Poker can take a lifetime to master, unless you’re New York Times best-selling author Maria Konnikova, who went from total novice to international Texas Hold’em champion inonly ten months. It was such an unexpected byproduct of researching her upcoming book that she ditched the very same book deal to tour the high stakes circuit across Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, and Macau armed with just a few key poker tips.
- High Stakes Tips For Beginners
- High Stakes Tips For Planting
- High Stakes Betting Tips
- High Stakes Tips For Teachers
- High Stakes Tips For High School
- Tips From MuckDucks While Playing High Stakes MTTs February 2, 2021 at 5:30 PM by Staff In this classic poker training video for Cardrunners, MuckDucks live plays three tables of high stakes MTTs, sharing his thoughts and strategies in real-time.
- When you notice a high stakes conversation is “triggering” something in you, take a breath, sit down, and bring yourself back to the frontal lobe by PREPARING your talking points. PREPARATION is the second key ingredient to conducting high-stakes conversations with a clear head.
Over the past several years, many parents and students have begun to launch movements against overtesting and the high stakes testing movement. They have begun to realize that their children are being stripped of an authentic educational experience that instead hinges on how they perform on a series of test over a period of a few days. High stakes poker can take a lifetime to master, unless you’re New York Times best-selling author Maria Konnikova. Here are 10 key poker tips.
Under the esteemed tutelage of Poker Hall of Fame inductee and 30-year veteran Erik Seidel, you could argue Konnikova’s success was, in fact, inevitable. You’ve got to learn from the best to become the best. Seidel’s gameplay – rooted in psychology over mathematics – has earned him eight World Series of Poker bracelets and over $34 million in competition earnings.
Konnikova spotted Seidel in Matt Damon’s 1998 poker drama Rounders. He delivered his unconventional wisdom through Yoda-style idioms over long walks. When Konnikova asked for winning strategies, Seidel simply responded, “Less certainty. More enquiry.”
Her book The Biggest Bluff (which she did later finish) is the ultimate masterclass in not just poker tips, but general decision making: how to think, act, and react.
“This book isn’t about how to play poker. It’s about how to play the world.”
1. You control the art of playing a bad hand
Seidel compares poker to jazz music. All you can do is ask, “What are these guys doing and how do I respond to it?”
So much of what happens at a poker table is beyond your control. You might be sitting across from assholes, the cards themselves are inanimate, and luck doesn’t give a shit about you. The only thing you control is your response.
Konnikova runs a mantra-like checklist to control her behaviour. Asking if she has agency over her attention, presence, control of her emotions, guard over her behaviour and gestures.
2. Question everything and stay open-minded
“Less certainty. More enquiry.” Poker isn’t static, and being too fixed on your hand impairs your ability to take on new information as it transpires on the table.
Some poker tips to hone your flexibility and open-mindedness include;
- Being more interested in listening over speaking
- Believe you are wrong by default, so you are forced to reconsider the problem and ensure you’re not missing any key details
- Practice balancing opposite opinions to your own without losing the ability to think clearly
3. Get better at making sound decisions
“The object of poker is making good decisions.” Luck is beyond your control, but planning for the best possible move is achievable. Building a coherent decision-making system makes it easier to identify a breakdown in your rationale to be improved upon for next time.
A system mindset makes individual outcomes less important, so you can avoid the typical cognitive biases that impede on making decisions under the pump. Many players fall victim to the sunken cost fallacy: holding on to bad cards for far too long, simply because of the time, energy, and buy-in they have already made to date.
4. Don’t act without knowing how to react
Considered all possible outcomes in advance of your next move or else don’t make the move. You should also enter every game with a predetermined exit strategy. To avoid making misinformed decisions, know in advance which cards you will keep betting on, and which card will force you to fold.
