We all have habits, both inside and outside of poker. Some are good, some are bad, but if you’ve ever tried to break a bad one, you’ll know how difficult it can be. But developing positive habits is crucial to success in any area of life, and poker players struggle against bad habits more than most. Let’s take a closer look at how your poker habits might be costing you money.

How do we develop poker habits?

In poker, many of our habits are a product of deep-seated, subconscious perceptions about the game or about ourselves as people. For example, someone with a significant tilt problem might believe, deep down, that they’re an unlucky person, and thus that belief manifests itself in a tilt reaction every time they take a bad beat. Their beliefs condition them to respond in a certain way to a stimulus that appears to confirm a negative reality, and every further confirmation produces a stronger response, until tilt becomes a habit.

Sometimes, habits are formed simply through a lack of conscious direction. The best example of this is players who go straight into a poker session without any kind of mental warm-up or meditation beforehand – it’s not so much the case that they don’t have a habit of preparing adequately for their sessions, as much as it is that they do have a habit of not preparing. Not doing something is an action in itself, and thus habits have to be consciously built if they are to become second nature. Many of us spend so much time focusing on at-the-table decision-making that we neglect to observe how many negative habits might be seeping into our preparation.

Consciously challenging an unconscious habit

In order to approach correcting a habit we have identified as damaging to our game (e.g. a tilt problem, lack of preparation, always bluffing on the river, always quitting a session after the first bad beat, etc.), we first need to recognise whether there are any subconscious assumptions creating the habit. In the last two examples above, the assumptions might be ‘giving up on winning the pot is a sign of weakness’, or ‘if I run bad early in my session, I will run bad all session, so quitting is better’.

In each of these cases, it’s important that we first challenge the underlying assumption, and then actively replace it with something more beneficial. If your bad habit is that you always bluff the river after you miss a draw, no matter what the board is, you might want to do some in-depth, mathematical analysis of these hands and figure out whether bluffing is even remotely profitable in those spots, and then consciously trying to find spots to give up on the river in-game.

If your habit is quitting too early, you might try revisiting some of your assumptions about variance, and perhaps reminding yourself of previous sessions where you lost a few pots early on and then came back to have a winning day, and then practicing playing for an extra 30 minutes or 1 hour after you’ve already decided to quit. Forcing your brain to confront the times where it’s ignoring reality is important, which brings us to our final point.

Embrace the discomfort!

Challenging your bad habits and developing better ones is uncomfortable. It will require re-examining your perceptions and behaviours, and being honest about the extent to which you are consciously adapting those perceptions and behaviours to produce the right results. There will be times where you feel like adopting a new, positive habit is actually having a negative impact – this is where it’s important not to be results-oriented, and stay patient. Just because you did a mental warm-up and had a losing session doesn’t mean going back to never warming up is a better idea.

They say it takes 30 days for a habit to be implemented to the point where it won’t automatically disappear without conscious effort. In poker, it’s arguably longer than that, since you’re not playing poker every single day. It might take 30, 50, 70, or 100 sessions before you’re able to fix a bad habit that’s costing you money, but taking the time to irreversibly fix a small leak in your game can have a massive impact – imagine that impact being spread out over all the hands you’ll play for the rest of your life. That’s how important your habits are, so don’t neglect them.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle