JV'S KILLER POKER:
Stress

BY: John Vorhaus

You still think poker is about money, and you still stress out when you lose. You don't need a doctor with a blood pressure cuff to tell you that stress is bad for you. All you need is to see what stress does to your stack. Overcome stress, amigo, or stress will surely overcome you.

There are all sorts of strategies for damping or dumping stress. Most of them are useless. Some pundits suggest, for example, salving your wounds by taking the long view, thus: You're born broke, you die broke; everything else is just fluctuation.

What a helpful homily - not! When you've just peed away two racks in two hours, you're in no mood to be consoled by "the long view." You're in pain. You feel stress. And the notion that life is one long poker game in which one session can neither make nor break your lifelong bankroll - well, in that place at that time, it's cold comfort indeed.

So maybe you try this ad-hoc absolution instead: I played as well as I possibly could; I didn't make any mistakes.

This likewise doesn't work. You may have played perfectly, but the fact remains that you got your kiester waxed, and a waxed kiester is an unhappy kiester, no matter how smoothly and roundly alabaster that kiester may remain.

So you turn to a third rationale. This one, at least, has the benefit of being proactive: This adversity is a test of will, and I will pass the test!

And while this thought may stiffen your resolve for next time, it does frick-all in the moment to make the pain of the moment go away.

And it's not minor pain, not like, say, a root canal. This is extreme pain. It's real. It's powerful. Loud inside your head. Inarguable. And it's not going to go away just because you can think of a mantra to chant. Why? Because a certain problematic human relationship with money goes back a lot further than your involvement with poker, or even than poker itself, or even than gambling. This problematic human relationship with money goes all the way back to the beginning of human history. Without going all anthropologic on you, I can boil down this problematic relationship to a simple equation: In our minds, money = survival.

Oh yes, money equals survival, and it's been this way ever since the first bright Johnnie got the notion to swap his leftover wheat for someone else's leftover meat, and employed beads or shells or coins to facilitate the trade. Money equals food. Food equals survival. Therefore, money equals survival. What could be simpler than that?

Ah, but now look what happens when you throw chips into the mix. Chips equal money. Money equals food. Food equals survival. Therefore, chips equal survival. This is how you feel about them, right down there in your muddy, muddled medulla oblongata. And I'm not talking about chip-and-a-chair type tournament survival. I'm talking raw, draw-another-breath, live-to-see-another-day survival. Is it any wonder that the loss of chips causes you some stress? On the level of your deepest psychological programming, when you lose a lot of chips you feel like your life is on the line.

This is why you must stop thinking of chips as money. Because the connection between money and survival is hard-wired into our brains by ten thousand generations of human history. It's not going anywhere; we're stuck with it. But this connection between chips and money, this is new. Those cords are not wrapped so tightly around your brain. You can still break the symbolic bonds that lie at the root of your stress.

It's hard. I know it's hard. In a sense it defies logic. After all, you took money out of your wallet to buy those chips, and if you have any chips left when you're done, you'll sell them back and get money in return. So chips equal money, right? Not necessarily. Here's something you might try doing: Never sell them back. Take that thing you call your bankroll and turn it into a big, unwieldy mound of chips. Fill a shoebox, maybe. When you go to play poker, you pull chips from your shoebox. When you get back from playing, you throw what chips you have left back in the box. The number of chips rises and falls. You never convert it to money, so you never connect it to money. That way when you lose, you only have to think about why you lost and how you lost, and not worry about how the loss of a few round tokens will affect your long-term chances for thrival and survival upon this mortal coil. Chips do not equal money, not if you will it so.

Of course, if you really want to be a bitch about it, you can always turn this stress factor around and use it against your enemies. When you see someone freaking out at the poker table, don't discourage them from freaking out even more. Rather, draw their attention to the symbolic link between chips and money, money and survival and watch them, if they're the vulnerable sort, stew in their own juices. Of course it's cruel, but also it's real, and what's wrong with acknowledging what's real? So long as the relationship exists between chips and money, money and survival, there's an edge you can exploit to push your weaker-minded opponents around. After all this time I shouldn't have to remind you that it's precisely your weaker-minded opponents you want to concentrate on. But perhaps it's worth reminding you that there are only two kinds of poker players in this world, those who feel stress and those who do not. Can you guess which kind wins in the long run? If you can't, then you're not paying attention. But you'd better start paying attention, because stress is an acid that will eat away at your game, and so long as you persist in thinking of chips as money, then stress will eat away at you.

On that cheery note, I assign this homework: Play an entire session without counting your chips. Quit at an arbitrary and pre-determined time, and don't cash out when you leave. Teach yourself - train yourself - that money doesn't matter. Only poker matters. And only Killer Poker counts.