By John Vorhaus

There’s a basic difference between thinking your poker and feeling your poker, a difference so important that if you do nothing but think your game instead of feeling it, you’ll probably come out ahead.

To understand the difference between thinking and feeling your game, consider that we carry two different filters of reality, filters we use to analyze and organize information. These filters are the judgment filter and the process filter, and each asks a different fundamental question about the information it receives. The process filter asks the useful question, How can I use this information to improve what I do? But the judgment filter asks only, irrelevantly and counter-productively, How does this information make me feel?

You have no doubt seen the slaves to their judgment filter; they’re pathetically easy to spot. They expose themselves, for instance, in the moment of a bad beat when they do something patently ridiculous like throwing cards at the dealer or berating other players. They feel so bad that they have to lash out. Their only concern is the pain that’s washing over them and their desperate effort to make that pain go away. They’re filtering through judgment, and they’re doomed.

You’ve also certainly seen players who filter extensively through process. Faced with that same bad beat, they don’t waste any psychic energy on emotion. They just calmly go to school on what has happened, looking for mistakes in their own play that they might correct, or flaws in their foes’ actions they can look for a chance to exploit.

A process thinker is a canny thinker. He’s making constant instant assessments about his current table image, his opponents’ states of mind, his and their stack sizes, their decision-making abilities and the overall quality of the game. Among other things, he’s taking note of which of his foes think their game, and which feel it, aware that the former are to be respected and the latter to be attacked without mercy. He is aware of his own feelings, but not in their thrall. He understands the crucial difference between review and regret. Review filters through process; regret filters through feeling.

Why must a feeling player lose in the long run? Because he occludes his own perception with the fog of his emotion. How can such a player see the game clearly enough to beat it?

Does this mean that if we let a bad beat get to us even once we’re doomed to failure? Not necessarily. Look, no one’s perfect. We all filter information through both the judgment filter and the process filter. In a perfect world, we’d only filter through process, but last time I checked, this wasn’t a perfect world. However — good news — we can change! By force of will, we can make the decision to redirect the flow of information, bit by bit (and byte by byte) from the path of judgment to the path of process. We will never — trust me — achieve 100% process filtering. But we can shift the balance, and here’s a case where, definitely, every little bit helps.

How do you make the change? Start by recognizing that it can be done and should be done. Some players never grasp this simple truth. They play every day with the same (un)stated intention: to feel good if they win and feel bad if they lose. They’re in a swamp, so to speak, and we can’t help them. All we can do is take their money and move on.

Having made the commitment to do more process filtering, your next step is to consider how you process information now. Next time you play, keep a notebook close at hand, and chart your instances of feeling or thinking the game. On the feeling side of the chart, you might have words like excitement, anticipation, resentment, happiness, fatigue, anger, arrogance, pity, fury and so on. On the thinking side, you’ll record useful discoveries like, I’m overplaying small pairs; seat two doesn’t defend his blind; the dealer is flashing cards; seat five is on tilt; fatigue is affecting my choices, etc. Do this exercise several times and you’ll start to discover a shift. There will be fewer items on the judgment side of the list and more items on the process side. Over time, you will develop the habit of filtering through process. It’s not that you’ll stop having feelings, but rather you’ll see them as new pieces of information only, and not your purpose for playing.

There’s a familiar pitfall in this: If we commit to seeing ourselves clearly, we many have to face certain unpleasant truths about our play. We will see that we’re not close to perfect players. We don’t make flawless decisions and we do, occasionally, become slaves to feeling. We are, in other words, yes, human. Acceptance is called for here. Recognize that you’re not where you want to be yet, but take pride in taking steps toward that goal.

What I’m proposing, then, is a logical, analytical approach to studying and shifting the underlying emotions of poker. You shouldn’t be surprised to find that this study pays other dividends in your life, for we use the parallel filters of process and judgment in everything we do and with everyone we meet. In poker, as elsewhere, it’s vital to acknowledge and honor our feelings, but not to leave them in control; it’s vital to admit our limitations, but then to transcend them. This leads to growth in life, and to profit in poker.

Which is best? I’ll take both please.

John Vorhaus is the author of POKER NIGHT and the KILLER POKER series. Excerpts and ordering information are available at his website, www.vorza.com.

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