front of you.
• Allow yourself to feel confident and happy with the logical conclusion you have
reached before you act. Let go of any final doubts.
• Now execute your logical choice with pride and conviction.
• Reassure yourself that you had good reason to make the investment you made
before any anxiety can creep back in
• If you lose the hand, remind yourself that this was not your fault, but the will of
variance this time

By listening to the rational brain instead of the emotional one, you are quieting the
noisy disruptive child so that the brilliant timid child can be heard. Once in the
limelight, your logical thought processes will start to feel more and more natural and
you will execute choices free from emotional disruption. Logical empowerment is a
technique which allows you to believe in your rational mind. Over time, the logical
faculty grows in ability and confidence and starts to have a much greater effect on your
decision than fear, which is now just the whispering ghost in the background.

We are aiming for a picture like this:

In most cases of successful logical empowerment, fear does not go away completely
but lingers in the background. It is okay to feel an element of uneasiness upon deciding
that you are going to bluff. It is very important at this point to delay your action until
you feel confident about it again. If you force yourself to bluff while feeling dread, you
are likely to find yourself experiencing regret whenever it goes wrong (See'Ouch I
Should Never Have'). This is why we want to fully trust our logical conclusion before
making an investment. We need to feel good during the seconds right after our
investment. We are associating logic with positivity.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of freedom that accompanies blasting an overbet
bluff into the pot knowing full well that your play is profitable. Being that player who
can just empty the clip in a deep pot because he's confident in his game makes you a
fearsome opponent. You become that guy or girl they all dread playing against.

A word of advice though. Before you embark on empowering your logical brain, it
might be helpful to list all of the excuses your fear of gambling typically produces for
taking overly tight and passive lines. This will be essential during the first step of the
process, where familiarity is key to spotting the emotional toxins and stopping them in
their tracks. Your poker mind is proud and does not want to act on fear alone,
therefore, it will try to create semi-logical excuses to make tight and passive plays
(pseudo-logic). Do not let these fool you. Your problem solving brain is there the
whole time, telling you the answer, if you can only listen.

Finally, If you find that the barrier of fear is too great and that you are having little
success with logical empowerment, then try the following technique. Let's call it the
ice bath.

Open up a table of your normal stakes and cover the part of the screen where your
cards appear. Then, shove for 100BBs. Seriously, gear yourself up until you feel good
about shoving, then just go for it. Most likely, every one will fold, but it doesn't matter.
The point is that you have broken the taboo of gambling and proven to yourself that
you can invest a whole stack on a wild punt - so of course you can invest 60BB on a
good bluff. You will find that the resistance to gambling is reduced the next time you
face a tough decision in a large pot.

You can repeat this exercise as many times as you feel is necessary. When the habit
sticks and investing big bets without strong hands starts to feel normal, then you are off
and running. Don't even worry about running into a monster and getting stacked. Any
money you lose during the ice bath will be made back and then some after you've
broken your resistance to gambling and started making rational choices in big pots.

5. Wrong Balance

Having a balanced range is often completely unnecessary and overly limiting, but
having a balanced ratio between playing poker, studying poker, and other things in life
is crucial for success. The wrong balance roadblock manifests in a few different
categories of student:

• Those who devote too much of their poker time to putting in hands.
• Those who devote too much of their poker time to studying.
• Those who devote too much overall time to poker.
• Those who do not devote enough overall time to poker.

There are two ways of getting better at poker and each is essential, within moderation.
There is learning by studying (LBS) and then there is learning by doing (LBD). These
methods teach your poker brain in different ways. The studying introduces new ideas
and builds upon the out of game framework, adding to the pool of concepts from which
you will try to pick out the right information in game. Playing poker gives you practice
in picking out the right concepts at the right time and teaches the skill of using the pool
of concepts you have built. If you neglect one or the other of these methods, disaster
ensues.

Students who study too much end up with a huge pool of concepts and a painfully slow
and laboured application system. On the other hand, students who play too much end
up too small of a pool of ideas and fall into a bored trance of doing the same things for
the same half-hearted reasons over and over again. Imagine that studying fills your
pool of poker knowledge with potential thought processes that need to be grabbed from
the archive at the right time to be used effectively. Now imagine that playing poker
gives you more grabbing power to take the right thought process out of the pool at the
right time. The picture looks like this:
In the top figure we see the inner workings of a hopelessly lost poker player who has
watched far too many training videos and read far too many books without playing
enough volume along the way to put things into practice. His poor thought grabbing
power flails around and picks out completely the wrong thought processes at the wrong
times.

The second player is lazy when it comes to study. He has an obsession with forcing
results by putting in volume. In life, the more we work, the more we achieve - this is
where his approach comes from and explains why it feels natural to just play poker in
an attempt to make money. This student is guilty of likening volume with progress
when, in fact, it is high quality volume which leads to success. This player is bored by
his empty network of ideas. He is jaded by making the same choices for the same
simple and dubious reasons. He has no trouble finding a thought process, but it is
always the same autopilot decision. This player misses the essence of what makes one
option more profitable than another.

The third player has perfected the division of study and play. He is continuously
learning enough concepts to fill up his pool of knowledge via studying, but has also
increased his thought process grabbing power by putting in regular practice with new
concepts still fresh in his mind.

Playing the right amount of poker to help ingrain what you are studying also requires
that your sessions are of a reasonably short length. In order to perform at a high
Learning by Doing level(LBD level) we need to be alert and switched on at the tables.
When a session becomes too long, or a week contains too many sessions, our level of
focus drops, and with it, the effectiveness of our learning by doing. Here is an example
of the effect that playing for too long can have on your ability to learn by doing.
Your average session usually starts off with a moderate LBD level, which we shall
refer to as 'practice'. While in practice mode, you are alert and reflective. You take your
time with your actions, ingraining concepts that you already know. Your game,
however, has yet to switch into hyper-drive. Thinking is deliberate and a little clunky
and you are probably playing your B game. As long as the session starts off well, and
there are no roadblocks or misfires dampening your performance, you will soon reach
growth mode when you have warmed up sufficiently.