5. Find comfort in uncertainty
The human mind clings to certainty. But poker is always changing, and you have to get comfortable with that unpredictability. All you can ever control is:
- Making the best call based on the evidence you have at the moment
- Ensuring you’re not in a rigged game
- Completely detaching from the resulting outcome
- Accept you did the best with what you had, and the result was out of your control
6. Don’t be a victim
Seidel refused to listen to Konnikova’s bad beats, “It’s like dumping your garbage on someone else’s lawn. It just stinks.” Ruminating in past mistakes just diverts your energy away from the present moment, which you still have the opportunity to change. Worst of all, you run the risk of inviting more unwanted outcomes. Konnikova explains that as a victim, “You don’t open your eyes to possibilities around you and your opportunities naturally narrow so you create a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
7. Get rid of your ego
Poker might be the best social example of a dick-measuring contest out there. As such, you need to detach from the outcome of your move, especially if it’s unwanted. Inflating your own importance isn’t confidence, it’s your ego, and if left unchecked, your ego will crush you. Pride will make it harder for you to own mistakes, and as a result, you will take in less information and make inferior decisions.
Your ego is always trying to size you up against other people, so Konnikova’s performance coach Jared Tendler advised, “Everyone got lucky at some point. Strip down the mythology around their greatness. They still have weaknesses. They are humans first, players second.”
8. Find the right mentor
Seidel was the perfect mentor because he was more passionate about sharing his love of the craft over anything Konnikova offered him. Find a mentor with longevity in the game who is committed to long term growth above short term wins, money, or fame.
9. Staying sane under high stakes
Casinos are specifically designed to deplete your ability to make smart decisions, from the architecture down to the free alcohol. You need to recognise and take back agency when you’re triggered and thrown off your game.
To regain focus, Konnikova donned headphones, watched the hands of her opponents rather their faces, and walked away from the table often, despite losing a few chips to do so. The emotional reset was a much smaller price to pay than suffering the consequences of overwhelming emotions.
10. Tells are a last resort
Only after composing your own emotional state can you better read it on your opponents. Any ‘tell’ can have multiple explanations, what matters more is how they stack up over time. Tells are only valuable if you use enough of them to form a pattern. Only after you identify an opponent’s baseline, can you detect any credible deviations from it, in the same way that a polygraph test registers untruthful answers.
Poker and life are interchangeable – constant games of incomplete information, balancing acts of chance, skill and luck. But remember, no one knows what cards you have to play. All they know is what you offer up.
If you’re still not immediately inspired to master these poker tips and poker in general, I’d recommend having a flick through of the book – which you can cop on Amazon right now.
There is an ever-growing mountain of literature and research that shows how important emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and learning agility are for leaders and employees to succeed in today’s world of work. The primary way that we exhibit our abilities in these critical areas is how we communicate with others. For most of us, it isn’t the simple conversations that will define our failure or success in these areas. Most of us have learned how to effectively engage in these basic every day conversations when we assign tasks, check on a status update, give directions, provide feedback around a task that has been completed, or add your opinion to someone else’s ideas. Simple and transactional conversations are easy.
High Stakes Tips For Beginners
Don’t confuse these everyday casual conversations with your high-stakes conversations. These harder conversations will define success or failure with your most important, challenging and complex situations. Success with these conversations requires a unique set of skills and rigor. When we successfully engage in high-stakes conversations, people walk away feeling that the time was well spent and as a result, they feel a deeper understanding of the intentions and perspectives of one another. This builds a foundation of trust that sets the stage for the possibility of creating new insights and shared action for progress.
All too often, we see how quickly these high-stakes conversations can deteriorate into unproductive, reactive and defensive conversations. Below are 3 Tips I have used with my clients to help them become more successful with their high-stakes conversations.
Tip #1- Generate Empathy
We have all heard the quote, “Before you judge a person, walk a mile in their shoes.” This saying acts as a reminder to practice empathy. Empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Research has shown over and over again that empathy is a critical element for your ability to exhibit emotional intelligence, build healthy relationships, and effectively engage others in high-stakes conversations.
Psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan developed Self-Determination Theory in the mid-1980s and since then it has been researched and refined by many scholars. This theory tells us that people have three innate psychological needs affecting well-being, motivation, and performance. These universal needs are Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competence (ARC).
