hey guys,

im a reg at nl50/100 zoom fr and im confident enough to say that im at 50 one of the biggest winners.

after todays session, when my typical start happend, i decited to make a review of my last sessions and saw the not surprising, but shocking result:

out of my last sessions from almost 3 months i was down 2 bi's 40% out of the time and 1 bi almost 80% out of the time!!! and most of it in the first 30 minutes...

here are some pictures of my last sessions...









ok, the list would be endless but i hope its visable what the problem is.

problem 1:

how much more would i win if i would be 100% on my game from the beginning of a session?

problem 2:

when im down (what i am most of the time) and then fighting back and have a good a rhythm, then i quit most of the time because i am happy to be back up again but taking myself the oppertunity to have a huge winning session. but scraed of letting my mindset be damaged.

i would really hope if one of you can give me some good advice or maybe some of you are some good mental coaches and can help me with that or offer some good courses.

ILUVTHRILL

You say you are down in the first 30 minutes.

I'm wondering, how do you warm up or prepare to play poker?
What do you do before starting a session? Be specific!

tbh nothing. just open the tables and start playing. today i tried and open just 50% of my usual table but same result...

A great start would be creating your own little warm up to help get you focused!
This is unique to you, but I complete this warm up:

1.) State your session goal
2.) State why you want to do this (motivations)
3.) State how you are going to do this
4.) Empty your mind by venting onto a notepad or doc file.
5.) Take Several Deep Breaths
6.) Say "This is a brilliant session and I am mainly playing well making correct decisions regardless of results. Let's do this..."

7.) Start playing...


Feel free to create your own and it can include things like reviewing poker videos, cleaning your desk, listening to music or even meditation.

tbh this sounds absolute weired to me, but i will definitely try it and let you know if it worked for me. anyways thank you veeeeeeery much for even reading it and giving good advice!!

hhmmm, same story....



really not sure how to fix this leak. or the reason for it is because im getting deeper after a while and im better deep then with 100bb, but dont think this is it...

nah dont do that lame warm up. Do a warm up that works for you.
Right now, when you first start playing, that's your warmup. That's why you play so bad during that time.

I suggest the warmups:
Review your previous session in hem. Think areas of your game you want to work on, leaks you want to plug.
Play at lower limits for 10 minutes. or a hyper turbo. only thing that matters is that it's for a trivial amount of money.

play a warmup session at nl 5 before u jump into ur regular games.

Do a warm up that works for you.

To be honest, I shouldn't but I often change my warm up depending on my current state of mind.

If I am tired, I do a different warm up to if I am alert.

Sometimes, I even play online checkers for 10 minutes just to kick start my thinking. Other times, I might watch a strategy video or review hands. Other times (if I am overly activated already), I might do a Progressive Relaxation (link) to calm myself down allowing me to focus again.

With regards to a warm up, there is no perfect method that fits everyone. Experiment and find out what works for you.

maybe you have a playing style that needs to establish some kind of history before it becomes most effective?

it might just be variance and selective memory playing with you

just about any book on sports psychology will explain the value of a pre-session routine as others have mentioned. i have found having some type of brief routine has really helped my start sessions on my A-game and stay on A-game longer

Maybe is warm up is losing a buy-in to start? Why change it if its working?

Dan is right, a warm-up is part of the solution. The reason is that you need to raise your energy level higher from the start. As you've said, getting down in a session provides a huge boost in motivation as you fight back. There is a clear challenge ahead of you and you focus like hell to play great from that point on. The problem is that you've created a well worn pattern where you now NEED to be down money in order to create the level of energy you need to play great.

Have you seen this graph before?



It essentially describes the relationship between a player's performance and their stress/energy/emotional level. When your energy is too low, as it is for you at the start of your sessions, you play like ****. Only when you've lost a few bi's do you have the motivation to push your energy level towards the peak of the curve. (Just to complete the description of the graph - basically players tilt because their emotions are too high. So whether you're exhausted or monkey tilted, you play equally as bad, just for opposite reasons.)

Changing this pattern isn't going to happen overnight since you've been getting good at it for at least three months, and I suspect longer. So you cannot expect that trying a warm-up one day is going to instantly fix this problem. The goal is to steadily increase your level of energy over time. So for example, let's say you're at a level 20 from the start, the goal would be to get it to 25, then 30, then 35...etc. Regular practice to retrain how you respond to the beginning of a session, so you steadily bring more and more motivation.

This would not appear to stand up to scrutiny.
If it were the case, we could start from (so called) low energy levels and add *just the right amount* of tilt to end up in the middle of the curve and play optimally. But this does not work irl.
As for 'raising the energy levels'...it would appear that there are other ways of doing this (eg exciting video games, workout etc). If your 'need to raise your energy levels by following my plan' theory was right, then any poker player could 'warm himself up' to the middle of your curve by doing any of the many non-poker things that raise their energy level (a so-called 'warm up') and bazinga, they're playing optimally. But this doesn't work.
I think this is why the experienced poker players itt instinctively suggest that the early section of play (that happens to be losing, and maybe educatively so) is giving his mind the *poker exposure* he needs to reactivate and prime specific poker cognitions that (and this may come as a surprise to you) often run counter to every day cognitions. Because poker thinking, especially in today's competitive environment, is special, and normal patterns of thought cannot be relied upon to work well in it.
If your suggestions are implemented, all we would find is the guy sitting there slightly more excited, but not appropriately primed.
I'd ditch the whole 'tilt is too much energy' thing also. Plenty of situations where a good player has 'too much energy' but isn't really tilting, and plenty of situations where a player is actually tilting but appears normal or left of peak in your arousal curve.

especially when this....

is the case.