While in growth mode, your performance is reaching A-game and your ability to
understand and learn from what you are doing at the tables is maximised. While your
LBD level is soaring into the growth category, you will experience the out of game
work you have been doing paying off. Concepts are clicking, not just in a passive
comprehension sort of way, but also in terms of your ability to produce them at the
right time and execute some profitable plays which you might normally miss. While in
this mode, you are becoming a stronger player as you make each decision. Your mind
is giving you positive feedback when you do things well and taking accountability for
mistakes in a curious and emotionally removed way. Growth mode is more than just
strengthening things you already know well; it's learning how to apply less familiar
concepts and turn them into familiar ones. Practice mode might help you engrain your
3-bet ranges, but growth mode helps you explore when to deivatew from them and
form new positive rules about each deviation you make.

Alas, we are finite creatures with poor endurance. Growth mode, sadly is a very
temporary state. This is because the mode is very energy consuming. After around an
hour to an hour and a half, for most players, they start to slump back into practice
mode. Fifteen to twenty minutes after that they fall below their original LBD level and
enter stagnation. In this mode, there is enough thought to barely sustain the level of in-
game know-how you currently possess, but solidifying anything is now tough, let alone
discovering anything new. Too much volume played in stagnation mode leads to, well,
stagnation. If your stagnation mode equates to a profitable game, then playing on in
this mode when the games are good is a reasonable idea. If however, you are in the
early stages of your poker journey, then you are better off prioritising learning over
small profits. This means you should quit your session, or take a day off to recharge if
necessary. Come back when you can perform in growth mode and become a much
stronger player while putting in volume.

If you push it for another half hour or so, or fail to take a day off after a volume packed
week of poker, then you risk descending into decline. In this mode, your game is so
weak, and your mind so lethargic, that you have to actually use simpler thought
processes than those you were comfortable maintaining while in stagnation mode.
When you fail to flex the more advanced muscles in your game, they degrade. To play
for a long time in decline mode is to rely on crutches to get around. When you take
them away, you find that walking is more difficult than you remember. If you need to
adopt lazy, superficial thought processes just to make decisions, then you are better off
recharging the batteries and coming back when you can function at a higher LBD level.

The bottom line here is not only that we want to avoid putting in low quality volume,
but also, to manage our energy levels so that we can play poker when alert enough to
improve by doing. The most efficient sessions are those that both teach us and make us
money. This is how we maximise our long-term EV.

Now on to players who spend too much time and/or energy on poker and suffer the
effects of neglecting the real world.

I shall not say a lot on this topic, only that there are some very clear symptoms that you
suffer from this problem and some equally clear solutions.

The symptoms of this form of the wrong balance roadblock are:

 • Canceling or refusing the vast majority of social plans due to poker goals
seeming more important.
• Sleeping and eating irregularly due to increased poker volume
• Feeling resentful about poker as if you have been in a loveless marriage with the
game for too long.
• Being very irritable and taking things out on those closest to you when poker is
going badly.
• Feeling obsessive compulsions to meet certain volume targets.
• Losing interest in things you once felt passionately about outside of poker.

The way to fix this issue is simple. Just consider the following logical argument.

I play poker only because I think I enjoy it and that it can bring me things that will
make me happy such as money, success, and pride. The way I am currently managing
my poker career is making me unhappy. Therefore, there is no point in playing poker
in this way since it is bringing me the opposite of the only thing I desire from it.

If this sounds like you, then I would advise you to take a week off, at least. Reconnect
with other things in the world that fulfill you and come back to the game when you
have remembered what it feels like to experience motivation and pleasure. Your game
will be much stronger when you return as it is a hundred times easier to do something
well when you are enjoying it and feeling inspired - when you can see how it fits in to
the bigger picture of your own personal journey.

The final way in which students succumb to the lack of balance roadblock is by not
making enough time for the game to meet their goals. There are a few reasons for
which this might happen:

• Your goals are inconsistent with your level of free time. You are
underestimating the impact that work, family life, or other commitments have
on your ability to improve at poker. Solution: Adjust your goals to be more
practical.
• You avoid playing poker due to having had a bad reaction to negative variance
and losing stretches. Solution: See 'Don't Play. Can't Lose'.
• You avoid playing poker because you are more afraid of trying and failing than
you are of not trying. Solution: Accept that if you try and fail, at least you will
be able to devote your full attention to something else instead of wasting time
by flirting with the idea of taking poker seriously.
• You like the idea of poker as a casual interest, but don't enjoy taking it seriously.
Solution: Accept that being a serious poker player is not for you.
In summary, a lack of balance is remedied by understanding how to use poker time the
most efficiently and being honest about which goals are both desirable and achievable,
and which are not.

4. Inability to Cope with High Volume - Gary's Story

Certain events cause my students to suddenly start playing more volume than they are
accustomed to. Life changes such as finishing university, being made redundant,
retiring, turning professional, having a week off work, and many others can be
responsible for this change. Playing more volume than you are used to can expose you
to some new mental-game challenges that can be very difficult to handle. These are:

• Your swings seem more intense due to playing more hands in a short space of
time.
• Your willpower gets tested more than you are used to due to poker being less
diluted by other areas of life.
• Poker feels more consuming and can have a larger impact on your mental health
than normal. It is harder to compartmentalise bad stretches as so much of your
recent time and energy have been used on poker.

From years of coaching, I would estimate that approximately 80-90% of students who
suddenly increase their volume experience significantly worse mental game issues than
they are used to. around 50-60% of players upon ramping up volume will go on the
biggest downswing of their career and 30-40% of players will describe their game
falling apart completely. This can often cause them to give up on the dream of poker
success, either temporarily or permanently. Failure due to unexpected high volume is
an epidemic within the mindset side of the game and it needs to be properly understood
and prepared for. This leads us to the question of how the player can prevent himself
from becoming yet another victim on this long list.

