It Is Time To Celebrate YOU in Poker!

The Importance of Celebrating Your Poker Journey and Progress

Poker is not about the end result. It’s more of a marathon from one goal to the next where every step, milestone, and achievement is worth notting.

It doesn’t matter how long your career is — you can look back on it any day of the week and find something to be proud of or at least satisfied with. Without doing this, you’ll inevitably find yourself unsatisfied or just annoyed, focusing too much on the monetary result and never simply feeling accomplished.

By celebrating your poker journey and evaluating the path you’ve already crossed, you’ll be able to detach from the monetary side of your results and find many more sources of joy. A good example of this is one of Francois Hamel’s client, who while remaining anonymous developed a beautiful mindset about the game:

“I’m losing $ today but no idea how much. Normally I’d be seeing how much my buy-ins were and trying to see if I can get even, etc. Now I’m just playing and finishing off my session and smiling. I “won” because this is the happiest / most focused / best session I’ve played in a long time. I just tried to trust myself. Didn’t over think anything etc. Never once got frustrated, It is quite freeing not worrying about if I win this session or not.”

The Importance of Celebrating Your Wins (Even the Small Ones)

Even if it may seem naive, allowing yourself to feel positive and just outright joyful every time you win can be very powerful for your mental health. According to Melanie A McNally Psy.D., when we celebrate something, we boost our brains’ reward system, helping ourselves to have more motivation and overall satisfaction. We also help our mind solidify lessons learned from the victorious moment, decrease our general level of stress, and maintain a healthy level of selfesteem. 

Moreover, reliving successful memories can also keep you afloat during long downswings, knowing that it does get better. Of course, you can go about this n different ways — for example, Lex Veldhuis writes and uses “a book of victories” to reassure himself from time to time but also to be kinder towards himself.

Being positive about each of your wins is easier when you have a healthy relationship with your mistakes. As Omaha player and Francois Hamel’s client Dennis Backhaus says, you should “go into sessions expecting to make mistakes and be ok with it”, meaning accept them and don’t give them the power to influence your mood and performance.

But What to Do if I Can’t Celebrate My Poker Self?

Not every person has an ability to feel proud of themselves and celebrate the good parts of their life in full. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t gain this ability through training. A good way to do it is one that Francois Hamel taught Lex Veldhuis in regard to studying: perceive this trait as a muscle you can train:

1. Start small: As for studying, you can start with one hand per day. For celebrating, you can start with one small praise for one good thing you did today in poker. It can be a nice bluff or bluff catch, avoiding tilt after bad beats, sweet little ITM or pot, etc. You shouldn’t overwhelm yourself or push yourself to be happy; the main goal is to make a constant effort of noticing the positive moments in your life and career.
2. Gradually build up volume: The measure here is your inner comfort. As soon as your daily acknowledgement becomes a comforting habit, add a second thing to praise, then a third, and so on. This way, when you have a horrible day or just don’t feel well, you can always reduce the amount of things to celebrate.

The main trick here is not expecting your ability to celebrate to be on a certain high level from the start. You also have to remember that people tend to feel the same emotions differently depending on a cluster of factors such as the conditions you grew up in, the presence of psychological trauma, perceptional peculiarities, circle of friends, etc.

So, if you don’t know anything about self-encouragement or just don’t have a habit of giving yourself positive re-encouragement — you should start looking within yourself a little bit and taking these celebratory baby steps without the weight of any expectations about the end result.

A Celebration Mental Trick: Create a Value System for Achievements

You can make a list of things you consider as achievements for different areas of your life — separating playing poker, studying poker, dealing with health or mental issues, etc. — rank them according to their importance and distribute them throughout the week for praise.

By making this system you also can re-evaluate your own perception and gain a deeper understanding of your fears, sources of motivation, secondary incentives, and other important factors that you should understand in order to become better in both poker and in life.