Poker, Hormones, and Fitness

Well, here I sit in the middle of my second week of my current program, and after feeling great for a week and a half, and seeing good progress, I currently feel like shit! Why? Because I just got done with a losing poker session, of course! Most notably, bubbled or near bubbled three MTTs in a span of about a half hour, two of which were after some marginal plays on my part, which only makes the post-session feeling even worse. We've all been there, of course, and I'll be there again soon enough. But it gives me enough impetus to write this blog post about something I've thought about a lot in the past and especially during the last couple of weeks.

The truth is that poker is a terribly, terribly unnatural thing for humans to participate in. Not only is it extremely unnatural for us to think with the kind of rote logic that a complex card game requires, we are emotionally committed to results-based thinking, regardless of how illogical it may be. Furthermore, the resulting emotions are designed for a world we don't even live in anymore. The classic example would be a player who loses a big pot due to a bad beat, and suddenly goes into hyper-aggressive tilt mode. As we all know, that is a terribly exploitable strategy and is a quick way to lose the rest of your chips. So why does it happen so often?

As humans, I believe that we are constantly playing a sub-conscious mental game of tribal politics, constantly taking stock of those around us, and where we stand (or don't stand) in the group. For males, this tends to show up as a desire to assert ones-self as a dominant male of the group. This is the cause of a large percentage of drama/fighting/general bullshit that goes on among friends. This phenomenon is even worse among strangers, as people don't know where they stand and are in a constant mental frenzy to try and figure out what others think of them, and are hyper-aware of everything.

In poker, where you have a constant source of competition that is occurring among strangers, this subconscious battling is amplified. To make matters worse, the short-term variance of poker is so high that it's often not the best poker player who wins over the course of a few hands, or even thousands of hands. So, because of our aforementioned results-based thinking, the emotions that we DO have are terribly irrational. I can sit at a table and completely outplay those around me, but if I run bad and lose, my emotions will be just as down as if I had lost the same amount playing poorly.

Going back to our tilting friend above, the sudden burst of aggression he shows after a bad beat is something that, for thousands of years, allowed humans to survive. We've all seen (or been) the guy who gets punched in the face and suddenly the adrenalin starts pumping and he beast-modes the other guy into submission. This kind of thing was extremely useful in the pre-ice age tundra, but at the poker table, not so much!

When you "lose" a battle (and your initial last-ditch aggression attempt fails), your body compensates in the other direction just as quickly. We've all gotten up from the table after a loss in a cash game or a tournament, feeling like absolute crap physically no matter how well we may have played. Our testosterone levels drop rapidly, in part, as a survival mechanism. There was a time in the distant future where continuing to challenge someone who had asserted his/her dominance over you meant exile from the group and/or death. Besides, nobody wants the weak loser guy to be passing on his genes anyway!

The funny thing is that for most of my life, I was always the guy who isn't terribly emotional about things, the guy who seems to be able to set his irrational instincts aside and operate very logically. In fact, it was always strange to me watching how driven by raw emotion and instinct others were. When I started playing poker, I got more in touch with everything "human" about me than I ever had before. Poker is probably the first thing that has really brought out everything horribly irrational and defective about my humanity. And because Poker is hands down the most complex and challenging thing I've ever done, it's managed to make me feel like a superhuman and at once a worthless pile of irrational emotion, unlike anything else.

Anyway, trying to keep this short, but I really started thinking about this a lot because of my current fitness push (which includes studying hormonal-based approaches to diet/exercise), and knowing how much hormones/emotions can affect your progress in that department.