I need a book that will help me control my emotions.

[Colombo]

Specifically one that will list specific techniques to calm down after a bad beat. Any suggestions?

[DiggerDog]

Zen and the Art of Poker: Timeless Secrets to Transform Your Game by Larry Phillips

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452281...5Fencoding=UTF8

[pocketse7ens]

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Zen and the Art of Poker: Timeless Secrets to Transform Your Game by Larry Phillips

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452281...5Fencoding=UTF8

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[Wilco666]

[ QUOTE ]
Specifically one that will list specific techniques to calm down after a bad beat. Any suggestions?

[/ QUOTE ]

The technique is turning off your computer immediately and doing something non-pokerrelated for a while.

[MikeRand2000]

John Feeney's Inside the Poker Mind has an entire chapter called "Poker and Emotions".

Emotions (especially after a bad beat) are something I'm dealing with as well. For me, it stems from two things:

1) I am too focused on short-term results (being a business analyst, this is obviously tough to fix).

2) I'm probably overestimating my abilities just because I own every 2+2 book out there.

Ultimately, I have to fix these two items to avoid having the emotional flare-ups in the first place. I'd recommend you think about why you're emotional after a bad beat and try to fix that first.

That being said, until I get there, a few of the techniques I use follow below:

1) playing in structures that don't hurt steamers (Sklansky has a chapter on that in Poker, Gaming, and Life...let's just say it doesn't include no-limit cash games)

2) turning off the computer

3) sitting out until I have time to analyze the play to see if I did (in fact) have a bad beat.

The last one is especially useful because it can become an immediate and certain consequence to your behavior (whereas poker tends to have future and uncertain consequences).

[deacsoft]

2+2's own Dr. Alan Schoonmaker has written several great articles in Card Player magazine. You can go through them here.

[MyTurn2Raise]

Zen and the Art of Archery

[amulet]

inside the poker mind is a terrific poker book. and it has entire sections that deal with your emotions and poker. i highly recommend it.

[kiddo]

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Zen and the Art of Poker:

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For me it didnt help and the problem is that this author knows very little about poker. Dont use it to understand poker.

Dont buy "psychology of poker", probably the most boring and unnecessary book ever written.

Feeneys book is better, but problem with that is that is is so obvious that Feeney himself got no problem whatsoever with getting emotional. How much is it worth that someone never getting upset telling us to not get upset?

Feeney seems to think that the emotional guys are a bit stupid and thar makes me a bit upset [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. Feeney seems to think that the steamer dont understand that in the long run there is nothing like "bad luck".

Well Feeney, I knew that 20 years ago and I know it today. Im no stupid. That is not the problem. Knowledge will not - as Feeney thinks - kill my emotions.

Getting emotional got a lot to do with habits and its very hard to break a habit. Not many can do it after reading a book. But people hope that the next book will do the trick. Thats why there are 4563464654654 learn-to-know-yourself-and-learn-from-your-misstakes books on the market.

[amulet]

i have given this book to several "steamers" and it seemed to be very helpful to all of them.