Why Your Poker Mindset Matters

Your poker mindset and the way you process challenges during and between sessions is a major determinant of your longterm success. There are three kinds of poker players when it comes to the mental game. Essentially, they break down into these categories:

• Love the mental game. Likely has meditation and mindfulness as part of their day-to-day lives.
• Hate the mental game. Thinks anything related to mindset is just woo-woo nonsense.
• Indifferent. Don’t really think about the mental game, but may see it as valuable “later”

If you are reading this, chances are you fairly indifferent about the mental game of poker. You wouldn’t be here if you saw zero value in it, but maybe you aren’t totally sold on the concept. It’s OK – I was there once too.

Before going any further, I’d like you to take a moment and answer these questions. Spend a few moments giving objective & honest answers to each of them:

• How many mistakes do you make that you know you would never make if you were playing at your best level?
• How many sessions do you play on autopilot or unfocused?
• How often do you review your sessions and you feel your winrate could be much higher with a better mindset?
• How often do you feel unmotivated?
• How often do you lose confidence in your game?
• How many months do you achieve the poker goals that you set at the beginning?
• How many times have you hated poker and thought about quitting?
• How often do you tilt?

These are the type of problems that we all face as poker players. Poker is tough, and the more you play, the more you’ll experience the depth of mental obstacles the game can throw at you.

Variance is more extreme than you think and the long-term is longer than it seems.

But have you thought about the real cost these problems have? And I’m not just talking about money, I’m talking about a big emotional cost as well. The myriad of mindset issues can cause you a lot of headaches, doubts, worries, fears, etc. Each taking more energy away from you and your life.

And they are expensive AF.

If you don’t fix them, you end up burning out (or worse, burning your bankroll). You play less and less, you avoid studying, and any time you do invest in poker is far from your optimal efforts.

I’m wondering why. Why do you accept less than what you could do?

Mental leaks won’t change by themselves. In a year, you will be facing the same problems if you don’t do anything about them. You will keep tilting the same way. You will keep making the same mistakes (because it’s not about your knowledge, it’s about your mindset and performance). You will keep feeling unmotivated and procrastinating.

Your game will keep breaking down every time you run bad.

I’ve been there, we all have.

But does it have to be this way? I don’t think so. And better yet, it’s not reliant on just trying to avoid strategic mistakes or only playing when you feel perfect.

It’s about your mindset and patching the leaks in your mental game. And you aren’t alone. Every human has mental inefficiencies that require work to fix. The difference is some people are willing to introspect, find the leaks, and put in the effort to fix them – and everyone else largely ignores and avoids their leaks.

Improving your mental game is a skill. If you have been able to study poker and improve, you are capable of improving your mindset.

Seriously – you control this.

The issue is that traditional training isn’t always the best fit for mental improvement. Reading a book can be too impersonal and too theoretical to help much. A mindset coach is great, but you get limited access to them and they are rarely there to help you mentally prepare before a session or cooldown after. And even poker courses like The Mental Advantage still miss a part of the process.

The key? Being direct, focused, and consistent action.

You have to take action…consistently. You have to put knowledge into practice. If you don’t practice what you know and what you’re learning, what difference does it make anyway?

The only way to turn knowledge into a longterm action is by harnessing the power of habits.

Changing your mental game is mostly about changing the way you think. And the way you think is a habit. You have to retrain your mind over time, a little bit every day, and make sure that you take control of your mental state and your performance.

For that, I would suggest the first-of-its-kind tool: Pokermind.

This mental game manager bridges the gap between theory and practice. It helps you when you need it the most: when it’s time to play and perform. Pokermind gives you an easy way to develop the high-performance habits that will have the biggest long-term impact on your game: the warmup and the cooldown.

By putting just a few minutes of effort into both of these you can play better, for longer, and feel better while doing it. Warming up the correct way allows you to leave the day’s stresses behind you and start each session clear & focused. And cooling down allows you to quickly reset, digest the session that just happened, and get back to your real life without bringing your bad beats with you.

+$EV and +HappinessEV. Win/win!

If you dedicate to using Pokermind you will:

• Improve your mental game by working on your weaknesses daily.
• Perform at a higher level consistently.
• Start each session at 100%.
• Achieve your grinding goals every month.
• Develop stable motivation and self-confidence.
• Improve your self-awareness and tilt recognition so you can react quickly and minimize its impact.
• Review your session and your game daily to detect where you need to improve next
• Reset mentally after each session to go back into your life fresh.
• Focus on what you can control, yourself, and not on what you can’t, your results.

Register today at Pokermind.co and you’ll also get:

• A free 6-email course that will teach you the most important secrets to become a professional poker player.
• Four free guides that will teach you how to create good habits: the habits that will have the most impact on your performance at the tables, how to create the perfect Warm-up routine for you and the simplest exercise that you can do every day to improve your mental game.
• Access to a 14-day free trial to the first mental game manager. Try it with full capabilities and if you don’t like it, cancellation is easy.

Just click here to start your free trial today. If you know the mental game is important, and you can commit just a few minutes before and after each session, Pokermind will be a huge asset to your poker game. Remember, as the game gets tougher and solvers get stronger – the final edge out there goes to the mentally toughest.

Are you ready to get that edge?