Levels of Emotion

Something I have been thinking about recently.

One thing that separates good poker players from bad poker players is the degree to which their play is dictated by emotion. Good players are less dependent on emotion in making their decisions. At least this is the conventional wisdom.

Ernest Hemingway defined morality by saying that what's immoral will make you feel bad afterwards, while something that's moral won't make you feel bad afterwards.

This is easily understandable even if you don't agree with it, and it points to the existence of different levels of emotion. There are surface emotions, which spring up from your immediate hopes, frustrations, desires, your flight-or-fight instinct, and your behavioral patterns of the past. And on another level there are your identity beliefs, your vision of how you want your world to look and how you want to be.

Good players act more according to these second-level emotions, instead of their surface emotions.

A lot of new players or bad players just don't know what the right play is. They don't know what to do. But I'm not talking about that. Experienced players often know what they are supposed to do, at least in the back of their minds, yet take some other action. If they are timid they check when they know they should bet, or they fail to take advantage of some great bluffing opportunity. If they are on tilt they will overplay their hands. If they don't like a guy, they will get involved in a pot and make a bad call against that jackass just to snap him off.

Even when I play well, I usually look back on a session and find one or two spots where I made this kind of mistake, where I allowed surface emotions to dictate my play. When I play bad or go on tilt, it's a disaster zone.

This applies to more than poker, of course. But for anyone who wants to get good at poker, this stuff is critical.