Some people find it far too easy to forget that poker rooms present a view of what ‘real’ life is like out there outside of the internet and everything that it stands for. People who have been playing at one of their favourite online sites for more than a bit know how much importance they should attach to the other users of the particular poker site.
They know that some people – luckily not all – become different characters when they can hide behind being ‘virtually’ anonymous. This means that some of our friends and foes in any poker environment can be a regular ‘nice guy’ in the real world and a ‘cyberbully’ when they’re on cyber turf.
It’s perhaps more accurate to state that not all cyberbullies display bullying qualities 100% of the time; however, it may be a fair estimate to wager that such behaviours are what they display for the largest percentage of the time that they spend figuring out whose hand they should call.
The psychology of poker is a field that attracts its fair share of attention – there are a number of research papers out there that talks about how people make decisions in online poker rooms. Thought attribution is something that most of the most successful poker players spend a great deal of time on. They try to anticipate what someone – their opponents – thinks they think.
This creates an environment that is crammed full of an element many of us are only too familiar with – stress. Not everyone reacts to stress in the same way, which is why online poker rooms can offer entertainment that is perhaps on par with that of HBO.
One of the qualities that some players may struggle with when they are playing is their impulse control. It is possible that there are other aspects of someone’s personality that are equally important but the ability to control oneself is of paramount importance: it allows for many hours of play without getting the boot from the site’s administrators.
But it goes further than that: the ability to control one’s behaviour can help that player to win the pot, the tournament, and at other aspects of life, too.
There is no easy answer to how one can go about to control those pesky things that we call emotions and impulses. The important thing is, of course, to know whether your personality type is one that makes a 180% change at the sight of a poker game.
Author bio:
Piggs Peak Poker wrote this article about how an online poker room can change our behaviour.