Inspiration

Poker Inspiration: Sometimes looking outside of the box is the best way to gain a fresh perspective on something. Poker is a fun game, but we can get stuck in our own little universe, or develop tunnel vision.

Noted author and poker pro Lou Krieger wrote many books for beginner poker players including the first volume of Poker for Dummies. His best advice on how to avoid going on tilt is to “get up from the table, take a break, and go for a walk.” Sometimes stepping away from the poker tables or logging off of the virtual felt is the best way to improve poker inspiration.

Taking frequent breaks and engaging in things outside of poker is beneficial to your mental health. In the short term, you get a much-needed break from poker. Over the long term, the added benefit of gaining new insight and a fresh perspective can help improve your skills over the course of a career.

Playing non-poker strategic games such as chess, Go, roulette, and blackjack could actually help inspire your poker game, especially if you’ve gone stagnant or stale. You’d be surprised how other math-oriented gambling games (roulette and blackjack) and classic strategy board games (Go and chess) can help boost poker inspiration your poker skills. DominoQQ have the best online tables.

You can find poker inspiration in the strangest of places, but only if you take time away from the poker tables to play different games. As you will soon find out, several aspects of non-poker games have strong and similar connections to poker.

CHESS AND POKER

One of the biggest fundamentals of chess is grasping the concept that your current move has a ripple effect throughout the remainder of the game. You simply must consider the future implications of your current move. That’s why chess players take a long time to make a move – because they think in terms of decision trees before arriving at a strategic decision.

Poker players can apply decision trees to their basic poker inspiration. The best cliché to explain this concept is “thinking several moves in advance.”  Sometimes we get so caught up in the current betting round (pre-flop or on the flop), that we do not think about its implications later in the hand (on the turn or river). That’s why we need to be mindful of our current decisions; they have an impact on later streets.

If you ever walked into a park and watched the locals play a variation of speed chess, you should consider joining them for a few games. Speed chess is like turbo-charged chess because there’s a shot clock and you are forced to make instant decisions. Like Malcom Gladwell suggested in his book “Blink”, sometimes your initial gut instinct is the correct instinct versus a more thorough investigation into a decision. Hand analysis is important. But, sometimes players get lost in their own minds by overthinking a hand. While poker and chess are both very complex, too much over-analysis is a bad thing. That’s why speed chess is a great exercise to help making better decisions on the fly.