I never really paid much heed to the mental side of poker until recently when I got into financial day trading. I was advised to read a psychology book by someone called Adrienne Toghraie but it is only recently that I started to read the book. Firstly reading trading books is very effective for online poker because the two areas are strikingly similar. Secondly getting your mind right involves things that you do every bit as much away from the poker table as on it. This never really struck home with me until I started to seek the help of this psychologist through book form.
If you imagine that as you are reading the book that this person is actually speaking to you then it has more of an effect I think. There were too many things that I was doing in my life that were making me feel bad. Things like staying in bed late in the morning; I would often wake up sluggish and then hate myself for having stayed in bed so late. Then I would overeat and then hate myself afterwards for doing this. All this has an effect on your subconscious mind and knocks on to your ability to play poker. I then used to find that I didn’t even want to play poker at all because I just couldn’t take a losing session after numerous negative events had happened.
Now it makes perfect sense to me because if most things in your life are positive then you are far more likely to be able to ride negative sessions. When things in your life are negative then you are already coming off the back of negatives before the poker session even starts. So psychologically you feel that you don’t want any more negatives for that day.
