Poker is a skill game that is ‘simple as ABC’ to learn but tough to master. Though the game is competitive and challenging in itself, the human factor makes it the more entertaining and engrossing. The game is considered to be complex because the game decisions depend on the actions of other players, not merely on mentioned game rules and probabilities. This is the key reason you get to learn about practical life while playing poker. Following are the real-life lessons you can learn from poker:
Learn about Others & Yourself
While playing poker, you need to observe your opponents and their game moves. In live poker, you will find many players whose hands start to shake when they are dealt monster hands like pocket aces. If any such poker tells you can read, you should fold your hands with a blink of an eye. Likewise, you can apply this poker learning in your real life. For instance, you are attending a speech and feeling bored while listening to the speech. In this case, you can practically experience the same when giving the speech yourself and observing the reaction of the audience. If the audience is smiling and nodding, it means your speech is captivating. Thus, you can learn about other people by studying yourself. If you know how to act in different situations, you can watch for that very behavior in others to gain information as you may get to learn to tackle the situation in a better way.
Intellect and Intuition
Poker is a mental game wherein you have to use your logic and intuition together to decide when to check, bet, call, raise, or fold. There would be times while playing online poker games when your logic will work and intuition may not and vice versa, and you will have to go for the best possible option available. Equivalently, logic and intuition make an important part of your life. As life is open-ended, there would be times when logic and intuition would disagree with your decisions, but you always have the option to analyze the situation and choose the third substitute.
Don’t Be a Fish
In poker games, fish is the title given to bad poker players who lose more money and don’t mind giving away their money. These players play badly forever and hardly work on improving their online poker skills. The more they play, the more they lose. Correspondingly in real life, if you live imperfectly, you sooner or later lose everything, i.e, if you don‘t take care of your health, mismanage your finances and abuse your relationships, you actually part ways with everything related to you. As poker professionals enhance their skills to be long-run winners, similarly you should get rid of negative habits and work on the enlightenment of your personal life.
Play Perfectly and Still Lose
Poker is a game of upturns and downturns where you need to withstand bad beats repeatedly. There would be situations when you will be holding the best hand on the table and will still lose the hand. Life is much the same – you will make every effort to do everything perfectly but still lack somewhere. There are no rules laid down for perfection, and all you need to do is take the right decisions and as the cards will fall as they may.
Therefore, there is no such hand – in poker and in life that can leave you crippled for a lifetime. So, take a deep breath and sweep it aside because you can’t change the ‘over and done’ situation. Focus on the present and don’t forget there is always another hand to be played.