First on our list of causes for volume induced collapse is the intensity of swings. Of
course, nothing happens to the amount of variance in the game when you increase
volume, but your perception of it is altered significantly. For example, it is very
common for a winning player to go on a moderate downswing of 10BI. A 4BB/100
6-max cash game winner (someone who wins a modest but significant rate) will be on
a 10 buy-in downswing or greater 52% of the time. This means that if you take a
snapshot of his earnings graph at 100 random intervals in time, in 52 of those
snapshots, his current earnings will be 10 buy-ins or more below the previous highest
point of the graph. This same player will be on a 20 buy-in downswing or greater a
shocking 28% of the time. This data is based on variance simulation using the average
standard deviation value of an on-line 6-max cash game player.

What does this data mean? That some stretches can be very negative even if you are
normally a steady winner. When a 10 buy-in downswing is spread out across two
weeks, it can be irritating but the student does not generally feel acutely devastated like
he can when such a stretch happens over the course of a day. The player who increases
his volume by seven times his norm will need to be able to accept this intense losing
streak and play close to his best game throughout it. If he fails to hold it together, then
the downswing can become far worse.

Only 13% of the time will a 4BB/100 winner be on a 30 buy-in (BI) downswing or
more, however, in practice, such downswings are far more common due to mental-
game collapse caused by increased volume. Most of these downswings only contain
bad enough luck to be of around 10-20 buy-ins, but the student literally doubles the
intensity of his losing stretch through trying to chase his losses and losing control of
his normally trusted decision-making framework.

Take the example of my student Gary. Gary had just finished up with university and
was planning on playing poker and traveling for a year. He had proven himself as a
5BB/100 winner at 100NL (blinds $0.50/$1,00). This win-rate was achieved over his
last couple of years playing part time while studying mathematics. During this time,
Gary's volume was manageable. The pressures of poker were conveniently diluted by
university; and there were other things in life that were more important than how Gary
was running at the felt that week.

With a 5BB/100 win-rate, Gary had just a 0.74% chance of having a 50 buy-in
downswing, but Gary lost $6,000 (60 buy-ins) that summer. During our final coaching
session just before his final exams, we agreed that he would be very unlikely to have
any major problems in his plan to fund a gap year via poker, but he fell apart. Gary ran
bad initially. He started off on a genuine downswing of 20BIs - something that is
supposed to happen to him 19% of the time. Unlucky - but not impossible, and by no
means fatal. The other 40BIs Gary lost were not caused by running bad. While Gary
ran far more bad than good that summer; had he been able to play his normal game, he
would most likely have broken even or netted a disappointingly small profit. This is a
poor result for a proven 5BB/100 winner, but it is a lot better than busting your
bankroll and giving up poker.

When Gary returned to poker months later, I asked him what happened from his point
of view. He described his game as falling apart. Every pot, he told me, became about
winning and getting his bankroll back, not about logical decision-making. It is easy to
see how such a strong and promising player crumbled. Those first 10,000 hands, where
Gary downswung 20BIs, would normally have occurred over a week or two but they
happened in just three days. Gary was so rattled by this intense feeling of losing that he
lost touch with his normal mode of thinking about poker.

Not only did his expected win-rate drop significantly at this point, but he began to hate
the game. This led to anger, which as we saw earlier in this chapter, is the brain's way
of trying to morph from the helpless victim into the fearsome warrior. Gary became a
warrior alright, but it was only his own prospects that got slain.

While in university, Gary would have put the laptop down and studied for his next
maths exam or made a start on his homework assignment for the week. He refused to
take a break from poker that summer. Why? Because he thought that his 5BB/100
winning game was permanent and invincible - it was not. Gary could have reset after
that downswing by taking a few days off from playing; putting in some studying;
reassuring himself that his play had been mostly solid throughout his 20 buy-in losing
stretch and then come back with the confidence of a wider perspective. Instead, he
plunged further down the rabbit hole of self-pity and anger.

The reaction of the poker player at times like these reminds me of myself as a child.
When something went wrong, I would tantrum and ruin a perfectly good day due to
one minor inconvenience. I recall getting bought a box of brand new computer games
for my Atari ST (google it, kids). The first of these that I tried looked great and I got
excited about how much fun I would have playing it. My Dad was also intrigued by the
new games he'd acquired for me and eagerly watched as I went through the initial two
or three levels. When we were really getting into the game, it crashed, and the familiar
1994 Atari ST crash screen appeared. Three blue bombs materialised at the side of the
screen.

Not only was it cheap to get a replacement disk of this game, but I also had another
thirty or so new games to try out that morning. My reaction? Storm upstairs in tears
and refuse to play any more computer games until hours later. I ruined a perfectly
magical childhood morning because of one minor negative event.

This is what poker players do all the time when they have a bad stretch. They lose sight
of the bigger picture and fail to appreciate that their overall win-rate is far better than it
has been that morning. Instead of making the most out of it, they ruin the rest of it too.
The chief thought being something to the effect of:
'Well, everything's terrible now any way, so what does it matter?'

Why was Gary unable to resist the lure of a reaction he had largely resisted throughout
his career so far? Willpower - the downswing had sapped it all away. Willpower is like
a mental muscle. Numerous psychological experiments have shown that willpower is
more of a finite resource than a program that can be turned on and of on demand. Gary
had spent all of his willpower playing an okay standard of poker while losing 12, 14,
16 buy-ins. By the time he had lost the twentieth, there was no willpower left and his
game collapsed.

Higher volume will do that to you regardless of whether you are on a downswing. Gary
was playing far more sessions every day and exhausting his decision-making brain. It
took large amounts of willpower just to function at normal capacity. If Gary had ran
well at the start of that summer, there is every chance his game would still have
collapsed when even a small downswing like 10 to 12 buy-ins came around. He would
have been too depleted to keep it together.

Until we are very experienced, we need to recharge our willpower on a regular

basis in order to stand a chance against the storms of variance.

