If you've read my last “big” posts, you'd know none of them are about strategy. The rest of the forums is for precisely that; I prefer tackling other topics that interest me. If you want to learn when to checkraise, there are plenty of other places to read up on that.

Discipline

If you've ever played small stakes games, driven on public roads or just watched what happens in the world, you would probably believe our planet is populated by mouthbreathers. I wouldn't blame you.

I have a belief. I think that most individuals, at their core, have sufficient intelligence. You're probably thinking “No Matt, people are idiots; it's common fact to anyone who thinks about things”. I agree with that statement; people are idiots, yes, but individual persons' decision making process make sense at their core, even if the premises for the decision are often flawed.

With this in mind we can understand where pretty much every aspiring poker player fails. It is not in lack of layered thought, talent, emotional empathy or any other of the “poker skills” people who suck at poker often talk about. Most people fail because they lack discipline.


Intelligence and discipline

Everyone has an example of a person who is a ****ing genius by any standards and yet has had an utter failure of a life. In poker, we have Stu Ungar as a good example. If you went to high school (and if you didn't, get off this forum and go back to being a normal person you degenerate), you can easily think of a guy who was very smart but still dropped out at 16 to sell coke.

This is what the school system does in the first world, by the way. Everyone knows that what you learn in school is by far and wide useless for the great majority of degrees. Getting a business degree doesn't serve to show that you know the difference between micromanagement and other bull**** buzzwords that are common sense to anyone thinking.

All it serves to show is that you have a business degree. No, really. That you were able to stick to the end and get it. From a company's point of view that greatly increases the likelihood of having a better worker; it shows he isn't prone to miss deadlines, that he complies with social behavior rules, etc.

Now, this isn't a rant against the first world school system, and, despite the last 2 paragraphs, I actually do think it is quite beneficial to society. It only serves as an example that in most domains, discipline is simply more important than intelligence. You can easily get a degree with a double digit IQ; you just have to work. It will be slightly easier to get a degree with an IQ of 165, but not that much so.


Habits

Another thing having a degree shows is that you have had at the very least the motivation get there. Motivation can overcome a lot of bad habits you might have or other leaks in your lifestyle. Putting a ton of hours into what you want to succeed at is a prerequisite. You can live a fairly chaotic lifestyle, partying left and right, sleeping at odd and irregular hours, but, with discipline and motivation, this can easily work out much better than someone who has a solid routine but is lazy.

Everyone knows health habits are important; so are social habits. They are far from necessary to succeed at poker in itself, but they help in every aspect of your life. Plus, the end goal is not to make a bunch of money, but to be happy. If you neglect your social life, romantic life and health to become rich at poker, you effectively failed pretty hard, since you only got 1 out of 4 right. Trust me, you can be at high stakes and unhappy.

You don't need to be addicted to a substance, obese, in bad physical shape, or regularly have unprotected sex with shady randoms to fail at “life discipline”. Going to bed every night too late, browsing the internet aimlessly too long, watching too much crappy TV, partying too much. Those are all things you should aim to correct in your lifestyle.

There are plenty of resources on the internet to learn how to improve your social life. Actually doing it takes motivation, balls and the discipline not to give up. Same thing for your romantic life or health. This post is long enough by itself, I won't be discussing those topics here. I can point you to good places to start if those are things you want to improve in your life.

If you want to make a better lifestyle for yourself, a good exercise is this:

Close the TV, go in a silent room and imagine your ideal future self. Do it in detail, too. How does he walk around in public? How does he dress? What does his typical Friday night look like? What does he eat for lunch on a Tuesday? How does his girlfriend(s) look like? What daily habits does he have?

Write everything down, and go deep. The deeper the better. And don't limit yourself, pretty much anything is possible if you put yourself to it and don't give up. After that brainstorm is done, you probably want to rewrite everything neatly on a piece of paper and keep it in plain view. Then, everyday after that, you can recap the day and see how you're doing compared to your ideal self and work on bettering every possible aspect of your life.


“Discipline Blocks”

A “discipline blocks” is a term I just invented. No, really, like I just invented it 4 seconds ago.

Either way it denotes a phenomenon we all know, the nit. The nit will almost never be making daring bluffs or gutsy calls, because that is not what a nit does. The nit is a creature which prides itself on it's discipline, to the point of excess.

He won't take the profitable double barrel bluff line, because “that's getting out of line”. You can see how his thought process makes sense, too. It's just a flawed thought process, even though logical. Being open minded to new ideas is essential to become a very good poker player, a nit can become “OK”, maybe even “good”, but never great.

