The Mental Game Of Poker by Jared Tendler - Book Review

Poker is somewhat unique in that you can play the game perfectly, be one of the best in the world even and yet still lose on a regular basis. In his book Jared Tendler explores key mental issues such as tilt, motivation and confidence that can be affected by the variance poker often delivers. By understanding these issues more fully and working on techniques and strategies to minimise their negative aspects we can play our best poker more consistently and for longer. Sounds good to me. The key theme was that understanding variance better can improve your game, even motivate you to work on your game more. Astutely Jared clarifies in detail that the thing we hate most in poker ie.variance/downswings etc is the thing that makes the game worth playing. Without it the worst players would not play! So be careful what you wish for. At the end of a session the importance of how well one played should outweigh the actual profit and loss result. This I will definitely need to work on but I will report a Tendler style set of results for August to see how that works. Other aspects of the book I found useful included sections on pre session warm ups and warm downs. Another focuses on the achieving the ideal level of confidence (stable confidence). Interestingly one of his students was advised to write a blog to let out his feelings. Jared certainly covers a lot of ground, not all of which was relevant to me though. Nevertheless I do feel I learnt a lot about my own mental game issues through his book and this will help me moving forward. I was too easily affected by variance because success in poker means a lot to me for lots of different reasons (more than I had realised). When my results went off the rails (irrespective of how well I was playing) my game deteriorated through frustration at my lack of current success. Despite being a winning player for six years the truth is I believed I was a failure at Poker because I had not achieved the level of success I felt worthy of. My $20000 should have been more like $75000 in my old distorted mindset. This has held me back. At the moment I am much less affected by variance and yet strangely much more aware of it. Now I am seeing more of the positive aspects of variance as well, which perhaps in the past I had put down to my skill rather than luck. In some ways this book was not an enjoyable read. Partly because it contains some home truths about my mental game issues, partly because some of it is quite complex and also partly because Jared Tendler is no John Grisham. Overall though despite being a little more expensive than some poker books, I would recommend it to any poker player who has had tilt issues. I believe it will make them, me and Jared a lot of extra money. No wonder he is smiling! Play well.