The third reason for Gary's demise was that he let poker envelope him. University
finishing up had a greater impact his life than just subjecting him to more intense
feeling variance. Gary saw much less of his university friends, got out of the house
less; and with finals having just released their grip on his life; there was no higher
importance for which to prioritise his own well-being. Such freedom can often lead to
self-neglect especially for players who have always had jobs, exams, and marriages to
look after. For such players, finding themselves alone with poker can be world-
shattering whenever poker goes wrong - and it will. Since poker had become
everything to Gary, he had lost everything with it going badly. The computer game
crashed so Gary destroyed the rest of the box by spewing away 40 extra buy-ins from
the 20 that variance had borrowed temporarily and was fully willing to return over the
next month or two.

The recipe to dealing with suddenly ramping up your volume then is a simple one:

• Take very regular breaks to dilute the more intense feeling variance and
gradually decrease these as you become stronger.
• Fit in relaxation and leisure time to rebuild your stock of willpower
• Do not give poker all of your time and energy lest it will suck the life out of
you. Balance poker with socialising with friends or family. Have other hobbies
 that you can turn to for mental stimulation when you need a break from poker.
Finally, eat well, exercise and do all of that good stuff that lies out with the
scope of this book due to it being covered at great length already elsewhere.

The figure over the page compares Gary's tragic experience to what would have
happened had I known all of this when I was coaching him, and had I been able to
make him aware of the perils that lay ahead. Don't make the same mistake.
3. Gambling Addiction and Results Obsession

This roadblock does not necessarily refer to a severe problem that leads to financial
ruin. I am not writing this section just for those who would be better off in a problem
gambler's help group than at the poker table. Before we go any further, I shall define
these two terms.

• Gambling Addiction: A recurring emotional bias towards taking extra

unprofitable financial risks on or off the poker table as a result of what happens
at the poker table.
• Results Obsession: Caring so much about short-term results at the poker table
that it is difficult to focus on decision-making.

We could all benefit from reducing our level of emotional interference caused by an
unhealthy way of reacting to the gambling element of poker. The player who suffers
from this roadblock does not need to be emotionally affected by the real life monetary
value of his wins and losses. Small stakes players can be addicted to gambling small
amounts of money which serve as progress tokens. In this light, ten buy-ins for 25NL
is not just $250 but 1000 BBs and 1000 tokens of the player's time and effort in poker.
A token that is worth 10 cents, can, emotionally speaking, be worth a lot more than a
dollar.

Gambling addiction is a spectrum which ranges from having almost no emotional

reaction to winning or losing money to losing control of your own mental state and
behaviour entirely. The hardened high-stakes battler is at one end of the spectrum and
the guy who has lost his job and family through gambling is on the other. You are
almost certainly somewhere in between. Gambling addiction becomes a roadblock
when the changes in your emotional state and your behaviour due to winning or losing
money at poker severely impede your ability to translate skill into success and/or to
function normally outside of the game.

If we break it down, a gambling addiction in poker is an obsession with the results of a

hand, session, or stretch, usually accompanied by emotional shifts.

Players who suffer from the gambling addiction roadblock might experience some or
all of the following symptoms:

• Playing very long sessions in an attempt to chase losses.

• Playing very short session due to feeling severely damaged by losing just one
 big pot.
• Playing when drunk or otherwise intoxicated to chase excitement.
• Moving up in stakes beyond their ability level to chase losses or excitement.
• Moving down to stakes below their ability in an attempt experience less anguish
during bad stretches.
• Checking their bankroll and graph mid-session.
• Experiencing strong feelings of arousal during big pots. Shaking, palpitations,
and sweating are evidence that your body is reacting too much to winning and
losing.
• Feeling like poker results are strongly impacting your mood and relationships
outside of the game.
• Experiencing depression and anxiety when things are not going well in poker.
• Experiencing jubilation and immense pride when running good. This is
evidence that variance controls the player's self-worth, at least when it comes to
poker.
• Thinking of poker primarily in terms of bankroll and money won or lost,
thereby neglecting the strategic side of the game.
• Feeling like they have to play poker or gamble in some other way.
• Turning to other forms of gambling when poker goes badly.

The recommended steps for overcoming the gambling addiction roadblock depend on
the level of problem you have. Take a look at the following scale and try to decide
which box on the spectrum of gambling addiction you might fall into. Be honest here.
There is no more shame in suffering from this roadblock as there is in any other
roadblock or misfire dealt with in this book. Even if your symptoms are mild, it might
still be worth working to move closer to the top of the chart below. The further up you
can get, the better your chances of poker success.

The right hand column is my estimate from many years of teaching hundreds of
students what percentage of them fall into each category.
If you placed yourself nearer the top of the spectrum, you were perhaps surprised as to
how lucky you are not to suffer from this roadblock in a major way. If you were further
down the spectrum, it may have consoled you to learn that more players than you
might think suffer from the gambling addiction roadblock. Feeling some addiction to
gambling is human nature, and poker players typically have quite addictive
personalities. You might also consider yourself between levels or find that your level
on the spectrum fluctuates from time to time. That's normal too - our mindsets are not
static. External circumstances can easily affect how prone you are to feeling attached
to poker money. We are now going to look at some recommendations for improving
your current level of gambling addiction in poker.

Level 0: Please share your secrets with me.

Level 1: You may never get to level 0, but improvement is still possible. The first thing
you can do is set a rule where you never check results apart from designated times such
as every Friday or twice a month. This will help you to further disassociate winning
from success and losing from failure. If winning and losing are not perceived as
succeeding and failing then, it is quite unnatural to feel emotionally attached to results.
Set strict session lengths in order to work on resisting urges to force a winning session
by playing on. Around 50 minutes is about right for ensuring maximum focus. Take a
15 minute break and come back to the tables with your focus and willpower recharged.

Level 2: Do everything described above for level 1, but also try keeping a mental-
game poker journal where you document how you felt when having a losing session.
Try to rationalise why losing money makes you feel the way it does and ask whether
this is a correct interpretation or one that needs rewired in the style of this book. Since
your main form of emotional interference is one that causes changes in your play, look
out for the telltale signs that you are reacting to losing. What types of plays do you
consider when emotionally riled up that you wouldn't normally? How do these plays
attempt to force wins or prevent losses? Why are they irrational? How can you become
very familiar with their onset so that you can interrupt the culprit thought processes
and replace them with the correct view of the spot?

