After my most recent post about trying to limit the influence that day-to-day poker swings have on my mood and emotional state, I found two interesting comments on the blogs of other poker players. The first is from Curtains:
“Probably the true key is to stop getting happy when I win money? That’s an emotion that you generally pass off as being okay, because it feels good and how can anything be bad if it feels good? However it’s generally impossible to be very happy about winning money, without being really unhappy when you lose money. If I eliminate the good feelings that come with making money, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t allow myself to feel the bad feelings when I lose. So basically I have to not be happy when I win, and this way I am the big winner because my poker results will have absolutely no bearing on my happiness level, with the modest assumption that I make at least enough or close to enough to cover my monthly expenses. Yes I’ve decided that this is the key. From now on when I win, I will force myself to not care and not be happy, giddy etc etc. ”
The second comes from Ansky:
“Emotions are the bane of poker players. We want to make rational and unbiased decisions at the table. Emotions just get in the way. The more and more we play, the more we become inoculated against variance and tilt. But that has dramatic side effects in other parts of our lives. I felt nothing as my car temporarily skidded out of control in an ice storm. Nothing. It’s just not the way life is meant to be lived. ”
They’ve both got basically the same criticism of how poker encourages you to make important decisions (decisions affecting thousands of dollars, in the case of these players) without resort to emotion. They worry that training themselves to think this way at the poker table spills over to the rest of their lives, kind of numbing them from experiencing emotions in other contexts.
This is sort of the mirror image of what I was talking about, which was letting excitement or frustration from poker affect my mood outside of the game. Maybe my plan to try to react more emotionlessly to my poker results is not such a good one after all? I guess the real trick is to compartmentalize it so that win or lose, the results of any given poker session are just another day at the office and something to be left behind when not playing poker.
For more reading on this topic, there’s also a thread in the 2+2 Psychology forum.