With practice, poker players can learn to use their emotions to their advantage.

As poker players, we’re frequently encouraged to believe that regular everyday human emotions are the enemy, and that they’re something we should strive to eliminate in order to play better poker.

While this is grounded in some logic to the extent that it is true that our brains are better at logical calculation when they are unencumbered by emotional stimuli, it’s absurd to think that we can completely eliminate the attachment of any emotion whatsoever to our poker endeavours.

Emotions exist, and they’re not going away

We all experience emotions every day, in a variety of ways, and they can be triggered by anything that falls within the bounds of the human experience. On an evolutionary level, our emotions exist to protect us – they’re a survival mechanism. We’re conditioned to feel good about the things that help us to continue existing as living beings, and we feel bad about the things that threaten us.

This is why it makes sense that good results generate good emotions and bad results generate bad ones, especially in poker – capitalist society dictates that making money is the way we guarantee our survival, and thus the process of trying to make money by playing poker taps into our evolutionary instincts in a way we can’t always predict. When we gamble and lose, we’re conditioned to believe that our survival is being threatened because we have less money than we did before, and money is crucial to our survival.

It’s unreasonable to think that we can overcome this instinct just by being aware of it – you can’t fight thousands of years of human evolution. Instead, what’s important is to generate an environment for ourselves where we’re not trying to fight our instincts – we’re simply putting ourselves in a position where busting a poker tournament doesn’t threaten our survival, so that instinct is never triggered.

This obviously means that our emotions are likely to be set off more significantly when we’re playing with a short bankroll, since every tournament bust-out or big cash game hand we lose is a bigger threat to the survival of our bankroll if we’re almost broke.

Thus, the good news is that we control the bankroll we play with, the games we play in, and the types of players we choose to tackle (to an extent), so we have a certain degree of control over our circumstances. We can use this control to put ourselves in the situations most conducive to playing without strong emotional stimuli attached to them, and make better decisions at the table as a result.

They affect the way you play, even if you tell yourself otherwise

I’ve heard many players say that they do tilt from time to time, but that it doesn’t affect the way they play. This is absolutely false in every single instance, bar none. All this statement means is that they lack the awareness to identify the ways in which tilt or strong emotions affect the way they play, or that up until now they haven’t been able to pinpoint specific instances of it happening.

The reason this statement can never be true is, once again, a question of science – since your brain is configured in a way that makes rational decision-making more difficult when strong emotions are present and your brain’s chemistry is different, it’s simply not possible to make decisions in the same way. When you’re experiencing strong emotions, the reason why you act irrationally is because those emotions are literally obstructing the mechanisms that allow you to act rationally in the first place.

You may be a good enough player to have learned certain things to the level of unconscious competence and be able to survive in the games you play even while on tilt – perhaps you only play short-stacked turbo tournaments, for example, and you know your push-fold ranges by heart.

But the problem is that as soon as you step into a game that requires using that part of your brain that needs to think a little harder about things, strong emotions will get in the way, so all you’re really doing is avoiding the issue and hoping you don’t get into a situation that requires higher-level thinking.

Using emotions to predict your future

So how can we actually use these emotions to our advantage? It requires thinking about each hand as a sequence of decisions, and recognising that one decision follows another in leading us deeper down the ‘rabbit-hole’ that begins preflop and ends at the river.

If you’re making a decision preflop about which you’re unsure or lacking confidence, then there’s a significantly greater chance of your making a mistake later on in the hand, simply because the hand began with a small emotional stimulus which is likely to grow.

If you’re lacking confidence or not sure if a certain play is correct, that’s fear showing itself. When fear shows itself, your next decision will be more difficult, as your brain has begun experiencing emotion that will cloud your judgment. The decision after that will be even more difficult, and so on, and of course each decision is more significant than the last since the pot is getting bigger and bigger.

Theoretically, therefore, our goal in using our emotions to guide us is to recognise that the more uncertain or fearful we are earlier in a hand (or, conversely, the more aggressive and perhaps even angry we are – think about a hand where you’re so intent on beating an opponent you don’t like that you decide to 3-bet them with a trashy hand for no reason), the more likely we are to make bad decisions later on in that same hand.

Since such a big portion of our EV as poker players comes from the quality of the decisions we make on the turn and river in particular, simply being aware that our emotions are likely to be more intense when we get to those streets if we make a preflop or flop decision we’re not sure about can help us minimise the mistakes we make later in hands.

As we get better as players, the uncertainty, fear, aggression or anger we might feel in every situation will decrease, since we’re more confident in our ability. With this development, we free up mental space to make better turn and river decisions, and reduce the impact of emotions on our EV.

Over time, this impact compounds itself, and we’re eventually able to play fearlessly on every street. Take note of the times you experience emotions in the earlier stages of a hand, respond accordingly by studying these situations and minimising their occurrence, and you’ll be able to harness this emotion for future gain.