Hey everyone,

I'm exploring the possibility of offering coaching centered around mental game issues. My qualification is that I am a licensed therapist and I play poker, however, I have never done mental game coaching. I've used plenty of cognitive/behavioral/solution-focused techniques to work with therapy clients working on depression, anxiety, and addictive behaviors, but I recognize that mental game coaching will have distinct differences from my previous and current work that I can't completely anticipate.

I have read Jared Tendler's books on the mental game of poker and used his concepts to create some strategies for myself. I'm at a bit of a professional crossroads (aren't I always?) and I'd like to consider adding mental game coaching to my repertoire...but first I need to see if I am any good at it AND if I actually enjoy it.

Details
The purpose of this post is to see if anyone would be interested in a short-term (2-3 months) mental game coaching relationship that involves zoom/facetime meetings, some texting, and a lot of figuring it out as we go. Naturally, there will be some homework/self-reflection on your part and I will ask for your feedback about our work. I want to know about what is helping/not helping so that I can sharpen my skills. This will be a dynamic and evolving relationship that focuses heavily on your input and needs, while having boundaries around time and communication (I can't answer a gazillion text messages).

To be clear, I am not a poker coach. I am familiar with many poker games and concepts and I play low- and mid-stakes Hold'em and Omaha Hi/Lo. Since I am learning this "service" is offered for FREE. However, I'm only interested in working with someone who can be committed and punctual when it comes to the appointments we set (i.e. I will not chase you around to provide you with a free service at a personal cost to me).

I am particularly interested in working with someone who meets some or all of the following criteria:
- live cash or tourney player
- player working to move up in stakes
- player dealing with emotional/mental blocks
- player from a marginalized social or racial group

Respond with interest
I'm new to posting on 2+2. Please respond here with your interest and a little bit about your situation and how you fit the above criteria. I can also be reached via email: JustChristyB at gmail.com

If there are several folks interested, I will reach out to people that seem like they may be a good fit so we can chat. I think this really comes down to best fit based on your needs, my experience, and our availability.

Thanks and GL everybody!

Too many coaches nowadays, not enough players, but I wish you good luck

@chicagodude thanks. Just testing the waters, so we will see how this plays out. I actually don't know of many mental game coaches. Is there a group or site you can direct me to specifically?

Hi justchristyb:

I'm sure your intentions are good, but when I read posts like yours I can't help but strongly disagree especially when I see the mention of the name Jared Tendler.

What you need to understand is that Tendler and most of the poker mental coaches come out of the sports world, where, based on how I understand things, their advice is designed to improve execution, and from that perspective I believe it may be helpful in those environments. So, for instance, if your purpose is to hit a tennis ball more consistently, something that I've dealt with since I was a kid, then this stuff may have value. But is poker a game built around execution. I think the answer is no.

Any game, and this includes poker, can be looked at from the point of view of two components. Knowledge and execution. In tennis, you have to understand how the ball needs to be hit, the knowledge component. This can include what grip to use, how much spin to impart, swing style, and so on. Then you can spend thousands of hours practicing fine tuning your execution.

But does this apply to poker. In my opinion, the answer is mostly no. Poker is mainly a game of knowledge. How you put your chips into the pot shouldn't matter very much, and most of the poker mental coaching stuff that I've looked at seems to have very little to do with this point.

Below are my reviews of new books in this field:

Revised Tendler Review 4-24-17

The Mental Game of Poker; Proven Strategies for Improving Tilt Control, Confidence, Motivation, Coping with Variance, and More (3) by Jared Tendler, M.S. with Barry Carter. To start this review, let’s first discuss an idea that appears early in the text. It’s “unconscious competence” which Tendler says on page 17:

Unconscious Competence is the Holy Grail of learning, and by far the most important concept in this book.