Level 3: Do everything described above. In addition to this, you will need a break
system, where you stop playing poker when the impulses to spew money, chase losses,
or obsess over results become too strong. After a bad session, give yourself at least half
an hour and do not come back to the tables until you have reestablished your
equilibrium. Quit losing sessions when you feel your game has reached an
unacceptable standard. Your task off the tables is to nurture the part of your mind that
sees losing as an inevitable meaningless fluctuation in variance and ignore the part of
your mind which sees losing as a problem that must be fixed. This view of losing as an
unacceptable circumstance is what causes you to monitor results so closely and
become upset for a while after bad sessions. In your mental game diary, rate your level
of mental game and play while running normally or good (out of 10), and then have a
separate column for when you are running bad. Your goal for the foreseeable future is
not to have winning sessions but to score higher and higher numbers in this new
column. This will provide the positive reinforcement necessary for changing your
attachment to results.

Level 4: As above, but now a few more steps are necessary. When poker starts to
impact your mood and how you interact with those closest to you, it is time to take a
longer break to reset. One or two days away from the game should help. In this time, it
is important to unwind and focus on other things. The most important thing to ensure
here, as you work on treating your various results-based misfires, is that your anguish
about poker does not boil over and create a more permanent stain on your mental
game. Do not feed the part of your mind that wants to wallow in bad results, chase
losses, or use bad variance as an outlet for frustration. Instead, interrupt this behaviour
as often as possible and replace it with the real evaluation of what bad variance is.
Visualise in advance how you will go about resisting the urge to move up in stakes or
chase losses. Mentally rehearse closing the poker client down and walking away from
the computer in these cases so that the defense mechanism is loaded and ready to go
when these impulses occur. Try to find someone to talk to about the way poker makes
you feel, or failing that, write down in detail how your mind is working in times of
losing. Since your tendency to chase losses and lose control is a way of venting, find a
replacement method for getting the frustration off your chest. To succeed in poker, we
cannot vent via the game itself.

Level 5: Again, the above steps will all help, but they are not a strong enough
medicine for this level of affliction. Your poker bankroll must be considered
completely separate to real life money. To achieve this, you will need to avoid playing
any higher than one limit above the highest stake where you have ever had a long-term
proven win-rate. If you have beaten 10NL but never 25NL, then you can never play
50NL or higher again until results at 25NL show that it is feasible. In order to have a
large enough bankroll that you consider completely separate to real life funds, it might
be necessary to deposit something like 100 buy-ins for a cash game stake and never
look at the cashier again. If you are playing within the means of your skill, then you
should never have to worry about losing this money. It is mandatory that you start to
view poker as completely separate to any of the other forms of gambling to which it
can sometimes lead. If you find that you cannot stop these other forms of gambling and
that they are a problem then you should quit poker until you have fixed this issue. As
long as poker is tarred with the brush of impulse gambling, progress will literally be
impossible. There is no shame in quitting the game and all other gambling for a while
in order to come back and give poker a fresh start so that you can learn to treat it as a
game of skill.

Level 6: Unfortunately, this level of problem lies out with the expertise of this book. I
strongly recommend that you quit poker, at least for now. None of the material in any
mental game book nor technical game book will help you until you have resolved this
deep underlying problem. I would recommend speaking to a therapist who specialises
in addiction. If you are determined to become a poker player despite this issue, then
separate life into two phases. Firstly, treating your generalised gambling problem and
then learning poker once you have done that. You might find in treating your gambling
issue, that you are happier without any form of gambling in your life. It might be that
the highest EV move is to quit the game forever, and this does not need to be a
negative thing. For a few of the students I've worked with over the years, poker was a
futile and destructive influence on their lives - I gave them the same advice.

2. Lack of Grit

It is not uncommon for a student to book a block of ten sessions with me, show up for
two, and then quit poker due to going on a downswing. This guy never had a chance in
the first place.

Grit is the ability to keep going when things get tough - to find motivation when the
tank is empty. Gritty poker players are consistent. They continue hammering away at
the same point in the wall until they break through. They do not give up and find a
different part of wall to start hammering just because they're bored or frustrated. This
means that when they find an approach that works for them; one which accelerates
progress; they put all of their energy into that approach and refuse to change course
just because of bad short-term results, or a lack of enthusiasm when they first wake up
in the morning. Grit is not just having the passion and dedication to fight through the
bad times; but to do so in the same consistently effective way, without succumbing to
the urge to change the scene like the fickle player does.

Grit is a major asset in any endeavor, but in poker it is absolutely mandatory. Few
pursuits will frustrate or demoralise you quite like poker will. Grit is necessary in
poker to overcome the following inevitable challenges:

• Sustained periods of bad luck that repeatedly punish you for making good
choices.
• A highly competitive environment where players are becoming tougher and
tougher every day.
• Extreme complexity that will cause one step back for every two steps forwards
while learning.
• The fragility of your game and its tendency to fall apart whenever your mental-
game takes a beating.

The naturally gritty player has little to worry about - as long as he is not inhibited by
another roadblock, he is sure to make progress. For most of us, however, grit is
something that must be nurtured and developed as we grow as players. But why do
most of my students lack the requisite grit for success? The figure below breaks the
notion of grit down into its constituent parts. Players who lack grit lack one or more of
its key ingredients.

Inspiration is the raw fuel which powers the entire grit engine. It usually comes from
external sources, initially, such as watching the video of a successful professional. The
idea of poker success energises you because it promises freedom, extra income, the
satisfaction of conquering opponents, self-worth, or whatever keeps you coming back
to the tables.

From the emotionally charged desire of inspiration comes motivation. The difference
between inspiration and motivation is that while the former plants the seeds of what
could be one day, the latter is the drive to to put your energy, time, and resources into
achieving it. Players who hire a coach or join a training site have gone beyond the
dreaming stage and are practically taking steps to pursue those ambitions. We can have
the inspiration to write a book, without ever having the motivation to do it. While these
two things are separate, they are intrinsically linked.

