Recently, I was lucky enough to interview high-stakes live cash pro Matt Berkey for a podcast over at Tournament Poker Edge – one of the most interesting interviews I’ve been a part of to date. He raised an interesting concept, using terminology that isn’t really part of the traditional poker lexicon – he talked about high-level poker being a case of figuring out your opponents’ “pain thresholds”.

This struck me as a particularly apt analogy, given that the higher the stakes you’re playing, the more potential pain awaits your unsuspecting opponents (at least if you’re someone who crushes as hard as Berkey does) or you if you make mistakes. The funny thing, however, is that even players playing the lowest stakes have pain thresholds, they just don’t exist for the same reasons.

Understanding Contrasting Motivations

It goes without saying that people playing poker for high stakes mostly do it for the huge sums of money involved (and, to some extent, for the thrill of playing for them), but that doesn’t mean people playing for low stakes are just playing because they have nothing better to do. Of course, we should consider that everyone playing the game does it for a reason, and thus, they all have something to lose.

That something isn’t always money – sometimes it’s pride or ego, sometimes it’s the time they spend playing, sometimes it’s the fun and entertainment they get from it. But no matter what the circumstances, there is always something that can suddenly cause a player to go from complete comfort and serenity, to forehead-scrunching confusion and abject frustration. While we’re not in the business of causing our opponents pain on a personal level and we should always be respectful to our fellow players, we can use our understanding of our opponents’ motivations to inflict as much pain on them as possible with our playing style.

For example, low-stakes players who are playing for pride or their ego frequently exhibit a tendency to ‘hero-call’ too often – they’re obsessed with trying to achieve that great feeling of calling an opponent’s bluff and winning the pot, and they’re willing to lose ten pots that way just to win one. On the other hand, a player in even a $3 online tournament might be extremely tilted from a bad beat he just took, and he’ll be extremely risk-averse for a while as a result.

Making Peace with Big Pots and Variance

In order to take advantage of other people’s pain thresholds, we need to begin by minimising or eliminating our own. Simply put, there should be nothing in poker that can cause you any significant pain. Our bodies and brains are conditioned to avoid pain, but we can also use our emotional and mental capabilities to define what is or isn’t painful for us, so we can manipulate our brains (our bodies, not so much) in this way.

The process of eliminating your pain threshold begins with the recognition that the things that usually cause you pain – losing big pots, bad beats, coolers, bubbling the final table of a tournament, losing a heads-up match – are a necessary part of life as a poker player. They’re unavoidable – if you played poker forever, you’d experience countless instances of each one. The more of each you experience, the less pain each one causes you – your pain threshold expands. Given long enough, it would expand to the point where nothing in poker could hurt you, and then you’d be the one in charge.

Being Fearless in Important Spots

People often refer to ‘fearlessness’ as an important quality for a poker player, and there’s a strong correlation between that quality and lacking a pain threshold. However, there’s an important step in between the two – before you can learn to do something fearlessly, you have to learn to “feel the fear and do it anyway”, to quote Susan Jeffers’ book.

Before making a big river bluff becomes a matter of course for you, there has to be a first time, and a second time, and a third time – you get the picture. If you never start doing something, it can’t become a habit, and if it doesn’t become a habit, it will probably always have fear attached to it. Breaking through your pain threshold means turning the things that used to scare you into the most mundane things in the world, and to do that you have to push through those first few instances.

Putting Poker in a Wider Context

Finally, it’s crucial to recognize that while poker might seem like the most important thing in the world while we’re in the middle of each tournament or cash game session, it should never be our be-all and end-all. No matter how motivated you are to succeed in poker, it should always form part of a balanced lifestyle that gives you opportunities to interact socially and do the other things you enjoy – otherwise you’re risking burnout, mental game and even mental health problems.

By recognizing that poker is just one aspect of your life and busting a poker tournament or having a losing cash session really isn’t that much of a big deal, you ruin poker’s ability to inflict pain on you – if it can’t hurt you that badly, all of a sudden you’re the one with the power. A well-rounded understanding of your own emotions and thought processes can help you discover your potential and crash through the pain barrier to unlock the riches beyond.