Hello to long time readers. I feel as though I need to write some stuff to clear it out of my system and also see it in the flesh.
(ps short update: same old same old, sometimes poker great, sometimes terrible, still drifting around 100z-500z).
I think I may have epiphany'd a really good solution to my mental game problems and this post is intended to help with that.
What I've mostly been doing with my feelings is relaxing and allowing them to be, I've been in a state of panic quite often recently though, feelings essentially incompatible with playing poker, ie they're too strong to be ignored. I arrive at the state of panic though by first ignoring or running away from earlier feelings.
I 'run away' from feelings when I think they're some sort of enemy. Although I conceptually know that they are not, this is not enough for my subconscious mind which acts out of conditioned patterns and triggers the feelings of panic or 'fight or flight'. When I recognise what the feelings are though, this does not occur.
So what I want to write is as many feelings as possible that I 'recognise'. I then hope I can stay with future feelings and add to this blog.
So:
1) 'I don't know!'- this triggers feelings of panic, but when I recognise it I realise that 'not knowing' is simply uncertainty, and uncertainty in poker is great. Make the best decision we can, like everyone else does.
2) 'He might have a better hand!' - again, feelings of panic, and I obsess about the fact he has a better hand. This feeling's great though because when I move towards it, it pulls me back into the world of ranges. I start seeing other hands he can that are not better, and this is a great place to be in.
3) 'Arghhh that flop!'- this is closely linked to 'I don't know!!', but when I move towards this feeling it creates a feeling of serenity that we are simply not responsible for certain things, the flop being one of them :-)
4) 'I'm going to lose!!'- catastrophising is what occurs here. When we relax with the feeling though, we realise that we do indeed lose sometimes. Not all the time though as the original feeling suggests :-). The more we lose, the more we win.
5) A feeling of attachment to hands. So we get dealt KK, 3bet, flop is AQxs, and a pain is felt as our opponent stabs into us. Recognising the original attachment though as it occurs seems to avoid this.
6) The hand example above creates a feeling along the lines of 'We're going to make a mistake!!!'. This might actually be a super important feeling, because the pain that is felt is likely because we are, indeed, about to commit a mistake! Ie, we're maybe too attached to the hand and know this CC is now losing us money. This feeling is GREAT, because it's a time other people will also make mistakes and it's telling us about a dope move we can make instead.
Having written all this, there's a chance it can all just be described as 'panic', and maybe I simply have to learn to live with and accept panic, not get preoccupied with it but just relax each time it arises.
Decision wise, we just have to follow intuition too and then ask questions later.
