Tyler Durden's Online Poker Tips

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
Tyler Durden

This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time. Life’s too short to sludge through a dream world in which you’re content to play badly. Do you want to one day look back from your dotage, and see all the bad plays you made, all the bad decisions you could have avoided, all the crap hands you didn’t need to get involved with, but played anyway for god knows what reason?

Unlike the universe your game should show signs of intelligent design. Playing well is the key to keeping your present and future regret factor to a minimum.

It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Losing is hard, yes? No, it’s not. You play poker you lose frequently on a per session basis. Once you accept short term losses (think of them as short term loans) as an inevitable, integral part of the game you can free yourself to play without fear.

How much can you know about yourself, you've never been in a fight? I don't wanna die without any scars. So come on; hit me before I lose my nerve. Reiterating the last point.
Be fearless. You’re not going to get through your poker life without a body full of scars. You can’t play a winning game with fear at your back. Dive in, take your beats when they come, shake it off, and get on to the next hand.

You had to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide. In poker as in life, you have to recognize that so much of the crap that comes your way is just that, crap. Paring away the detritus of daily life, of poker, will help keep the screen clean and your mind uncluttered.

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive?. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
You want to know who thinks they’re special? Watch the “all singing, all dancing crap of the world” on the WSOP 2007 reality-TV show. And then check how many of those fist pumping, victory dancing, “that’s what I’m talking about” shouting clowns you see at the final table. (Aside from Hevad Khan, of course).


Listen to me! You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.
Sometimes a poker player will play as though he expects God to come to his aid. Making draws that the pot odds won’t justify, coming in with any two suited cards, and so on. Play as though God doesn’t care about the outcome of your hand (he doesn’t, he told me so), and you’ll play better.

After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down. Maybe this is what we love about poker. It can have all the elements of a good fight (without the blood, usually - especially in online poker): competition, defeat, victory, satisfaction.

Fuck what you know. You need to forget about what you know, that's your problem. Forget about what you think you know about life. Sometimes we need to clear all the garbage we think we’ve learned about poker (and life) out of our heads, just to get a genuinely clear vision of what it is we think we’re doing.

Tyler Durden's Online Poker Tips originally appeared in Tips4Poker.com in a slightly different form.