You can see a similar phenomenon in total fishes. A whale who is spewing money away on a daily basis at the tables probably logged in more hands than many players who are much better than him. He just doesn't want to learn how to get better. This might be for various reasons; ego (he doesn't respect the game enough and thinks he can beat it “by himself”), lack of resourcefulness, laziness, or flawed concepts (A fish once told me “Why study poker? The only thing you control in poker is when you bet and raise”).
You can even feel when you are having a discipline block. Acting open minded feels wrong because it's not the “normal thing to do here”. With a bit of practice, you can see when these thoughts pop up and with even more practice, you can do the right thing when they do.


Ruts

The last topic I'll talk about is ruts. This doesn't just apply to downswings, extended periods of bad play are a better example. You know a rut when you see one. You remember that month where you went out of your house 3 times. That week where you logged in 9k hands and played everyone of them like a fish. That friend of yours who got dumped and spent days locked in the dark in his room.

Most people who are “clinically depressed” aren't chemically imbalanced, they just in a massive lifestyle rut. I'm sure if you did a brain scan you would find their serotonin levels are off and whatnot, but that is a result of depressive thoughts plaguing the brain; not a cause.

Not a lot of people know this, since I'm a pretty outgoing happy-go-lucky guy in general, but I was massively depressed in high school. That sounds cute, but if you've ever seriously considered suicide in your life, then you know how it feels to hit rock bottom. Going broke is candy land in comparison. In fact, from about childhood up until when I was about 17, I couldn't say I was ever happy. I had transient happiness, but none of it was ever “real happiness”. I broke out of it by making a completely new social circle and changing most of my lifestyle.

Getting out of a rut necessitates drastic action. You need to stop the stagnation with movement. If you're playing everyday and playing like crap, you need to take a break. If you don't have a social life, you need to do something about that, and hard. If it's been a year you haven't had a date with a girl, you need to grab your balls and start asking girls out. Happiness can be considered a skill; it's a result of the right kind of thinking added to a good lifestyle.

I don't have the time or motivation (hey it's 2:15 AM here gimme a break) to list all the ruts. Just try to be honest with yourself and figure out if you are passing out on long term well-being because it will bring short term negative emotions. If you're doing that you're already ahead of pretty much everyone.

+1 Good read. First long post I've read completely in long time

wow very good post.

"With this in mind we can understand where pretty much every aspiring poker player fails. It is not in lack of layered thought, talent, emotional empathy or any other of the “poker skills” people who suck at poker often talk about."

Are you talking about this guy? http://www.philgalfond.com/poker-and-your-life/

Great read dude

Nice Thread!

+1 to all the above.

Goodstuff, wp!

very good read sounds exactly spot on to me

nice

n1

Was cynical at first, but you won me over. I read a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell which basically studies in depth the thing you mentioned about the difference in the difficulty of tasks for people of lower and higher IQs (amongst other things). It more or less agreed with what you said. Started off a good read but got somewhat tedious and repetitive after the first few sections.

Nice post man, well done.

Nice post, but not enough rant about the first world school system .

Looking forward to november edition... Thanks man.

Very enlightening to say the least. Thanks for making the great effort to pen it down!

A+

Bookmarked, will read again. Very inspirational.

Very good read. Thanks for sharing this with us.

great post man! <3

Ty, good read!
I wish I was more disciplined

Very good stuff!

good stuff

problem?

a bit of critique, though:

I'd be careful with being too general here, while clinical depression is rarely caused by chemical imbalance, it certainly increases the risk of it. Also, the last paragraph implies that rational thinking can rid you of depression, it's a good preventive measure for a healthy person, but it's quite different to tell a depressed person to change their mindset. Professional help is what they need, first and foremost.

from wikipedia:

I don't wanna give the impression that I hate the idea, just wanted to point out that it works differently for those already severely depressed. Many people, myself included, have mindset issues at some point in their lives, and it's good to deal with them actively.

nice post, thx !

Yeah, I'm not anywhere near understanding how the brain works on emotions and thought process; all I understand is that it's complicated pretty much .

From what I get, the brain can change itself overtime (example: recovering from a brain injury), so theoretically serotonin levels should regulate themselves as someone gets out of depression.

To not talk out of my butthole, I just think it's better to think no one is "predisposed" for depression (even if it's possibly erroneous) and that it's a result of lifestyle and way of thinking. If you are massively depressed, getting professional help is obviously the right start, but getting out of it requires more than that. Since it's usually a result of negative thinking + lifestyle not fitting your personal values, "just" getting therapy is probably not going to cut it (I wouldn't know since I didn't get professional help when I was very depressed).

A teacher once showed me a model for suicidally depressed persons which I think fits very well. It states that there are three spheres in one's life: Social, Romantic and Career. If you fail very hard at two of the three, you will inevitably be depressed. For example, if you rule at poker and crush high stakes but have no friends and have no prospects of getting laid, you won't be happy. There are other frameworks in sociology to explain it, like anomie (feeling of lack of purpose), but I find the Social/Career/Romantic model works for me.

5*. Should be intuitive, but good to read.