And in my opinion this is an incredibly silly statement. So what is unconscious competence? Well, without defining it here, let’s say that unconscious competence is what a baseball players uses to hit a 95 mph fast ball or a tennis player uses to hit back a 120 mph serve. And looking at the tennis example a little more, once a 120 mph serve leaves a player’s racket, it’s about one-half of a second until his opponent hits it, and there’s no way this can be done consciously.

So why is this unimportant in poker? Well, if all decisions in poker had to be made in a second or two, then this would be a valuable idea, but as any no-limit hold ‘em player can tell you, many decisions take much, much longer than two seconds.

Going back to the 1980s, I was the first writer in the poker/gambling field to link results and variance in a big way, and my approach, as a professional statistician, was to approach this topic from a statistical point of view to show how variance in certain forms of poker can play havoc with your results and produce surprising strategies for expert play. But variance can also affect your mental game and, as it should be, it’s addressed in detail in The Mental Game of Poker.

However, much of the discussion of variance in this book shows an incomplete understanding of the subject. For instance on page 102 Tendler writes:

Though it may not seem like a big deal, just wishing you could control variance means you’re giving up control.

The problem with this sentence is that expert players do things to control and reduce their variance all the time. This includes multi-tabling (on the Internet) where many games of small stakes are substituted for one game at a large stakes, emphasis is placed on reading hands, and playing tighter than optimal which in some cases will lower your expectation by a little but your variance by a lot.

Continuing on page 102:

Let’s assume you have actually run worse than expected and for far longer than the math says is likely, it’s completely reasonable to be pissed off,

Well what does the math say? First, it should be noted that the math says the effect of variance will dissipate over time. That’s because the square root of the variance, known as the standard deviation and from which the statistical properties of your results are derived from, is proportional to the square root of the number of hands played while your results are proportional to the number of hands played. Putting this in understandable English, it means that in most forms of poker, if you have poor results over a fairly large number of played hands, your understanding of strategy probably needs a lot of improvement.

Continuing with the sentence:

but the question is whether that frustration or anger affects the quality of your play.

This is a loaded statement. There are states that players can enter, and tilt is just one of these states, where their games can deteriorate. But all of these states are usually solved by improving your understanding of different aspects of poker including strategy, the short term luck factor, and why poker at times can be counter-intuitive to many players. (See my book Real Poker Psychology for more discussion of all the states.)

Another area where in my opinion there is much confusion is tilt which is also discussed in much detail. One of the problems here is that Tendler addresses many different types of tilt, and in my opinion, while these types can and are often problems for some players, many of them are not tilt at all. In my view, tilt is caused by the inability to process information that gets presented to a player, such as getting several good hands beat in a short period of time, and he can’t understand how this can happen. Thus their minds are not able to solve this problem and their brain can get hung up similar to an infinite programming loop. And it’s my observation that with some people tilt can last for days.

But Tendler has lots of different kinds of tilt, and let’s look at two of them here beginning with what he calls “revenge tilt.” First, it should be obvious what revenge tilt is. However, it usually occurs because a player, for whatever reason, decides that getting revenge on another player becomes top priority. Of course, doing this can also lower your expectation and your poor play can look like tilt to other players. But it’s not.

And the reason it’s not is simply because the player on revenge tilt has usually decided to get revenge for rational reasons, even though playing this way should lower his overall expectation. This often means that if this player is successful with getting his revenge, his play will quickly revert back to a more tight, solid game. Thus, if you as an opponent still think he’s on tilt and adjust your game as if he’s on tilt, it can become costly to you and not to the player in question.

The second type of tilt I’ll look at in this review is what Tendler calls “mistake tilt.” On page 118 Tendler writes:

At a basic level, being frustrated for making a mistake is reasonable.

But the problem here is that poker players usually don’t know when they make mistakes. If they did they wouldn’t make them.

As an example, when a tennis player hits the ball into the net it’s usually clear that he made a mistake, and that’s because the short term luck factor in most athletic sports like tennis is small. But in poker, because of the large short term luck factor, it’s very difficult for a player to ever know, without a good deal of thinking at a later time about exactly how the hand was played, if a mistake was actually made. So in my opinion, the whole idea of mistake tilt is a myth.