Once you have motivation, you have willpower, the essential prerequisite for discipline
- the practice of setting quotas and boundaries for yourself and functioning within
them. In order to satisfy self imposed standards, you have to feel like those standards
are worth conforming to. Motivation handles this part of the grit engine. The willpower
that comes from it is used to keep you from straying off track once you have defined
the parameters for your effort. If motivation is the shooting of a gun, discipline is there
to guide the bullet on the right course.

Discipline is as finite as motivation and willpower. Once these three attributes start to
wain, the drive to continue diminishes. Discipline provides the structure necessary for
setting clear and achievable goals. Some of these should simply be short-term goals
such as: study blind vs. blind play on low flops tomorrow. Others will be more
medium-term goals such as: try to play 50,000 hands this month. Some will be long-
term goals such as move up to the 100NL Zoom games on PokerStars. The short-term
goals keep you moving in the right direction and provide you with the direction in
which to distribute your motivation. Since inspiration is like a quick injection of hope
and determination, it needs to be recharged and the best way to do this is by setting
your own goals and smashing them out of the park.

It is now clear why most poker players lack grit:

Some players have not recharged their inspiration because they have no suitable goals
to achieve. Their long-term goals are not yet fulfilled and so effort seems fruitless.
There is too big of a disconnect between their end goals and where they are now. These
players need to use their next wave of inspiration to generate the motivation and
discipline to create short-term and mid-term goals to keep the engine of grit ticking
over. Without these, the bad times will wipe out motivation and there will be no source
from which to recharge it.

Other players have good goals, but have lost sight of the ideas that once inspired them
to work at them. Players like this need to find a new source of external inspiration with
which to keep the engine going. No goal is worth working for unless the finish line
promises something worthwhile.

For some, motivation is the broken link. Inspiration is there, but a lethargy stops it
from turning into motivation. Usually there is something holding these players back
such as a fear failure or a fear of devoting themselves to a cause. It might be another
roadblock or misfire that holds them back such as a fear of gambling or a lack of
confidence. Everything in the mental game is linked.

Then, there are players who cannot translate their motivation into discipline. These
players are often people who have never learned how to self-police. These players have
learned that they are allowed to do whatever they want; and may well have lacked
clear boundaries as children. They are driven and they want success, but they want it to
fall into their lap. This sort of student struggles to take criticism and believes his own
methods are more likely to succeed than those recommended by his coach. This player
needs to practice self-control and willpower, which are mental muscles that can be
strengthened. Believe me - I used to be this guy and now I can just about motivate
myself to work from home all day without slacking off! This was far from the case a
few years ago.

Finally, there are players who have discipline but set unrealistic, overly-harsh, or
overly-vague goals. Such goals can be as bad as having no goals at all. And so we
reach the beginning of the cycle again. Inspiration now starts lacking. The player then
runs out of motivation and gives up.

By asking yourself which step is missing in the engine of grit, it is possible to diagnose
which area you need to work on and build your grit by repairing the broken link or
links in the chain. Finally, here is how poker's testing nature can break the grit engine
in various places.

• Terrible variance or terrible play can destroy motivation which leads to

discipline failing and the player giving up. Inspiring goals are needed in the first
place to generate inspiration even through hard times. Never losing sight of
where your original motivation came from is also a great way to keep supplies
high when motivation and willpower are dwindling.
• The complexity of the game can cause your discipline to translate into the
wrong goal-setting. Students who resolve to solve 200 different flops in a week
when they barely understand the factors that govern the EV of common
situations are a prime example of this misguided determination. The result is
inspiration and motivation running dry before the student stumbles upon a better
use of discipline.
• The toughness of the games can cause a decline in inspiration itself since the
end goal seems almost impossible during the early stages of a player's career.
Most give up before they see that it was attainable all along.

Players who have overcome the first eight roadblocks often fail due to a lack of grit,
even though it is one of the easier things to fix once you understand what propels the
engine. Sadly, grit alone and the best intentions are often not enough. Our final
roadblock is the most likely one to get you and the hardest to overcome.

1. Insufficient Logic

One major part of learning poker is understanding the logical ingredients; the other is
putting them together in the right order at the right time. It is this second part that
stifles the progress of many a promising beginner. No one likes to admit that they are
not logical enough to be meeting their poker goals, but for many, this is the reality.
Awareness of logical deficiency is typically very low because logical skill is the very
thing you need to diagnose illogical blunders in your thought process. This is why in
coaching we focus more on the culprit thoughts that led to mistakes than on the actions
themselves.

The insufficient logic roadblock manifests in the following ways:

• Putting too much weight on a small factor that has relatively little influence on
the overall EV of an option.
• Ignoring a very crucial factor, which the student knows about, but fails to bring
into play in his analysis.
• Asserting two contradictory things at the same time.
• Being in completely the wrong mode of thinking for the needs of the situation

Let's take a common example of each of these situations and learn what steps can be
taken to improve the logical faculty.

The student who assigns too much weight to irrelevant ideas fits into two categories.
Firstly, there are players who feel strong attitudes towards options due to how taking
an action can sometimes cause them to feel on the next decision point. For example, a
student who bitterly hates getting raised is liable to make all kinds of checking
mistakes due to his irrational desire to avoid rare branches where raises occur, at the
expense of ignoring more central ones where they don't.

Let's say that Hero c-bets the flop and reaches the turn with a good semi-bluffing hand
such as two overcards and a gutshot straight draw. The turn is an overcard to a low
board and Villain is a straightforward tight player. Bluffing the turn here based solely
on this general outline of the spot is likely to be very profitable but Hero reasons:
'I would never bluff the turn here because getting raised would blow me off my
equity. I'd rather realise my equity and take a free card.'

Poker is not about what your emotional brain and attitude forming brain would rather
do. It is about which play will net you the most money on average. In giving such
crushingly heavy weight to the factor of 'getting raised is bad', the student is
erroneously prioritising the spot. His tunnel vision sees only a fairly insignificant
factor because that is the one which has generated the greatest emotional impact in the
past. See Figure 8 - Strong Rule Formation.

