The Super Power To Become An Ultimate Crusher

It’s exactly 9:23 PM for me right now. Sunday 5th, May 2024.

I don’t know when exactly you will be reading this newsletter, but it will be sent to our email list tomorrow, Monday 6th, at 10 AM BRT.

I don’t typically work on Sundays. And it’s not usual for me to write my weekly newsletter post so late into the week, and so close to publishing. I like to write it in the beginning of the week, so that I have time to review it, tweak it, or even rewrite it completely if I’m not satisfied with the result.

This week though, I couldn’t do that. Spent monday and tuesday mostly trying to recover from maybe my 4th or 5th viral infection of the last 3 months. I guess my immune system is shit right now. My eldest boy started school this year, and every week he brings home a new virus that takes the whole family down. Safe to say it hasn’t been much fun.

Then, on wednesdays and thursdays I usually have several meetings. Meetings with my partners from my businesses, individual meetings with many different employees, meetings with potential business partners, meetings with service providers. Endless meetings. Little time to do anything else.

And friday is the day of the week that I separate to give private coaching classes and group coaching classes at Metagame. This last friday I gave 5 classes, 4 being individual coaching classes and one group class, which constituted almost 6 hours of coaching that day.

I was then hoping to write this post on Saturday (yesterday), but my wife and I decided to use the entire day to put the house in order. Since we both got sick this week, and the kids didn’t (I got 3 of them by the way), you can imagine how much damage they were able to do while our energy levels were low. Well, actually if you are not a parent it’s really hard for you to imagine. Let’s just say things can get messy really fast. I stayed up until 3AM taking care of chores, when finally I decided I couldn’t continue anymore and went to bed.

This week I had all the excuses you can imagine to give up on posting my weekly issue of this newsletter. I’m sick; I’m tired; I don’t have many good ideas at the moment; I don’t have the time to do it; I have to attend other priorities; I just want to take some rest; I can afford to skip one. The list goes on.

Many people would even say that skipping it to get some rest would be the correct decision. I have been posting without fail every week for the last 20 weeks. “What’s the harm on skipping just this one?” – they would say. It’s ok to let this one go.

I imagine you can relate to that. Actually I don’t just imagine, I know for a fact you have experienced a circumstance similar to this in your life, specially in poker.

THE MIND – A BLESSING AND A CURSE

It’s a normal day of grind for you. You planned and prepared yourself to work for 6 hours. Perhaps you even set a goal for the number of hands you should play that day. But 4 hours in, you noticed you’re 10 buy-ins up. What an amazing session. Bluffs getting through, value bets getting payed. The game feels easy.

“I think that’s enough for today”; “If I continue I might end up losing this profit”; “This is a week’s worth of profit. I guess I can slow down now, maybe even take tomorrow off to enjoy myself”. “I guess I can just crush everyone here. This is boring. I might just go watch Netflix”.

It’s a normal day of work for you. You planned your schedule to study for 2 hours. But once you sit in your office chair, a million reasons not to follow through can appear: you are too tired from yesterday’s grind; you didn’t actually mark any hands, so you don’t really know what to do; you are behind pace for your volume goal, so you must grind instead of study; you don’t feel much improvement studying, so you might as well skip it; you’re already good enough to beat the games, so why bother?

Our minds can be both wonderful and terrible at the same time. In one hand, it makes us capable of extraordinary things, like launching rockets into space, cooperating with complete strangers and creating fiction that makes us cry and laugh. But the same mind in different circumstances can whisper in our ears self limiting beliefs that make us quit before even trying; this same mind can sabotage our own success by keeping us in a comfort zone where we can’t be harmed, but at the same time can’t excel at anything. This same mind can tell us that it’s okay not to do it. It’s okay not to push harder, not to insist, not to persist. Not to try again.

I decided to write this post despite all my unfavorable circumstances because I believe in cultivating a super power that in the long term makes it almost impossible for me not to be successful in anything that I try. I believe that this super power is the main difference between the people that are good, the people are the excellent, and the people at the top 0.5% – at any craft or activity, including poker.

This super power is the power to do it anyway.

I fucking love phrasing it this way. I could just say “the super power is to be consistent”, but to do it anyway conveys so much more meaning and depth.

If you want to find success at anything, including being a professional poker player, you need to learn and cultivate the power of doing the things you should do, even when:

• you don’t want to do them;

• you don’t feel like you need to do them;

• you don’t understand why you should do them;

• you don’t think you’ll be able to do them;

• you don’t enjoy doing them;

Fucking do it anyway. That’s the key.

Being consistent – and fucking doing it anyway – is the biggest source of edge in any activity whatsoever. And the reason for this is because doing it anyway is probably one of the hardest things, if not the hardest thing a human can do.