Another way of looking at this is that many players get frustrated by losing, not from mistakes they aren’t aware of. And if this idea of mistake tilt was correct, they would also get frustrated when a mistake helps them win a pot, and this doesn’t happen.

On the other hand, I thought his discussion of confidence, both lacking and having too much, was much better. The author, however, does not make a distinction between marginal and expert players. Yes, confidence can go up and down for a marginal player depending on how he has done recently. But this won’t be the case for an expert player who not only understands how the large short term luck factor can work but who (usually) has a long term track record of being successful.

Another way to smooth out the “roller coaster” of confidence is to think in terms of “Sklansky Bucks,” something I suspect Tendler is not familiar with. In addition, Tendler recognizes on page 204:

After a large enough sample, regardless of how you feel about your ability, your results tell the real story.

Of course this is correct. But why he mentions this here and not in the discussion I referenced above on page 102 is curious.

There’s also a much more general problem with this book and with much of the current poker psychology literature. It’s the fact that many of the ideas presented come from the world of sports psychology. But how related is poker to an athletic sport? In my opinion, it’s not close, and that’s because things like speed, timing, and coordination are not part of the game. And that’s because poker is mainly a game of knowledge, and those psychological ideas that may help an athlete perform better should, in my opinion, have little impact on a poker player.

But does this mean that the stuff in Tendler’s book will hurt you? Well, if a marginal player grabs hold of this material and substitutes it for continuing to work on improving their understanding of all things poker, then the answer is yes. But if this is not the case, then it might help a little. And if you’re a high stakes expert looking to gain every possible edge against the many tough players that you’re playing against, then a small improvement at high stakes can amount to a significant amount of money over time.

Positive Poker; A Modern Psychological Approach to Mastering Your Mental Game (1) by Dr. Patricia Cardner with Jonathan Little. This is another book that addresses the mental game as related to poker and like the Tendler book seems to draw many of its ideas from the world of sports psychology. It has so many problems that it’s difficult to know where to begin.

The book is divided into a number of chapters that include titles such as “Developing Exceptional Poker Talent: The Psychology of Expertise,” “Understanding and Mastering Self-Control,” and “Motivation: How to Keep Going when the Going Gets Tough,” and “Mastering Tilt.” And at the end of each chapter there’s commentary by poker player/writer Jonathan Little.

Anyway, I thought the best way to review this book is to just take some concepts out of the text and try to explain what’s wrong with them. So here goes.

Early in the book the following question is asked:

How much would your results improve if you could concentrate better or if you had more confidence in your skills?

The answer to this is simple. Not much if any for the vast majority of players. If you don’t know how to play well, don’t expect to do well. On the other hand, for the relatively small number of experts the answer might be a little bit, and if you’re playing in the high stakes games, a little bit could be a significant amount of money won over time. But this distinction is never addressed in this text.

Immediately following the above statement, and just to show how Positive Poker is misguided right from the beginning we read:

How about being able to finally beat someone who has constantly gotten the best of you?

This statement implies that the short term luck factor is small and of course that’s not the case in poker. That is, if you’re a regular player, probability theory tells us that there’s going to be one or more players out there who you have done poorly against in the past. But it doesn’t mean that your mental game is deficient.

Entering the second chapter, “Developing Exceptional Poker Talent: The Psychology of Expertise” in the “Avoiding the “OK” Plateau” sub-chapter we read:

It will take keeping accurate records of all the hands you play and then analyzing those hands, …

I wonder how anyone can do this, especially those Internet players who play many thousands of hands in a session.

Getting to the fourth Chapter, “Understanding and Mastering Self-Control,” in the bankroll management sub-chapter we are told by a player the author interviewed:

You can’t be spewey in poker and be a winner.

Notice that this has nothing to do with bankroll management. This is understanding not to make negative expectation plays.

In the “Self-Control as a Muscle” sub-chapter we’re told:

Poker is at its core, a self-control game

Really? To me poker is mainly a game of knowledge. Having good self-control but not understanding how to play well won’t get you very far. Isn’t this obvious?

Then there’s a sub-chapter titled “What Does a Twinkie Have to do With Self-Control?” where we read:

If you want the best chance to do well at the table you need to eat a healthy diet.

Now I certainly agree it’s best to eat a healthy diet, but you need to understand that while eating healthy is certainly good, this should impact the execution component far more than the knowledge component. And for this to be important it would mean that a player who had an unhealthy meal would now begin to play some of his hands in an inferior way, and it’s my experience that this is not the case.

What I think is happening here is that this idea is coming out of the sports world where poor diet, inconsistent sleep patterns, stress, etc. can impact things like speed, timing, and coordination which is part of the execution component. But this stuff should have little impact on your knowledge of how to play.

Next we come to the “Sleep Your Way to Increased Self-Control” where we immediately read:

Many people want to play marathon poker sessions, and I guess they think they are able to maintain their A game.

Of course, there is no direct research (that I know of) relating marathon poker sessions to quality of play. But a little later in the book in the chapter on motivation we read:

Phil Laak made history for playing the longest live poker game when he played for 115 hours straight in 2010. He did finish with a profit of $6,766, but I would not recommend playing that many hours regularly.

Regularly? It’s hard to make this stuff up, and I would certainly not recommend playing that many hours ever.

At the end of this chapter, Jonathan Little states:

When I am on a prolonged losing streak, I tend to lose my normally strong sense of motivation.

But when on a prolonged losing streak it’s an indication that you don’t play that well since you’re leaving the short run and entering the long run. But we’re told early in the text that Little is “an elite player” and later in the book that game selection is very important. So assuming that Little is game selective, this should almost never happen.

In “Chapter Six: Find your Focus and Improve Your Concentration," in the “Tips to Improve Your Concentration” sub-chapter we read:

You also cannot really control how things are going to go down, so why try.

Of course this isn’t true. There are many spots where your bets and raises will often gain you control over some of your opponents, especially weak players, in many situations.

Now let’s move on to “Chapter Eight: Mastering Tilt.” Here we read:

Happy tilters tend to feel exhilarated and invincible when things are going their way. Their happiness bubbles up and often affects their play by causing them to play too many hands.

No. These are people who are overrating their ability and thus play too many hands. This is also an example that shows how little the author knows about poker since it’s well known that experts can play a few more hands for profit than their marginal counterparts. Furthermore, these players have not lost the ability to think rationally (which would put them on tilt), but instead are simply, because of the short term luck factor, overrating their ability and believing they’re also in the expert group.

Referring to “passive tilters” Cardner writes:

It’s very unlikely that a person with this profile will make it to the top rungs of the poker world. Even exhibiting the slightest hint of brooding passivity can prevent you from achieving poker success

The statement “unlikely … to make it to the top rungs” is a joke. These are people who are disappointed with their results and are looking for better strategies, and that’s not someone on tilt.

And one more:

This alarm sets off the flight or fight response, which is helpful when you are in real danger.

It seems to me that if this was true, we would see plenty of fights in the poker room and this almost never happens. In addition, we would occasionally see someone grab their chips and run out of the poker room, and I’ve never seen that.

And for my final example, I want to go back to the idea that much of what appears in the text probably comes from the sports world. Early in Positive Poker, we’re told:

By now, nearly everyone has heard of the 10,000 hour rule: in order to become an expert you must put in 10,000 hours of practice.

I consider this the first highly unintelligent thing that appears in this book. 10,000 hours would make sense if you needed almost an instance response for a very large number of situations, and notice that this is similar to what Tendler calls “unconscious competence,” and which he states “by far the most important concept in this book” (and this is referring to Tendler’s first book).

Now I agree that poker does require some work. But since an instant response is not needed, for the majority of people, 500 hours should be plenty. This is most likely an example of confusing an athletic sport with poker, and if your goal was to become, for example, a top tennis player where execution in addition to knowledge is highly important, then 10,000 hours would make sense to me. But again, poker is not an athletic sport.

