“The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon”….one of the most famous Zen quotations and one that has set countless people thinking about its meaning over the years. This article is something that I hope very much will not only lead to you achieving a much better frame of mind the next time that you play poker but that it may also enhance your life significantly for the better in all other areas.

This is basically an account about my early years of not just playing poker in live card rooms, but alsoonline poker as well and my self imposed frustrations that were brought about by my inherent inability to be able to accept negative outcomes, us poker players understand them better as bad beats and negative runs.

Emotional stability has never really been a strength of mine but about a year ago, I undertook to learn all about myself and really understand why I behaved the way that I did and why I have done certain things in the past….if that makes any sense.

So in short, I decided to become my very own shrink and get to the nitty gritty of discovering just who and what I was and I set about this task by reading several books that were recommended to me that would help me in this quest. I knew full well that my inability to remain composed during bad runs at poker had cost me a very substantial amount of money over the years. I have tried numerous times to tell myself to stop doing this without success.

But looking back, it was obvious that I had been setting about doing this in the wrong way. That is a bit like telling someone who is overweight and who wishes to lose some weight to simply stop eating so much food. This is not addressing the real problem and it was obvious to me that this was an area that I myself could not solve without seeking help from some other source.

There have been many times during my poker career where I have often asked myself the question of whether I could even cut it at all in this game and especially during the early years. But after reading what for me was a very revealing and eye opening book, I suddenly realised what my problems were and this helped me to develop a better all round online poker strategy.

That book was called “Neurosis and the Human Self” by Karen Horney which is a book that is dedicated to achieving self realisation. For me this was a ground breaking book although quite old now, its impact has still sent shockwaves not just through my life but also through my poker game.

The content of that book cannot be covered in this article or done any kind of justice. But in short, what that book did for me was to make me realise for the very first time that my early childhood and formative years were still influencing greatly how I was behaving all these years later. Events at school, my parent’s methods, humiliating experiences in earlier life and the subsequent knock on effects were all explained to me in great detail by Karen Horney.

I actually found the book quite spooky and sad in many places because it accurately highlighted my failures as a human being in many areas and was almost as though the book had been written about me personally.

The more that I studied the more self aware I became. It reached a stage where I actually became amazed that I had become a winning poker player at all with the traumatic past that I had and it appeared to me that I should never have been in the proper psychological state to succeed in a game like online poker where personal and emotional discipline is so vitally important.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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