Poker Stress: How to Deal With the Pressure

The most important thing in poker is awareness, to constantly be aware of yourself.

- Phil Ivey

Welcome back, students! Now that we’ve covered strategy and theory for all betting rounds, we must circle back to poker stress.

The mental game makes or breaks players, even those with exceptional theoretical and practical understanding of strategy. At no point is a strong mental game more necessary than on the river where we face the largest bets possible.

Keep reading and build your own mental resilience to conquer psychological hurdles faced on the river.

Yes! Stress is part of the thrill we receive when playing poker. To manage this feeling effectively, we must break down its two components:

• Eustress: Describes the beneficial stress we receive. Picture yourself preparing for a long-awaited vacation. You feel the elation as a tingle in your body and you feel energized to complete tasks like packing.
• Distress: It’s an unpleasant feeling, like the pressure you might feel when getting laid-off work. Instead of receiving actionable energy, we’re driven inward as we worry about the future and upcoming bills.

As a profit driven poker player, you need resources to reduce poker stress, particularly distress. Those negative emotions are the last thing you need in the middle of a river decision for the rest of your stack.

Let’s keep going for some practical advice that’ll elevate our eustress, diminish our distress and ensure quality decision-making under uncertainty!

Players with a robust mental game understand that we cannot escape emotions. We’ll never play like a robot, because we’re humans, not machines. Therefore, it’s inevitable that at some point, we’re going to experience distress on the river.

One step we can take towards pleasurable poker experience is increasing our eustress before a session. Just as with any sport, take time to warm up. Here are some “stretches” professionals incorporate into their pregame ritual:

These activities aim to prime your desire to put in volume on your A-game. However, we must also prepare for the inevitable distress we will face.

In the heat of the moment, we often deceive ourselves into thinking we're not distressed. This subtle form of tilt is especially tough to manage because it clouds our awareness.

The key to avoiding poker stress that can sabotage crucial river decisions is staying mindful during less intense grinding moments. Before tough river spots, most sessions include routine hands, like pots ending preflop or on the flop. Use those moments to monitor your emotions.

By accepting we will face distress, we can catch it early and practice in-game poker stress management.

Try the following steps in this order:

• Inject logic: Accept that variance can lead to losing streaks, even with good decisions. Mistakes happen, earn and move on.
• Breath: Use deep belly breaths with longer exhales to lower your heart rate and stay calm.
• Plan strategy: Review your latest skill, like 3-betting or finding river bluffs. Spot table weaknesses and plan to exploit them.

If you still feel stressed, step away for 5 to 10 minutes. Successful players know the value of a break. Relax, reset, and come back stronger. The games will still be there when you’ve alleviated distress.

People often ask me how to deal with a bad beat, and my answer to that is to take three to five really deep breaths. That in itself is a form of mediation that can help center you and relieve the body of anxiety.

- Daniel Negreanu

Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking we’re not on tilt, and other times we overestimate our risk tolerance. If big river decisions keep stressing you out despite your efforts, your bankroll might be the issue.

Even top players know they can lose five or ten buy-ins in a session. It’s not common, but it happens, and they’re prepared for it. If the idea of this scares you, consider moving down in stakes.

We know making the most of poker stress on the river means increasing eustress while shedding distress. For that, we need a method for processing all the information available. The trick is to focus just on what’s relevant.

Have a plan for judging information. As a heuristic, the worse your opponent is, the less info we need to make the right decision.

Here’s an example: a nit who has shown down the goods on seven of seven showdowns check-raises all in on the river, and you have top-pair. Fold. Just fold. The only info necessary to make the right decision in this hand is player profile.

Things won’t always be this easy, so make sure to cover our fundamentals first. For river decisions, stick to these three basics:

• Player profile: Rocks under bluff, maniacs over bluff and good players balance value and bluffs.
• Action history: Connect the player type to the decisions they took on each street. Use your action history HUD to replay the action mentally. Ask what hand categories take those lines.
• Pot odds: Poker theory relies on the pot-odds model. We cannot make an informed decision without weighing risk and reward.

By sticking to this script, your poker stress will manifest as eustress, and you’ll use it to make an informed choice. Remember, you won’t always be right, but you only need to be right enough. Even errors are just opportunities to plug leaks!

In conclusion, river decisions cause the most stress in poker because pots are largest at the end of a hand. Professionals understand stress cannot be avoided, though we can channel it towards useful decision making.

We can rid ourselves of distress on rivers by managing tilt early and getting into our A-game from the start. With a solid pregame warm-up and a reliable thought process, we can turn poker stress into eustress, driving positive results. Stay tuned for the next lesson!

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The following links are recommended resources related to this section’s theme. Don’t stay in doubt--dive in! 🔔

• Tilt: Learn how to avoid tilt in poker.
• Mental Game: We recommend this read on Poker Psychology.
• Database tracking software: You may want to check PokerTracker 4 and Holdem Manager 3.
• Action History: Learn how to offload memorization onto multi-tabling software.
• Discord Community: Join the coolest poker community, don’t be shy! Use it to ask questions and interact with other poker enthusiasts and professionals.