Poker is many things. Here at Juicy Stakes Poker, we feel that poker is a great game of skill and a great game of luck! This dichotomy means that as well as you analyze a hand and as well as you play the hand, there will be some hands that defy even your best thinking and you’ll lose the hand.
In many cases, this will be an example of a bad beat.
To Tilt or Not to Tilt
A bad beat often results in a poker player tilting. This is manifested by whining, blaming the winner for playing the hand wrong, and as many other faults as the tilter can come up with. A person on tilt cannot fathom how they could have lost the hand and they are furious that they did.
A person who does not tilt despite the strong temptation to do so is a player on his or her way to achieving excellence either in poker or in another line of work. The ability to go with the flow, even in a losing cause, is a sign that the person or player has the mental maturity and toughness to achieve great things.
Lena Evans Explains How Poker Can Make Our Minds Healthier
We found an excellent Ted Talk given by Lena Evans after she won a poker tournament for the first time. We will give you the link to that talk at the end of the article.
There is no magic wand that allows a player to conclude that they have the better or the best hand. It takes strong mental agility to even allow yourself to say that a pair of aces is the best hand on that hand.
Lena Evans won that tournament by going all in with a pair of aces. She says near the start of the speech that poker is a great form of exercise for the brain. She goes on to talk about four main areas where poker teaches people certain skills that they can use in all facets of their lives. These four skills are:
- Patience
- Focus
- Emotional control
- Intellectual sharpness
We began to touch upon these briefly above. Emotional control is necessary to avoid tilt and to be able to work through a bad beat. No poker pro or average player will say that it is easy to work through a bad beat. What is necessary, and what poker can teach us, is that we are going to have to confront challenging emotional moments frequently and that we have to be at the ready to deal with them.
A person who has a terrible time dealing with challenging emotional moments has plenty of life lessons to learn and probably should avoid playing poker in the meantime!
Developing Patience is Vital to Personal Growth
As M. Scott Peck has written in “The Road Less Travelled” and elsewhere, kids need to learn patience. The temper tantrum that some kids exhibit when their parents say "no" to ice cream is a sign that that kid needs a major life course in achieving simple patience.
A poker player who is playing within his or her means and is also playing smart will fold on at least 70% of all hands before the flop. A player who is losing patience and is unable to recover from that loss of patience will probably stay in a hand they would have folded out of an hour before.
These hands lead to losses. And losses over the table in poker can lead to losses in other areas. Poker does have the ability to teach us important life hacks.
Exercising Our Brains
There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that playing challenging games can create a kind of mental musculature that we can tap into when we have to deal with situations at home or at work that require the use of great brain power.
Of course, there are many ways to exercise the cognitive function of the brain. These are all valuable. Poker adds the element of risk even on a small scale at low stakes. The risk necessarily concentrates the brain.
Developing a strong skill of concentration comes in handy in many, many situations outside of poker.
Focus Goes Hand in Hand with All of the Above
We have just tapped into the surface of how poker, along with many other fun activities, can help produce a healthy mind. We also know that a healthy mind is vital for a healthy body. Now, we can never say that poker is the only activity that will produce a healthy mind and body. We say that poker is one way to achieve that goal.
What Makes Poker Great as a Game?
As we have said throughout this article, poker works in many ways to make us better. But poker is also fun as a simple game. A lot of people love to play poker perhaps once a month with friends. The purpose of these games is not to win large sums of money. Rather, the purpose is to have fun!
Poker is just one card game people can play for fun. Some people prefer bridge, whist, hearts, or spades over poker. So, what makes poker as an individual game so fascinating?
What Does She Have?
Poker is a game in which we are always asking ourselves what an opponent can possibly have to justify his or her staying in the hand and betting the way they are betting. The betting aspect of poker requires us to justify our own bets and our opponents’ bets. The other card games do not have this betting element to them unless, of course, you add a betting element to the games.
In other card games, a low-level card is always a low-level card but in poker a measly pair of deuces can win a big pot.
Poker is a game that teaches people to use psychology for their benefit. Being able to channel psychology is a skill that can also be transferred to the board room.
Poker enhances short-term memory. When we are faced with a big bet on the river, wee have to replay the hand in order to figure out what the opponent has.
Listen to a fascinating TedTalk by Lena Evans HERE.
Juicy Stakes Poker Offers Great Online Poker Action
Tens of thousands of poker players come to Juicy Stakes regularly to play Texas Holdem or Omaha. Players can join a game in progress or enter a tournament. The famous Chris Moneymaker got to the World Series of Poker, which he won, by winning an online tournament. You can too!
