Why You Need to Stop Fighting to Control Poker

We’ve all played poker with people who love to talk about how unlucky they are. Sit down at any low-stakes cash table in Las Vegas or any home game in London and everyone will have a story for you about their latest bad beat or a big hand they lost.

These stories will often be accompanied by a muttered self-admonition, along the lines of, “I should have just shoved preflop”, or “terrible call, I should have folded”.

Occasionally, in the event that the player has either recognized the impact of variance or refused to admit to making a mistake, the admonition will be directed towards an opponent – “that donkey should never have called there”, or “such a bad call, what was he thinking?”

In many cases, the player is just looking for sympathy or reassurance, but beneath this lies an even more powerful impulse – the desire for control.

Poker’s biggest emotional trap

Most people respond to the idea of control in what feels like a rational way – they recognize that they control their own actions, but they don’t control the actions of others, and they don’t control the way the cards come out. But there’s recognizing a lack of control, and then there’s desiring more control, and these are two massively different concepts, particularly in poker.

Almost everyone wishes they had more control over the circumstances of their life. Most people wish they could just snap their fingers and make more money, or make their boss stop bothering them, or change their spouse’s behaviour.

In poker, almost everyone wishes they could win more coinflips, or get dealt pocket Aces every hand. In reality, we don’t have control over those things any more than we do over the weather each morning.

Neither do we have any control over the actions of other people. We might sit there for five minutes on the river, mentally screaming for our opponent to fold to our huge bluff, but we don’t actually control what they do. So why, if these things are so obvious, do we still feel bad about them?

The emotional trap we’re falling into is desiring to control the amount of control we have. Think about it – most people don’t ask the poker gods to deliver them pocket Aces every hand, just this one hand. They don’t ask to win every time they get it all-in with the worst hand, but just this “one time”.

They know they don’t control these things, but they’re so unhappy with that reality that they’re trying to fight to change the entire configuration of the universe, wishing everything were different, just to give themselves control of this one instance! Wouldn’t it be easier without fighting a battle they can’t win? Of course it would.

The power of absolute, radical acceptance

Here’s the part where we give up fighting that battle. It takes time, but with the right approach we can learn not just to embrace the fact that we don’t have control over the way the cards come out, but also to embrace the fact that we don’t fully control how wealthy or financially rich we are in our lives.

If you think you do, try talking to the 48% of UK citizens who, like me, recently voted for the UK to remain part of the European Union, but saw their net worth drop by 10% literally overnight anyway when the rest of the country voted to leave and the Pound crashed.

We don’t control the actions of our friends, family, husbands or wives, politicians, governments, business owners, other drivers on the road, sports teams, or poker opponents; we don’t control the circumstances into which we’re born, or any random accidents that might happen to us during the course of our lives.

I know that you know all of this, but you have to accept it. Truly accept it as an unshakeable reality. By which I mean, you have to give up screaming advice at the television to berate your favourite sports team (you can still root for them to win, I’m not trying to take all the joy out of it!). You have to give up calling for cards when you’re all-in. You have to give up trying to use Facebook to influence the way your friends perceive your personality.

I’m not just talking about recognising your lack of control, I’m talking about killing your wish completely and accepting whatever eventuality might happen. I’m talking about not wanting things to be any different than they are right here and now, even if right here and now absolutely sucks, because no matter how much you sit there wanting things to be different, it won’t help.

A radical transformation of your approach to life that will help you focus on responding to your circumstances in the best possible way, rather than wasting time wishing they were otherwise.

Transforming your life inside and outside of poker

You might be reading this thinking, “well, if I just accept everything and don’t try to change it, how am I ever supposed to improve as a person? How do I ever accomplish anything?” – this is natural to an extent, but it’s still predicated on the desire for control.

In most cases, people want to become a better person because they want to be more successful, or make more money, or be the best poker player in the world – they believe that improving themselves is a way to avoid being subject to the whims of the universe, a way to gain more control over the world and thus more control over their lives and the level of happiness and fulfilment they experience.

Actually, it’s the opposite. Money, success, fame – those are routes toward power. Power is the antithesis of control. The more power you have, the more unwieldy it becomes. Power is the enaction of a desire to change the world to suit oneself – it’s the end result of the desire for greater control over one’s own life.

But even those with the greatest power don’t have ultimate control – it’s why money is so rarely a direct route to happiness. All the money in the world can’t directly control the circumstances of a person’s life.

So if you want to become a better poker player and a better person, it’s time to start embracing the fact that you are not in total control of your life. You’re not in total control of whether you get into a car accident tomorrow, or whether the economy crashes, or whether your spouse cheats on you, or whether you win that poker tournament tomorrow.

All you control are your decisions – your responses to the situations that life throws at you. Giving up the fight for control will be the best decision you’ll ever make for your poker game, and you’ll free up massive amounts of mental energy by doing so. This is what will help you achieve great things and succeed in poker, because there’s a good chance that you wanting it more than anybody else, simply might not be enough.