Are You Taking Out The Trash?

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Are You Taking Out The Trash?

by Jamie Glazier

There’s another way of thinking about trash on the felt, rather than just trash-talking. Taking out the weekly trash and playing poker have a lot more in common that what you first might think. Take the analogy of the waste bin and the recycling bin. When taking out the trash we have a few different options. The waste bin holds trash that has no value to us at all, whereas the recycling bin is divided into two halves of which hold rubbish that can be of value when recycled. From a neurological point of view, every single hand you play, you unconsciously place into one of these bins.

The hands that go in the waste bin are the hands that you fold preflop. You are not interested in playing the cards you were dealt, and ultimately, your conscious mind throws that hand in the waste bin, most likely never to be thought of again. This is a great way to conserve mental energy and effort when it comes to hands you fold.  Once you think of them as going straight into the waste bin then you can erase those cards from your conscious mind.

That means that when the flop has come out, you have deleted those cards from your consciousness and will not waste energy on thinking, “OMG, I would have made a full house with my 73o if I had played”. Now I know we are all guilty of doing this on occasions, but it drains our energy and clogs up much needed space in our subconscious. This space can be much better utilised with planting hands that we place in the recycling bin.

Every hand that we play and see a flop is unconsciously placed in the recycling bin, or at times in the waste bin. The recycling bin has two separate compartments to it and those two compartments are labelled Positive and Negative. If you can think of your brain as having a positive and a negative recycling bin and you have control over which bin you place each hand.

This means that if you unconsciously place a hand in the Positive compartment of the neural recycling bin, it will come back and have a positive impact on your play or emotional state in the future. If you unconsciously place a hand in the Negative compartment of the neural recycling bin, it will come back and have a negative impact on your play or emotional state in the future.

The best way I can get you to understand this is by asking, “What is your initial thought when you get dealt your favourite hand?” Most likely, it is a feeling of confidence, as in the past you have unconsciously placed this hand in the positive recycling bin.

What about when you get dealt pocket jacks or ace-king? A lot of players experience a negative feeling as they have unconsciously placed these hands in the negative recycling bin due to a previous bad experience.

I get feedback from players who often describe a bad vibe about a certain hand, player or table they were sitting at, and when we dig a little deeper into what they experienced, they begin to recall it in a negative way which explains why the experience was placed in the Negative Neural Recycling Bin. The opposite occurs when a players begins to talk about playing a hand or a situation to the best of their ability.  It normally comes back to a similar hand or situation they have played in the past that they were extremely happy with, and in turn, unconsciously planting that experience in the Positive Neural Recycling Bin.

These are extremely powerful components of the mental game and the good news is that you are totally in control of specifically what bin you place every hand in.  This is important for when you are going through a downswing, as the result of which bin you place every hand in can have a great affect on whether or not you begin to allow human error to have an impact on the longevity of your downswing.

When working with a player that is experiencing a downswing, their initial thoughts are that they are losing hands because they are running bad.  However when we begin to really go through their sessions, they begin to see how many of their decisions were made out of pure frustration or impatience as a direct impact on how their downswing is affecting them.  They then begin to realise that they haven’t been dealing with their downswing in a neurologically correct way. This is when I introduce the “Trash Theory” to them.

Our goal is to place approximately 95% of hands in the Positive Recycling Bin so that we can begin to program our subconscious to take over in a way that is going to help us play poker with a mind that is clear and not controlled by negative emotional states. Achieving this is surprisingly simple.

By building a consistent post-hand routine whereby you consciously control what your mind focuses on, over time this process will become an automatic reaction.  It will help you to eliminate the negative aspects of the hands you play and place you in a position to be able to play the next hand after a bad beat with your “A” game.

Firstly, you have to begin to make sure during your session that you are completely focused on what is in your control and not allow any other aspect of the hand creep into your conscious mind. When the hand is finished, if you have won the hand and played it well, I want you to acknowledge what aspect of that hand you played well, whether it was the check-raise on the turn or the call you made on the river as you felt your opponent was bluffing. The more you can acknowledge the good play you made and make yourself feel good about it, will help place that hand in the Positive Recycling Bin. Where most players come unstuck, and the better player you are, the more this is relevant to you, is that when you play a good hand, you ignore it as you expect to play hands at a high level. This means that a lot of the time when you have played a good hand and you don’t not acknowledge it, you have placed that hand in the Neural Waste Bin and eliminated that hand from ever coming back to have a positive impact on you.

Now, when you lose a hand or play a hand poorly, which you are going to do sometimes, you more than acknowledge these hands, you actually amplify how bad these hands were and in turn place them in the Negative Neural Bin so that these negative feelings and images will unconsciously float back up when placed in a similar situation in the future.

The solution to reducing the number of hands you place in the Negative Neural Bin is to begin to focus on the positive aspects of your play, even if you lost the hand to a bad play, as how you controlled your play is the most important aspect to enjoying long term success, even if you have just experienced short term pain. So making a conscious effort, and at the beginning it will be an effort, to maintain focus on how well you played the hand, will help to increase the number of hands you place in the Positive Neural Bin and also decrease the number of hands place in the Negative Neural Bin.

Even when you have played a crucial hand poorly, with no positive aspects, you need to reframe that hand. Understand the mistake that was made and quickly focus on what you WANT to do differently next time. By reframing the hand in this way, next time you encounter a similar situation, your sub-conscious will float up what you would like to do next time, as opposed to the mistake you made last time.

By going through this process on a consistent basis, you will begin to reorganise what bin your brain places each hand in, and this will help you to stay in a more empowering mental and emotional state that is crucial to bringing your “A” game to every hand you play!

Jamie Glazier is a Mental Game Coach that works with players such as Joe Hachem, Full Tilt Red Pro Jonathan “MonsterDong” Karamalikis and  Brendon “Brendooor” Rubie as well as a long list of other Professional MTT players.