Despite being proud of being a rational species, and often times calling ourselves the only rational species in the entire universe, we actually simply act based on emotion way more often than not. We like to think that we’re in control of ourselves and our choices, but a lot of times we simply execute the instinctive or unconscious action that followed from an emotional state, which was triggered by the most recent stimulus from a real life event.

Every single poker player has once made a river call that they regretted immediately after. You actually call yourself dumb for choosing to do that 3 seconds after doing it. Why the hell did you do it then?

Because, at that instance, your conscious mind was not in control of your actions. Your action was determined by your unconscious, which is heavily impacted by your emotions. You called not because you decided consciously that it was the highest EV decision, but because you were frustrated; because you were tired; because you felt threatened; because you wanted to fight back; because you were anxious; because you were excited. Then you make the call, and get immediately hit by the post-nut clarity: “what the fuck am I doing?”

Doing it anyway is a super power because almost no one can do it anyway. Most people will fall victim to their own emotions and unconscious beliefs, unable to escape and take protagonism of their own lives. And that’s not to say that they don’t try – they might, occasionally. But fucking doing it anyway requires not only a tremendous amount of energy (in the beginning), but also strategic thinking and practicing.

Finding that disciplined fold when your emotions really want you to call is hard as fuck. On the other side of the spectrum, finding that hero call when your emotions really want you to fold can also be incredibly challenging and mentally tough. To make matters worse, throughout the grind we are bombarded with many different emotions as the hands play out – when things are going right, we feel confident, energized, focused; but then as soon as things start to go wrong, we feel frustrated, angry, anxious, insecure. We make a bluff we weren’t sure about in a big pot, get called by a bluffcatcher and immediately feelings of uncertainty and insecurity take over. “Did the guy exploit me?” “Should I even have bluffed here?” “Am I good enough for this game?”. We get coolered a few times, take a couple of nasty bad beats, and the mind starts ranting: “I’m so fucking unlucky, it’s unreal”; “this is pointless, no matter what I do I can’t win”.

Being a professional poker player is to basically put your emotional brain through a rollercoaster every single day. Even a single hand can be a chaotic sequence of different feelings. These emotions are instinctive reactions to the stimulus provided by the game, and they are essentially impossible to control. What you can control, however, is how you act after these feelings emerge.

Can you keep grinding even when you are frustrated? Can you keep making good decisions even when you are angry? Can you reach your daily volume target even when you are tired? Can you keep playing focused even when you are feeling bored? Can you follow through with your bluff even when you are afraid? Can you do your study session even when you are not feeling motivated?

The answer to all of these questions, for 99% of people, is a hard no. 99% of people cannot continue to perform when their emotions take over.

What this means for you is that fucking doing it anyway, if mastered, can open up insane edges in every single context and activity.

If 99% of your competition will skip studying once they are feeling too confident, or too tired, or too bored, or too insecure, imagine if you could study every single day without fail? You would become better than all of them in a matter of months.

If all of your competition will start making stupid mistakes they regret one second later every time they are frustrated, or anxious, or tired, or bored, or angry, imagine if you could execute a coherent and stable strategy regardless of how you’re feeling? You would double your winrate.

HOW TO FUCKING DO IT ANYWAY

This all sounds promising, but, how do you actually do it? If 99% of people can’t be consistent with their performance because they just act according to their emotions, how can you break the cycle and become part of the 1% that can achieve consistency?

I believe there are a few practical things you can try, which I’ll mention in a minute, but the first thing you must learn to do is to be aware of your own emotional state.

You can’t break the cycle if you are not capable of monitoring your own mental state and your feelings. You can’t address something you don’t even realize is there to begin with. If you are going to pursue being a consistent person, you need to be able to identify within yourself, at any given moment, what is the emotional state you’re currently in, and how that emotional state tends to shape and determine your behaviour.

I don’t believe there are any shortcuts or hacks into becoming more self-aware. It’s not like you’re going to wake up tomorrow and become immediately aware of your emotions just because you decided today that it would be a good idea. Just like any other habit, becoming more self-aware is about practicing the behaviour until it becomes automatic.

A great way to do this is by journaling.

Develop the habit of writing down, at the end of every day, all the relevant events of your day. Most importantly, write down how you felt. Write down how these specific events made you feel.

This habit literally forces you to become more aware of your feelings, and the act of writing it down can even have some therapeutical effects. One way I like to do this is by keeping a Discord Server for myself where I write all my thoughts after a full work day. Some people also really like just keeping a small notebook in their pocket, where they can hand write all the relevant events of the day as they come up. This can be really powerful as a habit forming mechanism because any physical perception of the notebook being in your pocket will serve as a trigger for you to take it and write on it. I recommend you try multiple approaches until you settle for the one that suits you best.