To finish, I want to note that what is written here is only scratching the surface. It would be easy to add many more pages similar to the above, but there’s no reason to do so.


Best wishes,
Mason

Very interested, I've sent you an email.

Thanks for your thorough response. It's going to take me a bit to get through it and I'm curious about your statistics background and knowledge in this area. Super interesting-- thanks for the feedback!

Great, I will respond via email. Thanks!

Great, I will respond via email. Thx!

I have a BS and MS, both in Math, from Va Tech. As a graduate student I took extra statistics courses and have almost enough credits for a MS in statistics. For six years I worked as a Mathematical Statistician for the US Census Bureau, and for just over five years I worked as a probability expert for the Northrop Corporation.

The problem I see with virtually all this mental stuff is, if it works, it’s designed to help execution and not knowledge, and poker is mainly a game of knowledge. See my book Real Poker Psychology and my psychology section in our book Poker and More.

Best wishes,
Mason

With the incredible wealth of poker knowledge available, why are there not more expert players?

I know sometimes when i made mistake,
exactly after i did,sometimes even when I'm doing it i know that i should fold, that call is not +Ev,but I call or raise. I can with Pio precision analyze hand out of table en com up with +EV solution almost in every spot, but make obvious (for myself) mistakes every life session minimal once at night.

I loved your book and refer to it very often.
I do think that you project the way you are wired to view the world onto all of humanity in this regard.

I agree that poker is technical, but as seen throughout the poker world and sports world, some people perform poorly when pressure is put on. There are tons of guys in the poker world who have a lot of technical knowledge but poor implementation as seen through their results ... and vice versa.

I think mental game coaching is a guided path of self exploration and understanding emotions.

My main gripe with mental game coaching is the way it's marketed as something that it is not

Thank-you.

I agree that there are states which players can go into that will cause them to play poorly. Those familiar with my book you should be aware of this. I also recently published a paper that goes over this. It can now be found here:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2.../#post55593638

Perhaps. And I agree that some of these ideas that the poker mental coaches advocate may be quite valuable for a game, such as some form of athletics, where execution is highly important. But poker is mainly a knowledge game.

I agree completely.

Best wishes,
Mason

I would be curious of what you think of Galfond's drastic improvement in the 1st galfond challenge after a break. And if you think Intuition has anything to do with poker. Phil talked about how he lost trust in his own intuition. His ability to identify stuff ...to learn patterns on a nonconscious level. He basically said taking a break allowed him to be in a better "mood", harness/access his own ability and play better.

Hi Moreconfused:

Again I would recommend that you look at my book, Real Poker Psychology. And here's the way I see this.

First, I know Phil Galfond but didn't know his opponent. But I think it's safe to assume that both are excellent players. And when two excellent players face off against each other, at best, one will have a very small win rate versus the other, (with one possible exception that I mention at the end of this post) and this win rate will be small relative to the standard deviation that each player will be playing with. Thus, the results of a heads-up match between the two should be much more driven by the large short-term luck factor that is present in poker than by the true skill difference between players.

Another way to look at this is to take the game of tennis, a game that I'm quite familiar with since I have been playing tennis (and I mean a lot of tennis) since the age of 12. This is a game where the short-term luck factor is small realative to the expectation. Thus, we were each tennis players, and let's say that I was just a little better then you, my expectation would be to win almost everytime. This would certainly not be the case in poker.

So the fact that the Galfond match featured large fluctuations is not surprising. But is this the whole story?

In poker, there are negative states, with tilt being the best known one, that players can fall into which will affect how they play. For a discussion of these states, see here:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...poker-1756469/

So, could it be that Galfond's opponent, for some reason, fell into one of these states and began to misplay some of his hands? I don't know.

