Poker Distilled

The final Episode of Season 1. Poker Distilled will return for season 2 in August 2023. Encountering wild maniacs at the poker table can be unsettling and disconcerting. We know these spots are highly profitable but how do we get into the right frame of mind to take full advantage?

Getting better at spots where your fortunes suddenly change in a negative direction is one of the most challenging elements to self-improvement in poker. Melissa brings up two spots from her weekend grind where she was on either end of extreme fortune reversal. How do we navigate this extremely difficult-to-process phenomenon in poker?

How do we set the right goals in poker in the short-term, mid-term and long-term. Achieving goals as part of a deal with future you and for the game itself as a higher power and object of intellectual beauty. 

Recently Pete played a weekend of live poker. How did the slowing down of time affect his  psyche and can battle-hardened live grinder Melissa soothe his pain?

In some ways tournament players have a clear mission which is mentally simple to carry out. Stay in the tournament, build your stack, and try to win it. For cash game players,  some sessions you will be down money all day/week/month long. How do we break free of this debilitating way of perceiving results and treat the dreaded feeling of STUCK.

Poker is a game of short-term delusion and long-term discovery. How do we know when we've gathered enough knowledge and skill to consider ourselves good players and how do we the avoid short-term illusions created by the swings.

Pete and Melissa dive into a few mental games topics starting with an examination of the role played by superstition in a poker player's career and ending with an endorsement of envy. Yes that's right. Envy can be good. 

How should we process the idea that we might be being bluffed? What about when we're shown a bluff after folding in a huge pot? How does this topic relate to what Pete calls 'the three modes of poker thinking'?

Live tells were once the biggest component of a live poker player's thought process. Since the GTO boom, we have moved more into the technical realm but have live tells been unjustly discarded and how much extra EV can they add to our game if wielded correctly?

We all have our own collection of 'poker knowledge' but do we really know the things we claim to?  Which poker beliefs can we trust and where do we have to be more sceptical about our own poker thoughts?