The point is that with a game as complex as poker, you can never ever know everything that there is to know. This is undoubtedly a good thing because if we could master poker in a very short space of time then poker would not have the appeal that it does.

Imagine for a minute if poker could me mastered as easily as the good old traditional game of noughts and crosses! Poker as a game would never have taken off and this would have been because the game was just too easy.

Yet it is truly amazing that so many players can assume that they know poker all because they have read several books and attempted to learn poker. I am in a position now where I literally have people approaching me from all over the world asking my advice on gambling matters.

But that would never have been the case had I simply stopped learning all those years ago by thinking that I knew it all. I literally cannot wait to find out tomorrow what I do not know today.

Zen and the study of other eastern philosophies like Confucianism has highlighted to me that much of what I perceived to be my earlier goals in poker, making money, winning, avoiding tilt etc were actually leading me down the avenue to being stressed and unhappy not just with my poker game but with my everyday life as well.

It can be tremendously difficult when you are totally absorbed with something not to let that interfere with your everyday life and your personal life. When you have just lost 200 big bets at limit Texas Hold’em poker then you could just turn into the type of person that your wife or girlfriend does not want to be around.

My girlfriend can tell when I have had a particularly nasty session because of how dejected and fed up I look. While I don’t start screaming and shouting, my mood still rubs off onto her substantially and she knows when I am having to force a smile and look happy. While I control myself very well at the table these days during bad runs, I still find it difficult to shrug it off away from the table and it certainly does affect my personal life.

But the study and application of Zen cannot be achieved by reading this article or a handful of books for that matter. It is something that one must constantly strive towards and for some Zen practitioners, true enlightenment can come in the blink of an eye from the most obscure of sources and in an instant, a persons life has been totally transformed.

To truly master poker then we must strive to master ourselves. Learning the technical part of the game although complex in its own right is still only half the battle!

Many people who come to poker can often succeed over some players who have studied long and hard in a very short space of time due to the fact that they already possessed the required mental outlook not only to poker but also to life in general.

I apologise if these articles has left the reader with even more questions regarding Zen and that I have not provided all or even most of the answers. But that in a nutshell is the sheer essence of Zen, it simply cannot easily be put into words but anyone who attempts to broaden their knowledge of eastern philosophy by studying Zen may find something remarkable happening.

They may just wake up one day with totally different outlooks not only to life in general but also to how they play poker as well……and that has to be worth taking a look at!

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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