It’s very easy these days to find information that will help you if you aspire to be a professional poker player. Strategy advice is everywhere on the Internet, and if you’re on TPE you’ve probably already spent a good deal of time on your at-the-table strategy. Even when it comes to off-the-table behaviours, it’s easy to find useful resources – the books of Jared Tendler or Tommy Angelo, the podcasts of Elliot Roe, or any number of other sources that will give you valuable advice on things like game selection, bankroll management, managing your learning, motivation, confidence, and more.
There’s one aspect of professional or semi-professional poker, however, that usually gets almost completely ignored, and yet it is perhaps the single most important thing necessary in order to foster a psychological environment that can allow you to learn more effectively and play your best poker more frequently. I’m talking about mental health, and the many forms of mental health issues confronted by poker players on a daily basis.
The influence of pre-existing issues
People often talk about how poker is a ‘stressful’ profession, the same way they might talk about running your own business or any other competitive enterprise. The implication of this, of course, is that poker players are prone to suffering from stress – but we would be extremely naive to assume that it ends there. There are all kinds of things in poker that can cause stress, but we often bring a lot of our personal issues to the table before we ever play a hand.
Poker players are prone to depression, low self-esteem, anxiety issues, addiction and a number of other psychological afflictions, and this is borne out by the sheer frequency with which we see people within the poker community exhibiting behaviours that may seem inexplicable to those with no knowledge of their situation. Everything from going on rage-tilt at the table after taking a bad beat, all the way up to stealing from a backer to fund an alcohol problem or a gambling addiction – these behavioural problems and poor choices often have a lot to do with unacknowledged mental health problems.
Of course we can’t absolve from any blame those who fail to repay debts or scam other members of the community – they’re accountable for their actions. But we also can’t go the other route and claim that those players exhibiting seemingly bizarre emotional behaviours at the table are doing it because they’re just eccentric people who choose to act that way. Poker puts an incredible amount of strain on an individual’s mental processes, and many times these processes break down under external influences.
Understanding your weaknesses
At this point you might be thinking, “well, I don’t have a tilt problem and I’m not a thief, so I guess this doesn’t apply to me”. Sadly, it does apply to you, because we’re all vulnerable to mental health issues in some way. Even if you’re very stable and balanced at the table and you’re the kind of person who would never steal from anyone (which I hope you are), you could very easily still be prone to lack of confidence, low self-esteem, anxiety, or addiction of another kind entirely.
To give you an idea of how wide-ranging the issues are that could affect your poker, during my four-year career I’ve been impacted by issues as diverse as caffeine-induced anxiety, addiction to certain kinds of unhealthy foods, low confidence, depression, social anxiety, sleep issues and significant entitlement tilt. I wasn’t able to address any of these issues until I was aware of them, and I wasn’t aware of them until they had already caused problems. None of them derailed my career completely, but each of them affected my poker game in its own way, even if it was as simple as my diet worsening and my energy level during sessions getting lower.
The point is, you probably have a lot of vulnerabilities you’ve never examined before. If you’re below the age of 25, it’s entirely possible that you simply haven’t come across any situations in life yet that will put your greatest mental weaknesses under the microscope. As a result, it’s crucial to look at yourself as hard as possible before you begin a career as a poker player and try your best to figure out which aspects of your personality might make life harder for you once you embark on that career.
Achieving work/life balance
Probably one of the most common issues affecting poker players is poor work-life balance, leading to everything from social anxiety to addiction issues to poor physical health. Poker players frequently espouse the idea that maximising your EV is the holy grail of the game, and thus getting as much volume as possible is necessary in order to maximise that EV. Players also deliberately make choices that lead them to sacrifice their work-life balance in favour of lower variance – for example, someone choosing to grind low-stakes SNGs 12 hours a day, 6 days a week because they decided they didn’t like the variance involved with playing five 6-hour MTT sessions instead.
Poker players who obsess over putting in volume are creating vulnerability for themselves in a number of areas. They’re making themselves more prone to stress, sleep issues, diet issues and other physical problems, and they’re even flirting with addiction issues after a certain point. Of course, the players who don’t put in enough volume are flirting with not making enough money to live on, but I’m sure they’re aware of that. It’s striking the balance that’s important.
Your first instinct as a poker player is probably going to be “I want to make as much money as I possibly can” – this is good, because that’s the mindset necessary to succeed. But you need to teach yourself to temper that instinct, because it could lead you down a road that actually kills your long-term EV by rendering you unable to tolerate the poker grind a year or two down the line. There’s a reason ‘everything in moderation’ is a phrase to live by – it’s crucial to develop a work-life balance that is sustainable and safeguards your mental health against any dangers that could cripple your ability to make money from poker in the long term.
Developing strategies that work
Finally, we come to the hard part – how to actually fix mental health issues once they arise. Of course this is a grey area, the same way fixing any mental health issue outside of poker is – if there were an instant cure for depression, we wouldn’t have depression. But the good news is that for everyone who suffers from any of these issues, there are always things that can be done that will have a positive personal impact. Since everyone’s brain is different, everyone can create strategies for circumventing mental health issues, even without the help of a professional.
By establishing processes that work for your own lifestyle and your own personality, you’ll be able to take control of whatever issues you’re confronting. In my case, the processes that have been most effective have involved taking greater responsibility for my physical health, and adopting regular practices such as yoga and meditation that force me to spend time each day on improving my mental health. In your case, it may be something entirely different.
The bottom line, though, is that it starts with awareness. Mental health problems don’t fix themselves, and you can’t fix an issue until you’ve become aware of it. Look inward, be honest with yourself, and find somebody to talk to about it. See a professional, even if you feel like you don’t necessarily need to right away – if you’re still dealing with a ‘stigma’ that you feel about the idea of seeing a therapist, it’s time to come into the 21st century. Mental health issues affect millions of people every day, and taking steps to address them before they become an issue is always the right decision. It’s just good poker.