Poker Pro Magazine Article April 2010

Playing Winning Poker By Embracing Fear- And The Other F Words, by Bob Silverstein

I used to work in a trauma intervention program run for the benefit of emergency services responders. The program provided trauma related services following emotionally difficult events, like dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 or arriving on the scene where a child died. We often used a seven-step model that guided participants through the difficult event. The forth step was called the “reaction step.” It might have just as well been called the “feeling step” or phase, but the word “feeling” seemed to cause outsized reactions for the participants. We came to joke that the F word was actually feelings and not the usual word associated with it.

I've found that in poker feelings also seem to be an F word.

The standard thinking goes that having emotions and exhibiting feelings while we play are both a distraction and a tell: A distraction that leads us away from sound analysis and into the realm of impulsive over- or under-reaction, and a tell in that other players will read our emotion and know, for example, that we are overexcited by the cards we hold and withdraw from the hand or that we are fearful and thus know to increase the pressure and take the hand away from us.

Rather than acknowledge our feelings, we go to all sorts of lengths to hide and distract. We wear hoodies, dark shades, engage in distracting banter or try to embody the ever-cool and detached. The problem with this strategy is that when we disconnect from what we are actually feeling, we are lying to ourselves and becoming disconnected from what is really going on inside.

CLASSIC EXAMPLE

In October, I played in the preliminary event of the inaugural Poker Pro Magazine Classic at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. About a third of the way in I lost the first of two hands that exemplify the problem of not identifying and acknowledging feelings during the course of poker play. Four of us called the big blind, me with Q-J of spades. The flop came K-10-3 with two spades. I was last to act and bet. The small blind then reraised me for what would have been about half of my remaining chip stack. He got one caller and after thinking for a long time I decided that I did not want to risk my tournament on a draw, even a wonderful one like mine with 15 outs, so I folded.

Sure enough the 9 of spades came on the turn and I would have won a very large pot and crushed my opponent’s kings. While I had acted in a fearful way, I don't believe that my fear was actually the problem here. It was really that I detached from my fear because I didn't like the way it made me feel. If I hadn't detached, I would have been far more likely to stay calm and analyze my fear on its merits. In that case my thinking would have probably gone like this: “Yes I could be putting my tournament at risk, but the odds of winning the hand trumps this fear.”

Nevertheless, I held on to my stack and starting winning hands again. By the time a third of the field remained I was back in the hunt and had about an average size chip stack. At that point, one of the aggressive and excellent players at the table noticed that me and another man were both doing quite well and that we were “the tightest players at the table.”

The hand after he said that, I had A, Q unsuited in the hole. I was on the button and first to bet. I raised four times the big blind and the young man who had just made the comment about my play called from the small blind. The flop came up Q-J-6 with two spades, almost the mirror image of the hand that I had folded and lost earlier. This time he acted first and raised about 12,000, which was about a quarter of my remaining stack. With top pair and an ace kicker I was very strong and thought that he was trying to push me off the pot. I raised him all-in.

He called, exclaiming that unless I had trips that he was the favorite. He showed K-10 of spades. I had gotten my money in with the lead on the board, but his eighteen outs gave him the advantage. A three of hearts came on the turn, but then he got a nine on the river and I was toast. Not only had my unacknowledged fear cost me the first hand, but because I wasn't honest with myself I believe that it led to me overcompensating in this hand and as well. My opponent’s comment that I was tight also probably didn't help. Again, still reeling from my earlier play where I detached from my fear, I probably wanted to prove to him and myself that I was bold and not tight or fearful.

FEELINGS ARE INEVITABLE

There are so many ways that we can win or lose a hand or a tournament. There are, in fact, lots of reasons to be fearful or experience other emotions. Queens with an ace kicker, as in the hand above, is a strong hand, but certainly not a clear winner on that flop. If I had been OK with feeling fearful and the useful information that my fear was giving me about the hand, I believe that I would have been better able to make the right play. In that case, instead of raising all-in and putting the entire tournament at risk, I could have simply called, keeping both my hand and my options open, and saw the turn. When the 3 came up I could have assumed that the 3 missed his hand and made me a much stronger favorite. If I hadn't over-bet because I didn't want to be afraid earlier, I could have gone all-in at that point with much greater confidence that I had the better hand and that my bet would not be called.