The second type of biased reasoner favours factors with which he is comfortable and
familiar. These factors become his pet thought processes, running almost on auto-pilot.
This feels good because it takes much of the strain out of the decision-making process.

• 'Why did you bet the turn here?'

• '...To represent the Queen'.
• 'Why did you raise the flop?'
• '...To represent the flush'.
• 'Why did you 4-bet against this weaker player?'
• '...To represent a premium hand'.

If you have a little poker experience, and a reasonable logical faculty, it will be quite
clear to you that the 'represent the X' thought process is extremely logically deficient.
The student has accidentally given up on logic due to the sense of cognitive ease
brought by his pet thought of 'represent the X'. In reality, representing something is
nothing more than acting in a way that you think is consistent with how you or the
general pool might play a certain type of hand. The logical absurdity of this sort of
reasoning can be exposed as follows. Take this spot against an unknown opponent, for
example:

• I am going to bet bit to represent the king. It is far more in my range than in his.
• I am going to bet big to represent a bluff. The king is a card I could bluff lots.

The same student uses each of these thoughts to justify his actions when holding, in the
first case, a bluff, and in the second, a strong hand. His argument is that as long as his
line is consistent with the other type of hand he could have that his opponent will have
to frequently do what he wants him to do - fold in the first case - and call in the second.
Since it cannot be simultaneously true that Villain will both usually fold and usually
call Hero's bet, the 'represent the' thoughts cannot possibly be sufficient for predicting
Villain's likely reactions. If these thoughts are useless in indicating how Villain will
react to Hero's bet, then they are in no way relevant to our EV.

But students are constantly neglecting the actual logical assessment that needs to be
done in favour of giving their pet thoughts the stage. It feels natural and easy to do this
much like it is more comfortable to solve 2+7 than it is to find the square root of 6511.
When asked to perform one off these functions, most people are very likely to choose
the first option. We can call this cognitive ease bias.

Look out for the irrational weighting of certain factors due to either emotional
bias or cognitive ease bias.

The next type of pitfall within the roadblock of insufficient logic is the neglect of a
very central factor to the puzzle. If you try to solve 4 + Y without checking to see what
value Y is, you will fail; but students do this constantly in poker because they do not
understand the logical structure of the problem at hand.

For example, let's say that the student is deliberating over whether or not to call a river
check/raise with a strong but not nutted hand from a 10NL Zoom regular. The answer
to this question is a categorical no. I don't need to learn any more details about the
spot. Just fold. Why? Because a fairly strong hand against a river check/raise is a bluff
catcher and the population at these stakes bluffs around 3% of the time in this situation.
In the other 97 showdowns, you will see a hand stronger than yours. This is a proven
fact that we know from empirical observation - so why does the student call?

He calls because of one of the following thought processes:

• I only need to be good 26% of the time and he could have a missed flush draw.
• I am near the top of my range so folding is exploitable.
• I have good blockers to his sets.

All three of these types thought process miss the mark entirely. In the first example, the
student is right about his required equity and also right that it is not impossible for
Villain to be holding a busted draw, but these are insufficient. In the second process,
the student is right about where he is in his own range and also right that folding is
exploitable. But, anything which is exploitable is also exploitative and vice-versa. We
are the ones doing the exploiting here, not villain. The third process is also true but
who cares? Blocking some of Villain's value hands merely gives us a little equity
boost, we are still miles away from our target against the player pool.

The problem with these thought processes are that they are irrelevant. The only thing
that really matters is that our average equity against the population is far less than it
needs to be for calling to break even. The student has ignored the bluffing frequency of
the pool in this spot and when prompted to tell me how often this line is a bluff he will
say: 'almost never' and that is the hand solved. The student went wrong because his
logical faculty was too weak to detect that his reasoning was irrelevant nonsense. Lots
of things are true and might sound convincing, but that does not render them
admissible as evidence for making a decision. Consider the following analogy:

• Should I kill my dog today?

• If I kill my dog today, I will have meat to eat in the event of an apocalypse and I
will not have to spend money on feeding the dog any more.
• Therefore, I should kill my dog today.

This is what happens when we omit the most relevant parts of a puzzle and take actions
based on far less relevant reasons. This is what poker players do all the time because
poker is a less familiar realm where the relative irrelevance of an argument is much
harder to spot without looking deeper. We can see intuitively that saving money on
food costs or preparing for an apocalypse are not sufficient reasons to slaughter a
beloved household pet, but that is only because we are experts in weighing up simple
real life questions. We are not experts in answering simple poker questions, hence why
poor logical awareness sinks so many hard working poker players.

To spot the most relevant factor in a hand of poker we must ask: 'What is most
central to our EV?'. Only then can we avoid being blinded by irrelevant arguments.

Students are often logically neglectful to the point that they end up believing two
incompatible ideas. A common example of this would be the following situation. In
coaching, we are discussing whether or not to overbet the turn. I explain to the student
that it is sensible to use overbets when our range contains far more strong hands than
our opponent's and to balance our over-betting range with value hands and bluffs. The
student protests that he does not want to use over-bets because people are calling
stations. I respond that the population being calling stations would not be a reason to
avoid overbetting, it would merely be a reason to build a value-heavy overbetting
range. The student objects quickly - 'but I don't want to scare him away.'

When spelled out like this, the absurdity is obvious, but the student legitimately
believes that the population is simultaneously going to call too often and fold too often
to an overbet. This happens because the student prioritises the negative outcome in
each case. When he is holding value, it is convenient to believe that Villain will not
call big bets as that justifies his fear of not getting paid for big hands. On the other
hand, when holding air it is convenient to believe that Villain won't fold as that
pseudo-logic helps justify his fear of being caught bluffing.

When obvious logical contradictions are present in a thought process, we usually

find that emotion is secretly running the show in the background, hidden under
the guide of pseudo-logic..