Also, assuming this is accurate:

Phil talked about how he lost trust in his own intuition. His ability to identify stuff ...to learn patterns on a nonconscious level. He basically said taking a break allowed him to be in a better "mood", harness/access his own ability and play better.

Then this would imply that he began to play some of his hands differently after the break and that this new way of playing was superior to before. But if for some reason, his ability to accurately put his opponent on a hand -- what poker players call hand reading -- did occur, then his expectation might have moved from negative to positive. But would this possible move in expectation be enough for the large positive swing that Galfond experienced. I doubt it.

But I do know this. When many poker players go through a large positive swing, one of the cruel tricks that the standard deviation will sometimes play on these players is that it can make them think they really are playing much better. I would think that someone with Phil's experience and ability as a poker player would make him immune to this type of thinking, but I don't know him well enough to say this for sure.

There is also one other possibility and it's the one possible exception that I mentioned above. Perhaps Galfond is someone who is very good at developing counter strategies, and the break allowed him to think things through and thus he really did begin to play much better. But if this was the case, as opposed to mainly a change in luck, Phil should be able to remember some hands that early in the match he would have played one way, but late in the match, for some specific reasons, he now played them differently, and this new way of playing was far superior to the way he would have played before.

An example of this would be if Phil realized that in certain spots his opponent would never bluff. Now his counter strategy would be not to call (unless he had a hand that could beat some of his opponent's value bets) where early in the match, because of the size of the bet compared to the size of the pot, he was calling a lot.

Best wishes,
Mason

Mason, does this mean that if someone like Phil Ivey gets visibly upset at Tom Dwan for showing up on the river with a hand Phil didn't expect, Phil lacks knowledge?

The reason the mental game is so pivotal in poker is that you can have a high level of knowledge and still get angry. Sure, maybe you don't have the knowledge of variance, but I don't understand how studying can be the solution.

In my own anecdotal example, I feel that as I kept improving on skills in poker without working on my mental game, I would tilt harder. The reason being that I knew I was outworking the players at my games, and I felt entitled to run pure.

However, once I delved into the mental game, Jared Tendler's book spoke about Entitlement Tilt, which I knew was my issue. So in that regard, knowledge about what kind of tilt I had improved the issue.

I don't really understand why you seem to be so against psychology, especially when many if not most of the top players would agree that a mental game coach has merit while "learning more" isn't going to make a lot of players elite.

Hi Venice:

This is actually a good question. First, I think we can agree that tilt occurs when a player loses the ability to think rationally? So, is that the case here? When Dwawn draws out, and Phil looks visibly irritated, has he lost the ability to think rationally. I doubt it. In fact, I'm sure he's completely prepared to play the next hand just as if no draw out had occurred.

In my book, Real Poker Psychology, (which you might want to read) I point out that when these sort of draw outs occur to expert players you'll often see them chuckle (since tilt follows the same pathway as humor). Perhaps in Ivey's case instead of chuckling he appears irritated.

If you don't "have the knowledge of variance," or as I state in my book a good knowledge of all things poker there will be situations where your mind can't figure out what has happened. Again, this is all explained in my book and I suspect would be quite helpful to you.

I think the words "and I felt entitled to run pure" is key here, and I assume that when you say this you're only thinking in terms of expectation and not the short term term luck factor or variance. The fact is that your poker results are actually a blend of both of these, but that blend changes over time. Again, this is all explained in Real Poker Psychology.

Entitlement tilt is not tilt at all. You need to understand that these so-called poker mental coaches need tilt so that they can get customers for their counseling. What Tendler calls entitlement tilt is simply a misunderstanding of the short-term luck factor and again is related to thinking only in terms of expectation and not the combination of expectation and variance and exactly how this relationship works.

Let me give an example. If you go and play poker tonight you're gambling. If you go and play poker every night for a long period of time, even though you may be gambling everytime you play, you're not gambling in terms of your long term results. This is from page 6 of Real Poker Psychology:

But there’s another aspect to this. It turns out that the expectation is proportional to how much you play while the standard deviation is proportional to the square root of how much you play. And this means that the luck factor, which can dominate your short-term results, will in time have much less impact on your overall results. Put another way, the expert player may lose tonight, but he will almost certainly be ahead after a much longer period of time, and the weak player will just have his winning nights to remember as his long term expectation is negative.

