I searched around these forums for info on this but I couldn't find much. Please delete/move if inappropriate.

I have been working on my mental game a lot this year. Trying to stop being a "mental fish" as it was described in "Mental Game of Poker." I think I have made a lot of progress and I am enthusiastic about moving forward and improving even more.

In Mental Game of Poker, Tendler said something about saying "one time" and crap like that can be a sign that you are a mental fish or whatever. I only do crap like that jokingly when I do something horrendous and I am in bad shape lol.

Something that I do actually partake in is some mild pre-gaming superstitions.

(a) if I am in the midst of a hot streak I have started this habit of making modest charitable contributions before starting one of my long weekend sessions. It makes me feel like I deserve the run-good.

(b) when I am in the midst of a downswing, minor or major, I usually buy a new article of clothing or accesory and I don't wear it until I am going to start my session. Usually it is just a hat, a sweatshirt or a pair of sneakers.

I don't see either of these things as inherently negative. Giving money to charity makes me feel good regardless and it is a good thing. I am not giving so much that it is putting me in a bad position or anything like that. As far as the new gear goes, also not a bad thing, spending a few bucks on stuff that I will use anyway.

However, my question is if this is a symptom of some deeper problem that indicates that I am totally hung up on luck and chance as opposed to focusing on my actual game and developing my skills. It might be harmless, and if it is, fine, but everything in my game is open to deep examination and I am hoping to hear some feedback (and any superstitions that other people might have).

Moved from poker theory

Duh, thanks!

Would you consider yourself to have a more internal or external locus of control.

By this I mean do you believe that your success in life, not just related to poker is more controlled by destiny and fate, or the actions you take on a day to day basis ?

For example, would you avoid obesity by hoping that God hasnt chose you to be a fatty, or by watching what you eat each and every day?

I feel that both of these opinions are considered "normal", however especially for the context of poker it is much more conductive to have an internal locus of control. This is because you believe that your success or failure is a direct result of the effort and skill that you have, rather than forces that you cannot control.
This makes it much more difficult to make an excuse for your poor results for example.

I'm not really sure if this is too relevant or helpful, but I'm studying this at the moment and I thought it was interesting!

Sounds interesting, can you recommend any books/websites?

Right on. I am studying similar things right now and that is why I am examining this. I really believe that I am at a place right now where I am trying to focus on playing well and developing my skills. I think that these habits are remnants of the past when I felt more tied up to the external locus of control of luck and injustice of the universe (I sort of used to believe that God didn't want me to play poker and that is why I ran bad, now I realize I used to play bad lol).

I really feel like I am at that zen place lately where I really feel like I can play my best, make good decisions and be pretty damn ok with the results no matter what happens (fortunately I have been running hot in 2012 so I haven't had to test this theory too much).

I am asking because I feel like this is a pretty harmless little ritual. I want to know if people feel like it really has a real negative impact on the way I approach the game. I feel I do those little things because they are comfortable and even a little bit fun. Anybody else have rituals?

luck is a very fascinating subject, a good book is The Luck Factor by richard wiseman, he is a college professor he states there is no luck good or bad he goes on to explain why some people are concede to be lucky or unlucky. now for my self my practical side agrees with him my other side believes luck exist but no one can prove luck good or bad exist or how it works. i use to play craps . some days i could not miss other days if i bet both dies would stay on the table one would jump off. i would look at the shooter if he looked like a loser i would bet against him. if he looked or acted lucky i would bet with him. i played craps about 10 years & keep records of my win/ lose after 10 years i was up about $700 i think that was good because the house has the advantage.
texas holdem also is a game of chance , the better players have a better chance than someone who dosen''t understand the game but it is still a game of chance sit down in a game 1 or 2 will have most of the money so are they lucky or is the chair lucky if the best cards find this spot?

In a vacuum, and as a good default, superstitions are bad because they create conscious biases. However, your superstitions seem mostly rational, and good for a positive influence on your literal psyche. (a) Even though being charitable to obtain super powers is "silly", it still should have a positive effect on your subconscious state ie- the act of doing good is spiritually cleansing [obviously]. (b) The healthy motivation is obvious.

I don't believe these are symptomatic of a bigger problem so long as you aren't altering in-game decisions based on whether you are on a hot streak or downswing. The problem areas -- and for these types of people specifically it is very hard to change -- are when you start exhibiting tendencies of the gambling addicts you have frequented; playing poorly because something "divine" is telling you to. I have a feeling this isn't an issue.

Good subject and replies, imo. The locus of control question gets right at part of it, as does are you letting decisions be influenced by any superstitious factors. I love that coverage.

Jack Nicklaus long carried a buckeye for good luck, Tiger Woods wore red on Sunday as his power/good luck color, John Wooden rolled up a program in his hand and was a nervous wreck without it. In none of these cases, and millions of others, were they neglecting training/preparation, and actually relying on luck or superstition to win. It was a fanciful vestige of magical thinking, a remnant from part of the psyche, usually much younger, carried on as habit, quite separate from their global "CEO of consciousness" functioning that they knew was producing their results. Human beings have countless little compartments to cater to. If it gets like Wade Boggs where he had like dozens of pregame rituals he had to do exactly the same at the same time or become very anxious, then it's a compulsive neurosis. If it gets to where the superstitions are raging and having to be serviced to avoid anxiety or to "assure" luck, that's different.