Finally, we come to students who are in completely the wrong mode for logic to even
function. Again there are a few different ways in which this commonly occurs:

• The student is obsessed with a recently learned thought process that should
sometimes be used and is recklessly using it in all situations because it is new
and fun.
• The student is trying to force winning situations or prevent losing ones instead
of trying to maximise EV.
• The student is operating in a lazy mode that is too low-powered to compute
poker logic.

Why do these pitfalls occur and how do we avoid them?

New thought process obsession is an addiction. We are first wooed by a new idea when
we experience that 'aha' moment. During a coaching session or study session, we
encounter a new concept that just seems to make sense. The instructor's explanation
really resonates with us and we can't wait to try the play out at the tables. We might
then receive positive feedback from using the play due to good variance. Remember
that we are very accustomed to judging the success or failure of our actions by their
immediate result. When it comes to poker, this is a dangerous piece of wiring. When
things go wrong, our short-sighted human control check is likely to deem a play bad
(See 'Ouch I Should Never Have'). When things go right, that shiny new play is placed
on a pedestal. We are now more likely to use it again and to use it in a wider array of
circumstances; even unsuitable ones.

It is impossible to function logically when one type of action is instinctively favoured

over the others. Always try to estimate the EV of all feasible lines before settling on
one. If a line jumps out at you very strongly before you have had time to analyse, there
is a very good chance that you are being misled by your own favouritism; particularly
in cases where that line has recently worked out well. See 'I'm a Winner Now' for more
on this.

Moving on, the tendency to try to force winning situations or avoid losing ones at all
costs is usually derived from the instinct of self-preservation during bad variance.
While in this desperate mindset, players avoid logic because it will often be
disharmonious with their desire to win money immediately. Their reaction then is to
instinctively abstain from logical discussion. They might use pseudo-logic to justify
the desire based plays; but make no mistake; emotion is the one running the show. For
some students, the mindset of winning now at all costs becomes habitual and
permanent. In extreme cases it replaces logic as the means for decision-making
entirely. This is why very logical and intelligent people often have highly irrational
thought processes at the poker table.

If you feel a strong desire to win every medium to large pot and frequently find
yourself failing to engage with real logic in game, despite being able to understand and
articulate logical ideas out of game, then this could be why. For these players, it is not
logical capacity that is the problem, but an invasive emotional brain that is hogging all
the processing power. If you suffer from insufficient logic due to this problem then you
have no doubt already been working on misfires such as 'Please Fold, Please Fold' and
'Stay with Me'.

Finally, there are players who could be translating their logical strides out of game into
profits, but aren't because of lazy auto-piloting. Such players describe symptoms such
as suddenly realising they have made the wrong choice and that they didn't even think
about the situation. You might also find that your brain feels sluggish during a session
and that when a big pot occurs, it appears to jolt you out of a daydream. It can be very
difficult to suddenly switch on the thinking brain having made decisions automatically
for the last five minutes. Imagine an old computer trying to boot up for the first time in
years. Autopilot is a state of disengagement. It is simple enough to work out what is
causing this habit and put and end to it. Here are some plausible reasons for which
students get into the habit of switching off during sessions:

• Poker has become boring due to a lack of inspiration and motivation. See 'Lack
of Grit'
• Poker is too confusing. The mind has chosen a flight mechanism in response to
the challenge of decision-making. You need to put more work in while
accepting that many spots need to feel confusing for a long time in order to
make progress. (See Lack of Confidence).
• Poker is too emotionally disturbing when fully engaged. The mind switches off
as a form of protection. The treatment here is to work on why the high variance
of poker causes such discomfort in the first place. (See 'Don't Play Can't Lose).
Here the variant is: 'Don't Try, Can't Fail'.
• Your sessions are too long or you play when you are too tired from external
commitments.
• You don't like poker, but are still infatuated with the idea of being successful at
it. It's time to reassess if this is the game for you.
Final Advice

Poker Therapy is a book that you will need to work through multiple times to get the
full benefit. Instead of shelving this book having read the last page, go back through
and highlight the misfires and roadblocks that most apply to you. Make a treatment
plan using the recommendations given under each of these sections and keep a mental-
game diary as you work through it. Try to document what has been working for you
and what problems still exist in these areas.

Be patient. Rewiring your mind not to run ingrained and useful real life processes at
the poker table is an arduous task. Change will not happen suddenly. Training the
human mind to react appropriately to poker is like teaching a bird not to fly. Progress
in the mental-game side of poker is gradual but massively rewarding.

If working on your mental-game feels tedious or daunting, try to remember that the
incentive is freedom - the freedom from unpleasant and self-damaging mental
programming - the freedom to enjoy the strategic purity of poker without emotional
interference - the freedom to meet your goals, and earn more money than you do today.

The very fact that you have worked your way through this book separates you from the
many poker players who fail due to neglecting their mental game entirely. As your
technical prowess at the poker table grows, the temptation is to cram volume and study
to maximise profits. Leave the mental game unchecked for too long, however, and a
thick rust is bound to develop and come back to haunt you. To keep your mental game
sharp, create your own rewire diagrams for any misfires not covered in this book.

I wish you all the best in your quest to become a ruthless objective decision -maker. As
distant a destination as this may be for the meager human, and, as impossible as it
might be to ever fully conquer the mindset challenges posed by the alien world of
poker; I hope that this book has put you on track to approach this imaginary finish line.

Above all else, be forgiving of yourself as a poker player. Humans were never
designed to excel in such bizarre circumstances as we find on the poker table, but we
can always improve.
About the Author

Peter Clarke is a professional poker player, coach, and author from Glasgow, Scotland.
He has written the highly acclaimed technical poker books: The Grinder's Manual and
100 Hands. He spends his working day coaching aspiring players one-to-one and
producing training material on the game. You can find his most recent instructive video
content on runitonce.com - the leading producer of top quality poker training videos
in 2019. Peter also writes and streams for the school department of PokerStars and you
can find hundreds of his poker articles at pokerstarsschool.com.
You can find out more information about Peter and his various poker training products
as well as private coaching at his website www.carrotcorner.com and can email him
about becoming one of his private students at admin@carrotcorner.com