While showing our fear while we play is problematic, having feelings is inevitable and human. While it is true that some people have difficulty containing their feelings under stress and therefore will either over- or under-react to them, not being ale to experience and identify feelings and thus benefit from the information they convey is a more serious mistake.

Our brains actually read the lack of identification of normal and appropriate emotions as confusing: It is like we are saying to ourselves that what we are experiencing actually isn't taking place. Kind of, “Say what, are you or aren't you?”

By feeding our brain mixed signals, our brain gets busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on. As it tries to resolve this situation, it can't apply its full attention to the game. We forget, or don’t understand, that there is a difference between having fear (and acknowledging it to ourselves) and showing it to our competitors. Our brain actually works more efficiently when we can be more accurate and honest with ourselves. It is not the emotion - fear in this case - which is problematic, but the concern we have over experiencing it. The concerns breeds a lack of calm and a compromised ability to use all the information before us.

BEING HONEST

As in the examples above, I lose far more hands trying to detach from my fear and act cool then when I simply admit to myself that I'm afraid. If in the hands above I had accepted the reality that none of my options were a sure thing and therefore that I had good reason to be fearful, than I believe I would have indeed calmed down and in both cases made better plays. So if wearing the hoodies and the shades helps you to keep calm and feel safer (because you believe that your opponents can't read you), by all means continue to wear them. Don't put blinders on when it comes to your own feelings, however, because if you do you will be confusing yourself far more than you will be deceiving your opponents about the hand taking place right in front of you.

In that case, rather than having the normal feelings that are part of playing winning poker, the F word will be fuhgettaboutit: winning that is.

Radio interview on House of Cards Radio

Listen to my interview with Ashley Adams on the syndicated radio program The House of Cards:

http://houseofcardsradio.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=594510

Poker Pro Magazine Article January 2010

The Pros "Tell" All: How Top Players Deal With Hidden Emotions At The Table

http://pokerpromagazine.com/when-choosing-a-fantasy-team.html

Poker Pro Magazine Article, November 09

The Blame Game: If You Are Losing It Pays To Look Inward Rather Than Search For Scapegoats

http://pokerpromagazine.com/the-blame-game.html

Poker Pro Magazine Article, May 2009

Understanding ‘Internal Tells’ Will Give You an Edge:
How Your Inner Feelings Affect Your Bottom Line

http://pokerpromagazine.com/understanding-internal-tells.html

Advisory Alliance Interview

Bob, please tell us about your professional background.
I'm a clinical social worker and consultant with over 25 years of experience as a crisis manager, organizational change consultant, employee counselor and executive coach. Currently I work primarily in a private coaching and counseling practice and secondarily as a troubleshooter for management and employees before, during, and after a disruption that traumatically affects members of the workforce.

Why the move into poker?
I've always been a recreational poker player. A few years ago I took a training course on psychological trauma. The course taught me how trauma, crisis, and stress affect our brain and our body, and how they can overwhelm our ability to function normally and cause our thinking, emotions and reactions to become distorted. I learned to identify the signs and symptoms of a stress-based response and those of an "in-the-zone" response. I also learned techniques for adjusting these responses.

In addition to helping me assist my clients to deal with their exposure to excessive stress and trauma, I began to apply what I had learned to my poker playing with increasingly profitable results. Last year I won a tournament that paid the $10,000 entry fee and all my expenses for the Main Event at the 2008 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Of the 6900 plus entrants in Vegas, I finished in 780th place or in the top 12%.

What version of poker do you play?
I play tournament No Limit Texas Hold 'em. It is the poker game that has sparked the recent poker craze. It is all over television and is the game that receives the most attention at each year's World Series of Poker and gets hours of coverage on ESPN. No Limit Texas Hold 'em is considered a betting game as much as a card game, and can put extraordinary pressure on a player to think clearly under very stressful circumstances.