I had some of these ideas when I played. It's just a little game with yourself, but somewhat striking as to the overly "rational" that take any such inclination as totally "irrational." It's no such thing (necessarily).

You be good to go. CEO in charge.

Hi Brow2821:

It means that your understanding of how the short term luck factor works in poker needs a lot of improvement. Specifically you need to understand that over time the effect of the short term luck factor will dissipate and that the best predictor of your future results are your past results, and this is probably something that you don't want to address. So to distract yourself from what is really important, and that is to improve your understanding of all things poker (which also includes strategy as well as the idea that those things like poker which are based on probability theory can be counter-intuitive to many people) you're concerned about being a mental fish. Thus you have come up with a distraction above and have made this distraction (in your own mind) more important than maximizing your expectation which is something that many marginal poker players do.

As for being a "mental fish," that's garbage and the reason it's garbage is that it implies there is an easy way out to fix your dilemma. By the way, I bet if you would have spent the past year working on improving your understanding of all things poker, your mental game would have greatly improved and you wouldn't be concerned with this mental fish nonsense.

Best wishes,
Mason

Hi Synchronic:

You're describing things that these people have done to help them reduce stress. And in an athletic sport things that can reduce stress, even if they appear silly, can be helpful when it comes to speed, timing, and coordination. But poker, not being an athletic sport, is mainly a knowledge game where things like speed, timing, and coordination is, in my opinion, not very important.

Let me put this another way. Suppose you're a top baseball player, reducing stress will probably help you to hit a baseball better. But it should have no impact on your knowledge of how to hit the baseball. However in poker, this execution component is not there (or at least not there in the same degree).

Best wishes,
Mason

Hi TrustyRombone:

My response to you is similar to my other two posts.

For a superstition to hurt you when playing poker it would mean that some of the hands you play would now be played differently and this new way of playing would be inferior to before. So does that happen?

In an athletic sport, if your answer was yes I could buy that because the superstition could take away from the execution component by increasing stress, by distracting you, or perhaps reducing your confidence to perform at your best. Thus things like speed, timing, and coordination might deteriorate. But your knowledge of how to play the game would be the same.

But poker is mainly a knowledge game. So how can superstition hurt you here? Well, to give a silly example, suppose you have the superstition that you can't make a flush on Tuesday. If this means that you'll now throw good flush draws away on Tuesday, your overall expectation will go down and poker is a game of maximizing your expectation. But if your knowledge of strategy and probability theory is strong, this won't happen.

Best wishes,
Mason

Listen to Mason, imo. That said I don't think that superstitions, by themselves, are harmful as long as a person realizes that they are superstitions and don't let them affect their play. I won't relate my personal superstition bec it's so ridiculous but, while I'm doing it, I'm thinking 'this is the dumbest thing ever' and I've always dumped the idea that I've done it by the time I get to the table.

Can you cite research to support this statement?

Professional athletes are notoriously superstitious. It's not something psychologists work to change (unless it has a scientific basis for being maladaptive to performance) and in many cases a psychologist will work with an athlete to create pre-performance routines, which could also be defined as "superstition".

Hi Elrazor:

Yours is an interesting post. I assume and believe that these pre-performance routines, if done correctly, will help an athlete with speed, timing, and coordination, and that's why they're done. I also believe that the current crop of poker psychologists -- Cardner, Tendler, and Roe -- also advocate stuff like this and my guess is that it will help a poker player with speed, timing, and coordination. But then again, poker is mainly a knowledge game so in my opinion this stuff is fairly worthless for poker.

Best wishes,
Mason

Are you saying that reducing stress and improving mood will NOT improve one's attention, memory, ability to synthesize inputs and prior knowledge, and decision making? How well you play poker in any given session is not determined solely by the knowledge you possess.

Let's see some verification that talismans have helped anybody with speed, timing or coordination. Harmless superstition is simply indulging magical thinking pockets of consciousness as an expression of being human, like whistling in the dark or something. In compulsive instances, it rises to the level of an anti-anxiety device instead of a funsy indulgence (separate from one's actual strategy for winning).

Two of the most potent saboteurs of thought are stress and anxiety. They are destroyers of cognition and perception. So if any of these superstition ploys actually decrease anxiety, that would serve to improve thinking at the table, at least more feasibly than they would make somebody faster or more coordinated. There's a difference between knowledge and thinking, and poker is far more a game of thinking and perceiving than it is of knowledge. Thinking on your feet is paramount, not any rote knowledge.

There indeed is an execution component to playing poker. When anxious or playing scared, players often act in a weak manner when their knowledge would tell them to do otherwise. That's anxiety talking ... anxiety undercutting knowledge. I'll show millions of instances of that for any established case of someone improving speed or coordination via talisman.