What proof do you have that it doesn't work irl? I've had many clients for whom this is true. Michael Jordan was a master of using this strategy to perform at his peak. He needed to feel anger at someone to perform great - and spoke at length about this in his hof induction speech.

I'm not suggest that being at a low energy level and then adding the right amount of tilt, is an optimal strategy. I'm just suggesting that for a player who needs to get stuck in order to play great, that they have an established pattern where anger (or tilt) is a source of energy that gets them to a higher energy level which allows them to at least play better and sometimes they'll even play optimally.

First off, it's not my curve. It's call the Yerkes-Dodson. Yes, there are many ways to raise your energy levels, including doing the things you've suggested, and you're right, a warm-up that only focuses on raising a players' energy doesn't guarantee they'll play optimally. They may also need to get their poker mind ready as well. Yes, as you suggest it can be done while playing, but I challenge players to do the work ahead of time to get as close as possible to being ready to play from the start as possible. I didn't mention this in my answer - so I wasn't as thorough as I usually am.

i got the same problem, mostly the time under the 0 line, but when i get up a little bit above it, i just quit playing because i kinda feel good cuz i got back to where i started and not keep playing because the fear to lose.... and idk how to improve this...

how have did you do these last days?

gl

I fear we might not be reading from the same page visa-vis psychology and poker. To clarify, can you tell me how, in your mind, psychology works within poker from hand to hand, what parameters are involved, and how tilt messes things up. Once we've sorted that out we'll be in a position to define and solve this guy's problem.

That's a pretty large question/topic and I don't understand what purpose the answer would serve in replying to OP's problem. We've each posted our perspective on the topic, and until OP responds either with more detail, questions, etc, there's not much more I can do for him/her.

Well given that he's probably making errors there that are causing his losses, and tilt interacts with this psychology in a specific way, it's really important to clarify that question before any mention is made of tilt / fixing tilt /using tilt to 'get your energy levels up' (as you put it).
Poker is a lot like basketball, agreed (........... .......... you need balls to play it .....) but it's also a lot unlike basketball (and actually anything else) in many ways, in fact, in the crucial ways. To say that because anger raises basketball players to a level of focus therefore poker players can use tilt to drag themselves out of the doldrums is to misunderstand the intricacies of tilt and the subtleties of poker, I think. I wouldn't be going on what your 'clients' are saying, either, to back it up. Are you sure you're both meaning the same thing by 'tilt'? Are you sure they really share your definition of 'tilt?' Are you sure 'anger' and 'tilt' can be used interchangeably? What tilt is often runs to the core of what poker is and what psychology is in poker...this is why I asked you to clarify the latter in order to make any discussion about this type of situation fruitful.
The same kind of applied to the second bit, which was about the warm up (you were saying 'do general stuff' and I was saying 'you MUST play poker at a lower limit to warm up). Top basketball players should warm up, but they don't need to play basketball to warm up. Poker players like the OP should play poker, and not just go through some random routines, and this is especially true because of the role of psychology in the actual poker process and its responsibility for his early-on losses. For this reason, it's crucial to identify what this psychology is, or at the very least, that it's there (this can be done in 10 lines). If it's not there, if it's not that important and poker IS just like basketball and early losses like this would occur because his mind is generally just unfocused and not because he isn't primed for the psychology specific to poker (in the varied sense).

you guys seem to be talking past each other a bit. likely because you have different definitions of the word "tilt". for my part i would say that tilt can be connected to energy levels but if can also be connected to many other performance factors

seems to me that some kind of warmup to reach optimal "arousal" levels before any performance(poker,basketball....) can be helpful and i think this is common belief in sports psychology. but i do feel like this is only one piece of the puzzle.

i uses a pre-session warmup like Jared suggest in his books and i feel it helps my performance. but even with that i also know that i am more likely to make a mistakes in the early parts of my sessions so i have trained myself to take a little extra time on any close spot and remember that i am sometime a little more call happy early on in session.

so i do think self awareness is also a big piece of the puzzle

and i also think there is something to "warming up your poker brain" but i don't know what psychologists would call this. is there a name or theory about warming up a specific thought pathway?

Nice post there, Mike.
I think this self-awareness extends from hand to hand, you can cover a lot of sins and improve the quality of a lot of decisions by evaluating your motivations and distortions when you make them.

There is a model for that kind of thought pathway, it's called the 'Spreading Activation Model'. You can show quite clearly that if people are primed, for example, with 'hospital' words, they are much more likely than usual to choose 'nurse' in a subsequent forced-choice test. This is the basis of the work I did but it relates to memory more explicitly, and the subconscious.
I'm interested in areas where the normal mind is maladapted for poker and poker decisions, and bits of patterns and networks that are necessary for correct poker decisions that become knocked over in normal life and have to be brought back into play for winning poker.

Think areas of your game you want to work on, leaks you want to plug.
Play at lower limits for 10 minutes. or a hyper turbo.



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