Why do you think poker has drawn such an interest by so many people?
Poker is social, intellectually challenging, and offers the allure of making a nice profit. Sound poker play draws on mathematical ability, gamesmanship, and the ability to read your competitors, understand oneself, and manage risk. While poker is certainly imbued with all of the risks and problems associated with gambling, it has proven to be a game of great skill as well. In fact, a major part of the appeal of poker is that as one's skill improves, poker is less like gambling and more like any other activity that we master, in that results become more predictable. For many poker players, poker is not only a measuring stick for how well we manage and learn from the challenges of the game, but how we manage and learn from life's challenges as well.

What has studying and playing poker taught you about assessing risk, making decisions and confronting fear and uncertainty?
For me, playing poker is as much a grand experiment as an avocation. The game provides me with the opportunity to regularly recognize and separate optimal from less than optimal states of being and to gauge the results of doing so. Recently, for example, I was on a long streak where I was coming very close, but just missing "the money." My knowledge and skill were working, in that I was finishing ahead of 80 to 90% of my competitors in almost every game, but I was still missing all my paydays. (I usually play tournament style Texas Hold 'em where only the top 10% of finishers typically get paid). Playing poker has taught me that if something bad is happening regularly, then I need to figure out what I am doing wrong, and take responsibility for making it stop.

In this specific case, with a lot of introspection and help from my coach, I was able to identify that I was tightening up and playing too cautiously as I got down to crunch time. I learned I was afraid of making the wrong decision and of feeling I was the cause for screwing up. By playing too cautiously I was making my card playing decisions too easy for my competitors to read, and I was assuming too little risk in my hands. Once I accepted that making the wrong decision wasn't half as bad as dooming me to mediocrity, I loosened up and won five of my next seven games.

What else have you learned from playing poker?
I have learned so much about myself, my life and my work from playing poker. Among the more important lessons have been:
- Pay more attention to the cards in front of you (your reality) than to any fears or speculations you may have about your competitors, your colleagues, etc.
- Focus on the game; don't get distracted by feelings or concerns unrelated to the game.
- Notice when your attention, focus, comfort and calmness (state of mind and body) are not what they should be; adjust and correct them accordingly.
- If you focus on the game, get the right influence over your body & mind, and make the necessary adjustments when needed, your performance and your results will improve.

