You can be one of the absolute best poker players in the world, and have an unbelievable grasp of the aggression and the rational deduction aspects of the game, and still end up broke if you don’t have a good understanding of your own psyche. This is the one area where many people fool themselves into believing they can have chaotic and unbalanced lives, and somehow still be successful at poker. Generally speaking, if you aren’t very successful in “life” you’re not going to be very successful at poker. There are reasons why you’re not being very successful in your personal life, and those very same reasons will carry over at the poker table at one point or another.
That doesn’t mean that if you’re young, for example, and haven’t had much success in other areas of life for lack of life experience, that you can’t have your first major successes at the poker table. It does mean that if you don’t have adequate schooling behind you, and other skills you can also be successful at, being successful at poker will be much more difficult to achieve. Nothing is impossible though if you want it badly enough.
There are several sub areas in this aspect of poker that we should explore and expand upon. They include tilt and its many sub variants, self- awareness, and perceptiveness. The ability to understand, and, in most cases, control these aspects of ourselves leads to greater success in life and at the poker table. Let’s take a look at each of these subcategories.