We all experience these same foundational drivers for social motivation and when these drivers are negatively impacted, they also become our primary drivers for social threat. By taking the time to understand how your high-stakes conversation might generate potential threats to other's ARC, you can help increase your empathy and insight about how others may be feeling about the situation. This can be done by answering how you perceive the situation and conversation could negatively impact other’s:
Autonomy – Need to be in control of their behaviors and goals.
Relatedness – Sense of belonging and security in relationships.
High Stakes Tips For Planting
Competence – Belief that they can succeed with challenging tasks.
WARNING: Assumptions created from assessing someone’s ARC should only be used to help guide what questions to ask (See Tip 3). One should never use ARC assumptions to tell people what, how, and why they are acting or feeling a certain way—as doing so would create additional threats.
Tip #2 – Align Your Goals and Intentions
I am continually reminded in both my professional and personal life that our behaviors and actions are a direct reflection of the mindset that we bring into the situation. To be successful during our high-stakes conversations we must be aware of our mindset and, if needed, be able to reset our mindset to one that pushes us toward behaviors that highlight our best selves during these critical situations. In my coaching practice, I often have leaders go through an exercise where they identify an important, complex and challenging situation they are struggling with and where they need to engage others in a high-stakes conversation. I then ask them to take a couple of minutes to answer the following questions:
High Stakes Betting Tips
What are my long-term task and relationship goals for this person or group of people?
Based on my answer to question number one, what are my best task and relationship intentions for my high-stakes conversation with this person or group of people?
What do your best results and relationship intentions say about the behaviors you should exhibit during your high-stakes conversation?
By answering these questions you can deliberately choose your best mindset before entering your high-stakes conversations. By aligning your 'in the moment' intentions to your highest-level task and relational goals, you will bring your best self to your high-stakes conversation. This exercise has the power to completely flip how you view your most difficult and charged conversations while allowing you to align your short-term behaviors with your long-term result and relationship goals.
Tip #3 - Lead with Questions
In his book “Trusted Advisor” written by David Maister he writes about research that shows us how our self-orientation is perceived by others is the single most important factor in either losing or building trust. Self-orientation refers to the focus you have when you engage with others. In particular, whether your focus is primarily on addressing your needs - or do people observe you balancing your needs with a desire to understand and advance their perspectives, goals and ideas. Research confirms that taking the time to ask questions, listen and demonstrate understanding of others’ perspectives and needs is the single most effective way to build trust with others.
Do the people you interact with during your high-stakes conversation believe that you understand and have their best interests at heart or do they feel you are doing trying to influence or leverage this conversation for selfish gain? If you are perceived to be focused only on only your interest and don’t seem interested in other’s perspective and needs you will not succeed in building trust with others. Using the ARC (Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competence) model helps to increase your empathy and understanding to equip yourself with a set of starting questions that demonstrate that you care about understanding their perspectives, assumptions, goals, challenges and ideas. Below are some example questions.
- What would success look like for you?
- How do you believe this situation sets you or others up for failure? / How do you believe this situation sets you up for success?
- Can you give me an example of that?
- What constraints (time, resources, energy, focus, etc) does this situation present for you?
- How do you feel this situation impacts others?
- How do you think we should move forward?
- What do you think we should do next?
High Stakes Tips For Teachers
A sincere attempt to understand others within the context of your high-stakes conversation helps to build a foundation of trust that will move your conversation forward by creating a safe environment for sharing insights, solutions, and actions for progress.
High Stakes Tips For High School
You will never reach your full potential professionally or personally until you develop your ability to have effective high-stakes conversations. Given this fact, it is hard to understand why our workplaces invest significantly more time and resources developing technical skills and, by comparison, very few resources focused on developing skill sets for effective conversations.
Tony Gambill is a principal consultant for CREO Inc., an innovative management consulting and advisory firm based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. Tony brings more than 20 years of executive experience in leadership and talent development within global for-profit, non-profit, technical, research, healthcare, government and higher educational industries. www.CreoInc.net