I was an athlete, poker player and psychologist ... all three. The physical exertion of sport, if anything, serves to dispel anxiety. Anxiety undercuts knowledge all the time at the poker table. It also curtails thinking and perception. I'm moving in on this. Beat me and take the pot.

Interesting OP. I guess poker as an activity is closer to chess then baseball so here is a link to what top chess grandmasters think of superstitions http://www.fide.com/component/conten...-superstitions and a bit about "chess psychology" https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-psychology , http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Psycholog...in-Chess-Games
Didn't realize how much "angle shooting" goes on in chess: #6 "use fake outs over the board"

No, I can't. I've read no more than one or two things worthy of citation on this subject.

The reason psychologists don't try to change them is because they work. Take placebos, for example, which have been proven to be effective. Say a new mother struggles with Postpartum depression from her first child. The father, a rogue Psychologist, then mentions that consuming placenta can help with depression. Next kid arrives and the wife goes ahead and consumes placental capsules and doesn't get depressed. Whether it was a placebo or not isn't material -- only a scumbag husband or friend would try to convince the mother that she's doing a stupid thing.

Interesting stuff, Mason. You are correct in your assertion that the unifying psychological locus of improvement (re: poker) involves becoming more intimate with the core strategies and concepts of the game. But I think there is something you overlooked in assessing OP's mental leaks.

There is a second component, aside from math, that many seasoned professionals take for granted. Mental strength also comes from a cluster of innate attributes: memory, depth and speed of processing and recall, pattern recognition, and emotional control are all inhibited based on something simplified as "stress." It is harder to think a hand through when it is for the rest of your savings, for example. If doing charitable acts puts OP in a stronger mindset than he would be otherwise, then he shouldn't change a thing.

However, he, or anyone in the position he was in four years ago when this thread was made, should definitely learn more math and stop looking to work on easier, yet inaccessible things like subconscious desires and motivation, of course. That should come last.

Hi ganstaman:

Let's assume you're an expert poker player and have been playing live poker all day at a major poker room. Now you're tired and are preparing to leave, but before you walk out of the poker room you spot an excellent game that features a couple of well known live ones and you know that if fresh, your expectation in this game should be high. Are you saying that if you now sit down you expect to lose? I don't think this is the case.

But now let's say it's the same situation but instead of having the opportunity to sit in a poker game your opportunity is to go play an athletic sport, and this is a sport, such as tennis, that you're quite good at. Now there should be a significant deterioration in the quality of your play.

So what's happening here. The answer is that there is a big difference between being physically tired and mentally tired, and it takes much longer for the mentally tired to kick in to have a big affect on the quality of your game at the poker table. And that's because poker is mainly a game of knowledge and not a game that requires things like speed, timing, and coordination.

By the way, in my opinion, this is something the current crop of poker mental coaches seem to have no understanding of. That's why they emphasize things like being well rested, diet, exercise etc. While this stuff is certainly good for you and it should allow you to have a healthier life long term, I doubt if it'll have much impact on your poker game this evening. On the other hand, if you stay awake for 36 hours then being mentally tired should kick in.

Best wishes,
Mason

Hi Trusty:

I happen to agree with you. Specifically, it can be tough to make decisions for all your money, and in big poker tournaments, where an unknown player gets close to the big money for his first time, what you are saying can certainly kick in.

But in reality, for the vast majority of poker players this should just about never happen. In my opinion, if you're dumb enough to put yourself in situations where you're playing for all your money, you deserve to lose it, and because of the large short term luck factor even if your decisions are good in this spot, you'll often lose it anyway.

In my book Real Poker Psychology I do talk some about stuff like this and also talk about how expert players can and do handle these spots.

Best wishes,
Mason

Yeah, I wouldn't advocate spending much time on pre-performance routines for poker. However, there are certain routines or "rituals" someone might undertake to put them in the right frame of mind. That might be preparing for a big tournament by going for a meal at a certain restaurant and always ordering the same menu as when you blinked that tournament before.

This can be classed as superstition, but if it helps you relaxed and confident (not to mention sufficient nourished and hydrated) then i'd see no reason to change such behaviour.

Whether I'd actively advise someone to take up a ritual like this to help their game is another matter. I think there are probably more scientific and specific ways to improve performance.

Hi Elrazor:

I think you have this right. There's certainly nothing wrong in doing what you suggest, and if it makes you feel a little better, that's fine with me. But I do question the following:

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but this sentence could be interpreted as slipping into the speed, timing, and coordination area, and again, it's my opinion that this doesn't have much value.

Best wishes,
Mason

I think there are a lot of ways psychology can be used to improve performance at poker, but I agree the the speed, timing, and coordination area isn't one of them.

Timing is critically important for players, especially live, at the highest levels.

So much that I would consider using a pocket metronome (something that vibrates every 5 seconds, for example) when sitting with Phil Ivey, if it isn't considered cheating. Mainly to help balance my own timing tells.