Controlling Emotions

Being a successful poker player is all about being in control.


Controlling your emotions is a vital part of poker, to ensure you make good decisions and avoid going 'on tilt'.

But it's not just 'bad beats' that can send you spiraling out of control; there are many little things that can increase your stress levels and turn your normally calm demeanor into an angry one. And as you've probably already noticed, an aggravated poker player is normally a losing poker player.
If you want to be a consistent winner, then, it's essential to keep your emotions under control.
When you get angry a physiological change takes place in your body. The moment your Aces are beaten by J-5 offsuit, your stress levels soar; your heart rate and blood pressure both increase rapidly as your body becomes infused with a cocktail of chemicals such as adrenaline and noradrenalin.
While this has been great for us as an evolutionary race, in modern society there are no woolly mammoths to flee, or sabre-tooth tigers to fight and hurling yourself across the table isn't generally accepted. So to prevent long-term harmful physiological effects and short-term impaired decision-making, we need to know how to calm ourselves down quickly.
The ideal way to keep your emotions in check is to stop yourself from getting overly stressed in the first place.

Socrates said that to succeed in life you need to 'know yourself'.
Another key way of retaining emotional control is to recognize the 'triggers' that set your emotions off in the first place. In the case of poker players, it is usually a bad beat that does the trick. However, other common 'triggers' to look out for are certain types of behavior from your opponents, including things like slow speed of play, excessive (and offensive) speech, and poor play (either your own, or other players' at your expense).
By recognizing and identifying the presence of your triggers, you're giving yourself the chance to proactively deal with the ensuing stress.