Being sane in insane places

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 13 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

Poker is a very strange world on the whole. Situations of extreme pressure exist, as are scenarios of near mass hysteria about a situation (such as the bubble on the final table of a major tournament), and situations where people seem to behave in very odd and compulsive ways (such as when tilting hard), where most people's rationality seems to be replaced by a kind of madness.

If anything, the player who will truly win the most in the long run is the player who can stay the most sane when playing the game. Although how you play hands is critical to success, your skill at the mechanics of poker is largely irrelevant if you go nuts and spew of your bankroll or throw away the chance to make big scores in tournaments.

The late, great Chip Reese, once talked about how bankrolls that had taken players years to build could be blown in a matter of hours if the player lost it mentally, and that his main skill was simply staying calm and composed all the time - a feat which would win him the money in the long run even against players technically more adept at the game, simply because they would blow up every now and then and drop all of their previous profits plus interest in one night of madness.

Poker can be a particularly brutal game, frequently doling out some of the cruellest beats and unfair scenarios of any game on earth. The psychological trauma of this is not to be underestimated, and being able to stay sane when everyone else seems to be losing their head is arguably the single most important aspect of winning poker. In scenarios of extreme stress (and this point is just the same in a whole range of situations - from warfare to mountaineering to pro sports), the long term winners are nearly always those who keep their head when everyone around them is losing theirs.

Not falling for the irrational aspects of poker, such as protecting wins, chasing losses, becoming defeatist or fatalistic, not attacking bubbles as hard as you can, or simply just playing in games where you know you have little or no edge, will make more difference to your bottom line at the end of the year than anything else. Staying sane in insane situations is very hard, but if achieved huge rewards are on offer to anyone who can keep their head just that little bit longer than their opponent.

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