Managing Risk, Mindfulness and Poker

Part II
Relevance to the Current Economic Crisis
In my last newsletter I wrote about winning an on-line poker tournament where the prize was a free seat at this year’s (2008) World Series of Poker (WSOP) $10,000 No-Limit Texas Hold ‘em “Main Event”. I wrote about the significance of this event for me personally and the connections that I found between playing poker and my professional activities as a psychotherapist and executive coach. Today’s newsletter continues down that path and updates you on my tournament experience, its application to my thinking and its relevance to the recent crisis in our credit and financial institutions.
This year’s tournament had over 6900 participants. The tournament itself was spread over seven 10-hour days of poker play. The top 666 players (the last to be eliminated) each won at least $21,200 and the prizes increased to $9,100,000 for first place. I came in 780th (top 12%), played over 25 hours of poker and missed “the money” by 114 places. I was eliminated when I made a risky, but strategically correct all-in (all of my chips) bet, with a starting hand (“pocket”) of Ace, King, and lost to another player’s pocket Queens. The subsequent five cards did not improve my hand and allowed my opponent's cards to hold up.
I lost my last hand fully aware that I could lose, but also knowing that the odds of my winning, the pressure my all-in bet put on my opponents and the amount of chips I could win if the cards went my way made the bet a wise one strategically. Even though I lost the hand, I felt comfortable that I had made the right decision under pressure. I was satisfied that I acted both mindfully and strategically, not only in this one hand, but in the hundreds of hands leading up to this one. I left the tournament having achieved a terrific result and validating that my style of play both manages risk and allows me to compete successfully.
As I write this, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and many of our other financial institutions have either been sold or are in the process of being bailed out by our government. While the skills that are necessary to manage our financial system and its institutions are clearly not the same as those required to play poker, it does occur to me that many of the skills I use to play poker mindfully would have been useful in preventing the financial meltdown that is currently taking place. A parallel I see is that the failure of these companies was the result of the deregulation of a financial system that allowed too many of its participants to disconnect from the risk that they were assuming. Any individual or institution that plays a game/business with inherent risk, plays poorly if they are unable or unwilling to monitor the risk factors present in their activity at all times, or have a monitoring system that checks and effectively regulates their actions for them. When I play poker I do well only as long as I can keep my attention focused, modulate my moods, evaluate my odds and stay connected to the game taking place in front of me—in other words—as long as I stay regulated. Apparently too many bankers and risk managers, spurred on by competitive pressure and the absence of regulation, were unable to keep track of the business in front of them.
Mindful poker play teaches one much about managing risk. Because in tournament Texas Hold ‘em only the last man standing wins, it is sometimes strategically correct and mindful to make very big and risky bets. When I made the all-in bet that caused my elimination from the tournament, for example, I knew that my odds of winning the hand were approximately 50/50. I took this risk anyway for a variety of reasons, including that at that particular stage of the tournament my need to gain chips outweighed the benefit of saving chips (as the mandatory bets were depleting my remaining chip stack and making my continuing survival in the tournament problematic). A 50/50 bet to gain a lot of chips was actually less risky than avoiding any risk altogether and temporarily preserving the smaller amount of chips that I had left. Even though this decision eliminated me from the tournament, it was the type of decision in my game that over time reduces risk and leads to success more often than it leads to failure. I was also aware of and able to accept the consequences of my action.
The participants in our banking and credit institutions, however, seemingly played their game blinded by the opportunity to profit and seemingly blinded to the possibility of loss. As editorial writer Thomas G. Dolan said in the September 22 issue of Barron’s,
“Banks lent more money than they should have to people who were borrowing more money than they should have, mostly on the strength of the idea that real estate would appreciate enough to cover up any problems.”
A sound player would never assume, as Dolan postulates in regards to the actions of those in the real estate and credit markets that they would always get cards that are good enough “to cover up any problem.” A mindful player knows the risks and knows that no one will bail him out if he is wrong. If we are wrong we lose, if we are right we win. Our banks and credit managers should know this as well.
When high-risk mortgages and credit instruments were sold and then repackaged as “high quality,” it set in motion a disconnect between actual and represented risk. As Dolan indicated, it encouraged an assumption that real estate would only go up, despite the fact that this has never been an “up only” reality. Purchasers were willing to invest under this illusion, because it allowed them to purchase homes that they otherwise would never have been able to afford. Institutions that sold these mortgages perpetuated this fraud in order to make short-term profits that were too tempting to turn down. Our government and regulating bodies joined in, and in some cases fostered, an ideology that encouraged this process. Their ideological belief in a free and unregulated market was aligned with their denial about their own greed and their need for regulation.
Mindful poker teaches a player never to make a bet that is riskier than it needs to be. A bet should always be realistic, calculated, grounded in the relationship between risk and reward and it should always consider the position, tendencies and motives of one’s competition. Richard Bernstein, Chief Investment Strategist at Merrill Lynch said in the September 29 issue of Barron’s:
“The idea that you could remove risk from the marketplace really made people speculate. What the credit market did was to expand that speculation to the broader marketplace.”In order to be more successful in the way we manage ourselves, our businesses and our government we must never lose sight of the fact that risk is an inherent part of life. If we are to manage risk successfully, rather than speculate, we must act with our feet firmly planted, our bodies and minds calm, our attention alert and we must be able to interact in an open, interested and empowered fashion. Partisan, divisive, rigid, grandiose, magical, detached, uninterested, greedy or uninvolved approaches simply cannot be effective.