So why is this important and what does this mathematical relationship have to do with poker psychology? Well, it turns out that this idea is the source of all good and evil in the world of poker psychology. In fact, and as we’ll see in this book, it’s almost impossible to think of anything in this field where the mathematical relationship between the expectation and the standard deviation, (along with a couple of other attributes that we’ll get to — poker can be counterintuitive and you need to play poker well) isn’t the explanation.


By the way, the so-called poker mental coaches really need the luck factor to act opposite to these two paragraphs.

I find it amazing when I get accused of this, and it has been happening since my views on poker psychology became known. If this was true, I wouldn't have written a 259 page book on poker psychology. You may also want to check out my paper "The Four Psychological States of Losing Poker" which you can find here:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...poker-1756469/

And one other thing. Once you understand the ideas in my book (and linked paper), you should have no need for the poker mental coaches.

Best wishes,
Mason

I read your article Mason. The point you make about fighting at the table or running away from the table seems to be a deliberate misconstrual of what the amygdala is doing during decision making. Since winning and losing in poker are tied with money, which is tied with resources (ie. survival) it makes sense that the amygdala is active during poker.

Just because someone doesn't fight at a casino, doesn't mean their brain isn't in fight mode. There are other considerations such as jail, not wanting to appear violent, etc. The anger that comes up when you get unlucky in poker is the amygdala's way of trying to ensure that you get your "fair share" of the money owed you. Of course, it thinks that every flip should come to you, but that's obviously the limitation of it.

Could you point out some empirical evidence that suggests an increase in knowledge reducing frustration? So far I've seen you refer to your book several times, but aside from having psychology in your title, I'm not convinced that there's really psychology supporting your thesis.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...2&postcount=13

MM

I'm not sure what posting that link is going to show, as there's still been zero empirical evidence supporting your position on tilt.

i've not seen anybody playing poker for living saying that menthal game is not as important as knowleg

TBH I don't really get what it's stickied to the Psychology forum as it contains no actual scientific evidence. The entire argument seems to be that tennis and poker are different.

The fact that many if not most high stakes poker players will pay the high fees for a Jared Tendler is evidence in favour of psychology helping in poker.

If Mason is right, then every high stakes millionaire poker player that pays for mental game coaching is an idiot.

This is from the Conclusion of my book Real Poker Psychology:

Expert players who in the high stakes games are mostly playng against other experts in reality have very small win rates. So, any small increase in their win rate, given that the stakes are so high, can be worth a lot to them and therefore the type of stuff that some of these poker mental coaches offer might have value to them.

And one last thing. Have you spent any money of these poker mental coaches?

Mason

I saw a psychologist for a bunch of sessions and my winrate was noticeably bigger within a few months. During that time period, I didn't study poker much (as I felt the mental edge was larger at the time for me).

Mental game edge is neglected by a lot of players because it's not as sexy as how to 4 bet bluff.

You mention this 1/10 of a bet per hour, but what is that based on, exactly? To me it simply looks like a number created for the sake of having one.

The 1/10 bet per hour is my opinion. There are situations where it could be much higher. An example would be when playing short-handed you pick up a tell that dramatically alters your play (and is accurate) and you feel that your more relaxed mental state allowed you to see this when otherwise you would not have. But I think this is fairly far fetched.

Also, when you say "my winrate was noticeably bigger within a few months," how long this this last? You do understand that even if the psychologist helped you, because of the large short-term luck factor your winrate could have been noticeably lower within a few months.

Also, and this is quite important, you didn't say "poker mental coach." But instead said "psychologist for a bunch of sessions," and I assume the psychologist was highly competent and may have given you much different advice from what these poker mental coaches, who I'm so critical of, do.

Mason