Improve Your Game In Poker By Strengthening Your Mentality

Take a Time and Space to Mourn Your Lost Chance

The world of achievers and especially the highly competitive environment of poker push people to hide their sadness about losses while showing their happiness with successes. But by repressing or rejecting your negative emotions provoked by loss, you do not help yourself even the slightest. On the contrary, according to Ph. D., a clinical psychologist Rosy Saenz-Sierzega, “pretending something didn’t impact you or denying yourself from grieving a loss because it wasn’t a matter of life and death is a disservice to your psyche”.

That’s why you simply must live through your pain for the sake of your mental health. And to be done with it in an effective way, you should follow the four tips:

1. Get rid of labels for your loss. Stop calling your missed bullet “minor” or “major” — refuse to categorize it with some adjective into some hierarchy. The only thing that matters is you went through loss — something bitter, painful and distorting your life for some time. So it deserves to be acknowledged in a clear form as it is.
2. Do not minimize your loss. Minimization is one of the worst enemies of accepting your own feelings. When you or other people say to you that things could go worse, there are players who lost more, you should be grateful for this experience, etc — it distorts your perception and gaslights you to believe that your feelings do not deserve to be acknowledged as true and real. So, accept that you have all rights to feel pain and sadness after your only bullet is gone — and let yourself feel it fully.
3. Spend time with other people. Find players who can share your loss and support you or talk to friends, relatives and significant others about your situation, this pain and frustration of unfulfilled expectations. You can find talking to a therapist relieving too, just find a true professional who can understand the specifics of poker.
4. Create a ritual of deliverance. As childish or esoteric it may sound, making some releasing ritual is actually a powerful psychological move to ease your mind after the loss. The content of the ritual is fully up to you — screaming into a scream jar or pillow, punching a bag with WSOP or other branding on it, making a piece of art about your loss — just choose something that helps you to have closure.

Finally, give yourself permission not only to mourn but to heal too by moving forward after you fully feel your grief.

Reframe Your Experience to Focus on Positives

According to mindset coach Daniel “lucky_scrote” Carter from The Poker Mindset Lab, reframing losses can be a very powerful tool for long-term success because while we don’t have control over the situations that happen to us and we can only have an impact on them, we have control over our perception, the way we see things.

Reframing can be done in three steps:

• Recognize and acknowledge the initial thought. I lost my last chance to freedom, I’m unlucky, I can’t win anything — it can be anything of this sort that pops in your head after your loss.
• Challenge this thought with logic or growth perspective. Ask yourself: does your thought make sense? What does it tell you about you and your mindset? What can be done better in the situation connected to it?
• Replace this thought with a more empowering and actionable one. Create a new thought and repeat it again and again to create a new norm for yourself.

If you think that you don’t have thoughts when you are losing, you are just reacting with emotions and feelings — you should be aware that thoughts are here, they are just quiet or not quite noticeable for you. And you need to make them louder by focusing on your inner processes to create an opportunity to work with them.

The best instruments to practice reframing:

1. Mindfulness exercise. Every time you go through something or feel something — try to catch not only a feeling or emotion but thought that you have in this moment. Practice makes it easier even if at the start you can feel stupid and unable to recognize your thoughts before they slip out of your mind.
2. Keep a journal or diary. Write a summary of your day or session, describing situations that make you feel and think something, and use your own words on paper for reframing — writing your thoughts down can actually be more effective than just thinking them inside your head. It also helps to clear the mind from unpleasant thoughts and structure thinking.
3. Use self-talking. Find a technique that helps you to create more positive and just inner dialogue and stick to it without diverge to self-indulgent or self-critisizing ways of talking to yourself.

All of these tools may seem a little woo-woo but they have quite a history of being useful when implemented right and without esoteric fanaticism.

Consult with Numbers: Poker Maths and Statistics Don’t Lie

Finally, if your loss feels unbelievable, improbable and statistically insane from an empirical point of view — just use maths to prove or refute it.

The simplest way is to study an example from 2025 WSOP Main Event:

• Day 1a had 923 entries with 634 players going to Day 2ab.
• Day 1b had 1,096 entries with 798 players going to Day 2ab.
• Day 1c had 1,678 entries with 1,249 players going to Day 2cd.
• Day 1d had 4,977 entries with 3,776 players going to Day 2cd.

Since the Main Event is a freezeout without re-entries, you have only one attempt to qualify into Day 2 or enter into it directly for the short time after start if you miss all Day 1s. However, we are here to inspect the situation where you have money or a ticket only for one entry during Day 1.

So, depending on the day you choose for your shot, you had a different probability to get into Day 2:

• Day 1a — 68%
• Day 1b — 72%
• Day 1c — 74%
• Day 1d — 75%

This percentage may seem huge until you remember that the WSOP 2025 Main Event is played over 11 days where each subsequent day becomes more difficult to survive, so the probability of passing further significantly decreases. So, you can probably imagine how small a chance is to run really deep, reach the final table or especially win this event.

So, if these numbers calm you down — try to do maths on your personal results in some major event and you will see very interesting probabilities that may help to find peace with your lost chances.