At the 2014 WSOP Main Event final table two months ago, two of the final three players received a great deal of attention from the ESPN commentators and on social media when it came to their habits away from the table. Both third-place finisher Jorryt Van Hoof and eventual champion Martin Jacobson were identified as regular practitioners of yoga and meditation, with many people crediting the healthy habits of the two as a big factor in their ability to maintain their concentration during a gruelling final table.
So what’s the big deal? Isn’t it simply a coincidence? Well, yes and no. Obviously there’s a large amount of variance involved in who gets to be at the WSOP Main Event final table, but in looking at recent final table performances, a trend seems to be developing. Not only did Van Hoof and Jacobson put in two stellar performances in 2014 throughout a final table that lasted 328 hands, but 2012 champion Greg Merson, a strong advocate for yoga who credits it with helping him overcome a drug problem, dominated his final table, the longest in WSOP history at 399 hands and 19 hours 34 minutes.
Incidentally, Merson’s success has landed him a sponsorship deal with WSOP.com, one of the legal sites at which to play online poker in the United States. If you’d like to know more about that online poker room, have a look at this review of WSOP.com by PokerUpdate.
I want to take a look at why so many successful poker players, particularly in live tournaments, seem to benefit greatly from yoga. I’ve been a yoga practitionar, or ‘yogi’, for about two and a half years now, and while I’m no expert, I’d like to pass on some of the benefits that I and others have received.
Calmness of mind, clarity of thought
This is probably the biggest one for many yogis. The focus that yoga places on matching breath with movement has the effect of forcing your thoughts to remain with your body, increasing your awareness of how your body moves in space and bringing your thoughts away from whatever little things might be occupying it on a daily basis. For poker players, these little things often include bad beats from the day before, thoughts about hands, or general stress and mental strain.
Yoga not only helps to minimize the effects of the mental wear and tear of poker, but it also helps a player to maintain control while at the tables as well. The process of actively, mindfully focusing on something physical can train your brain to shut out distractions and really stay attentive towards the task at hand. It trains you to recognise the link between your breathing and your emotions, and makes you a lot more likely to maintain clear mental processes at times when your brain is being challenged.
Relaxation and the release of physical tension
Most poker players have largely sedentary lifestyles. The majority of successful players these days have developed healthy habits away from the table, such as regular exercise, healthy eating and limited use of drugs or alcohol, to ensure that the impact of spending long periods sitting at a computer or a poker table is minimised. However, it’s still extremely easy for a healthy person to carry a lot of muscular tension in their neck, shoulders and hips, and this is where yoga comes in. Yoga strengthens and stretches the muscles in your body that are most challenged by a sedentary lifestyle, and in doing so, releases a great amount of the tension that can build up over, say, a two-week SCOOP grind or a three-day live tournament.
Your body is the place where all of your thoughts take place, so this release of physical tension can often have a hugely positive impact on your mental state as well. Feeling loose and limber as opposed to tight and tense creates a lasting sense of relaxation, which is reflected in a calm and collected attitude and a balanced mental approach to the game. Would you still have a tilt problem if you were constantly getting a massage while playing? Probably not. Yoga has the same effect.
The paradigm of experience, enjoyment and improvement
In poker, we work within a specific paradigm. Our goal is to make the best decisions and win, with the intent of being rewarded with money. Ultimately, for as much as we might want to steer away from results-oriented thinking, it’s the results that matter – if we weren’t able to make money playing poker, very few of us would play it. Gambling has no appeal without money.
Yoga, however, operates within a totally different paradigm. There are no winners and losers in yoga. It’s all about the experience you have while performing it, and what that brings to you. Your own enjoyment of the process and the physical, mental and emotional benefits you receive from it are the main point of the exercise, and the improvement you make day by day is only in comparison to how you were the previous day.
This mentality is ultimately a more healthy one than the whirlpool of competition that many poker players are often sucked into. It encourages self-acceptance while promoting health and self-improvement, while poker often teaches us that what we do is either right or wrong, profitable or unprofitable, +EV or -EV, good or bad. We’re constantly making value judgments in poker, and calculating their accuracy. None of that is necessary in yoga, and it brings us closer to a mentality that will ultimately help us focus on the long term in our poker game.
A final thought
I encourage all serious poker players, male or female, young or old, to try yoga at some point. Heck, I encourage all non-poker players to do it too. But the one piece of advice I’d give to poker players above all else is to make a conscious effort to approach yoga differently to the way you would approach poker. Abandon competitiveness and self-evaluation.
Yoga exists for different reasons, it has different benefits, and on an existential level, it’s really the opposite side of the coin from what poker is. One is a mathematical and psychological battle with large sums of money at stake, and the other is a very personal and individual experience that doesn’t have to involve anyone else but you. Keep poker out of your yoga, and yoga will repay you by making you a better poker player.