Once you’re capable of being aware of your own emotional state, you need to practice controlling your behaviour despite your feelings. You need to be able to do what is rational, even when your emotions want you to do something else. Alternatively, instead of trying to control your behaviour in response to a certain emotion, you can try to associate a different emotion with the event or events that tend to cause the undesirable behavioral response.

One very powerful, science-backed technique for doing just that is visualization. Wikipedia definition states that “creative visualization is the cognitive process of purposefully generating visual mental imagery, with eyes open or closed, simulating or recreating visual perception, in order to maintain, inspect, and transform those images, consequently modifying their associated emotions or feelings, with intent to experience a subsequent beneficial physiological, psychological, or social effect“.

A common way that poker players use creative visualization is through guided meditation audio warmups. In these audios, typically a mental coach does a guided meditation where he verbally instructs the listener to visualize an upcoming circumstance of their grinding experience, and to associate the event with positive emotions rather than negative. For instance, a player may visualize themselves playing and facing tough decisions, perhaps getting coolered or suffering from bad beats, but then they should imagine an emotional response to the event of tranquility and acceptance, which ultimately leads to less tilting and less mistakes due to frustration.

To practice visualization you don’t necessarily need a guided meditation audio from a mental coach, though. Visualization and anticipation are very old techniques, which have been used by humans for thousands of years to improve their behavior and well being. Take a look at this excerpt from the philosophy book Handbook of Epictetus, a famous stoic philosophy book from almost 2 thousand years ago:

Here the philosopher recommends using visualization to anticipate any undesirable events that may come up in your activity. Then, you state to yourself how you want to handle the situations that may arrise. That’s exactly what I think you should do before every poker session. Create a warmup visualization routine where you anticipate all the triggers for your negative emotional responses, and then state to yourself how you want to handle them. This could be as simple as repeating to yourself: “Today, some of my bluffs will get called. But I understand this is part of the game, so I’ll accept it and keep playing my best“. By doing this, when these triggers eventually take place, it will be much easier for you to supress the immediate natural behavioral response, specially because the emotion triggered won’t be as strong as it would be without the visualization exercise.

SOCIAL PRESSURE – A HACK FOR CONSISTENCY

The final tip I have for you is to leverage the social part of your brain if you want to become a more consistent person.

If you decide that you want to go to the gym every day at 7AM, it’s way more likely you are going to be there when the time comes if there is going to be someone waiting for you there, like a friend or personal trainer.

If you want to play 100 thousand hands in a single month, you are way more likely to achieve that goal if you create a public blog post saying “I will play 100k hands this month” to hundreds of people compared to keeping it to yourself.

If you want to stop calling rivers in big pots, you are way more likely to achieve it if you tell your friend about it and let him watch you while you play.

These things above are true for multiple reasons, but all of them come from the same source – which is the fact that we are very social animals.

We need to get along with others to survive – or at least needed for 99.999% of our evolutionary history. We need other people to trust us. We need our word to mean something. We need other people to like us, to want to hang out with us. One of our worst nightmares is to be ridiculed by the people around us. Other equally terrifying outcomes are for people close to us to think of us as liars, as unreliable, as weak, as inconsistent. Our biology perceives that as an incredible danger to our safety. 

By setting commitments to people other than yourself, by making your goals public, by having other people monitor your behavior, you are leveraging millions of years of biology crafted by natural selection to promote cooperation among individuals in a group. Our biology really really wants us to get along with people around us. Our biology really really doesn’t want us to let the people around us down. By integrating your goals and the things you want to be consistent at into a social environment, you are essentially hacking yourself to become way more committed and engaged, and therefore more likely to succeed.

SUMMARIZING

If you really want to find success in poker, you need to learn to be consistent. You need to learn to fucking do it anyway. No excuses, no bullshit. You’re not a victim of your emotions. You should feel your emotions, but you should act rationally. You can’t control how you feel, but you can control how you act.

To control how you act, you need to:

1. Develop self-awareness;

2. Develop self-control.

For these 2 purposes, I recommend 3 habits:

1. Journaling, which will help you develop awareness about your emotions, their triggers and their behavioral responses;

2. Visualization, which will help you strengthen your self awareness and develop your self control;

3. Public commitments, which will make you more consistent by leveraging social pressure.

Finally, consider that the vast majority of people who will read this post unfortunately won’t do anything about it.

Do you really want to be part of that statistic? Are you really okay with just getting the results everyone else gets? Don’t you think you deserve more than that? Don’t you think you’re capable of more than that?

It’s up to you. I did my part here.

It’s 1:30 AM now. I wake up at 6AM. I could’ve been sleeping for many hours by now. I had all the reasons not to write you any of this. But I fucking did it anyway. I hope you’ll do it too.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Until then – don’t play the game. Play the Metagame. 

Saulo