When You're On, You're On

[_TKO_]

When you’re on, you’re on.

You’ve felt it before: this uncanny ability to become the prophet of poker. It could be 1:00 on a Tuesday afternoon, or 9:00 on a Saturday. It could be right after you lose your job or close the person of your dreams. All of a sudden, you can see into everyone’s head. The flow of the game consumes you. You are controlling every action on the table, whether it’s through betting, check-raising, or open-folding. You are a prophet of poker and the master of your poker destiny.

When you’re in control, nobody can take that away from you. So the lesson here is simple: be in control. How? Well, just make it happen. The deciding factor here is confidence in your own decisions. Every decision you make is the best decision you’ve ever made, right? Think about it. Given all the available information, you have made the best decision possible at that moment in time. If you decided to fold KK preflop, well, given what you knew, you made the best decision. But, this can’t be right. There has to be something missing.

I think there is.

Something is missing from the equation that balances the available information with the best decision. Look at it like a scale:



There is some idea that seems to put more weight on the decision than should actually exist. Whatever it is, it makes the processing of information somehow irrelevant or inaccurate. Something gets in the way of clear judgement, and I think you already know what it is.



Of course, it manifests itself in different ways. Think about yourself as that poker prophet with perfect control, where everything goes your way because your insight is dead accurate at every moment. Now slowly find yourself adding weight to your decisions. Write it all down on a piece of paper – every burden that weighs down the decisions you could make in your prophetic state. Condense it into one block of emotion… and crack it, destroy it.



Lift yourself of the unnecessary burden and manifest it into the great equalizer: control.



It doesn’t matter whether or not you are dominating your table in physical reality. It doesn’t matter if one TAG is constantly playing back at you or one LPP is consistently hitting his draws. It doesn’t matter if you are so dead of cards that everyone at the table is convinced you are deader than death itself. It doesn’t matter if you are playing way over your head and are scared of getting it in with KK preflop. What matters is that you are capable of handling every obstacle in your way. You might choose to persistently value-bet the fish in the face of danger, or leave the table to ensure the TAG stops playing back. It is all under your control.

Just make it happen.

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I’ll leave you with the Universal Pain Assessment Tool (source):



According to the diagram above, the scale appears to be linear. However, in terms of your poker game, it is far from so. Consider it to be more exponential, with each extra level drastically increasing the need for you to break emotion and dominate control.



Keep an eye out for indicators. Any time you catch yourself high on the scale, stop, make a list, and control it. The sooner you learn to recognize what sets you in the wrong direction, the closer you will get to building your own poker prophecy.

Remember: just make it happen.

[nudemolerat]

nice post. emotion can have a strong impact on your decisions without you ever realizing it.

[BigBuffet]

Intuition is important too.

[the_rookie]

Well put. We all know what we need to do to win, but it helps to have constant reminders to control our emotions.

[stigmata]

"The zone" can often be an illusion due to the hidden luck factor.

If you win every time you pick off a bluff, you are being bluffed to much. If they folded every time you bluffed, you aren't bluffing enough. If every time you value bet, they call, you need to value bet thinner. A necessary consequence of this is that you are going to have times when all your reads seem "totally off", but actually you are playing perfectly well.

I'm not actually disagreeing with the OP: I agree with your premise of playing with a completely fresh, clear head. Just be wary of attributing luck (both good and bad) to outside factors, such as "being in the zone".