Hi all, well tbh I do suffer from depression but I am a winning player in micro tournaments but just wondered if anyone suffers from anxiety from poker? Maybe it’s when you go deep in the tournament and your scared to make moves late on that you know you should be doing or even scared to enter a tournament as you been on a bad run or won the same tournament back to back and think your luck will run out now as we all know we need luck to win a tournament! From my experience there is all different types of anxiety in poker and it could be from a player who always seems to beat you in big pots ect so your scared of that player Now and this affects your game with him! Guess what I,am trying to ask is what is your anxiety in poker and most importantly of all how you deal with it?
Hey, I have depression and I'm also a winning micro-stakes MTT player!
To answer your question: No, I don't suffer any anxiety from MTTs because there is nothing about them that bother me. Here is something from a different thread on some of the main things players might fear while playing:
1. Losing a buy-in/money
It's impossible to play any game without the risk of your BR dipping down a bit. In MTTs, with higher variance than other games, seeing downswings in your BR is not uncommon and is to be expected. Good BRM is the best way to counter this. If losing buy-ins is scary, have a stricter BRM plan. 100 BIs for MTTs is pretty standard, but you can make it 150-200 if it's more comfortable.
2. Losing with a strong hand?
It's inevitable. No matter how much of a favorite your hand is preflop, if your opponent has some
equity, they can beat your hand. Even 27 vs AA is winning 1/5 of the time. That's nothing to be afraid of as you can clearly see that AA is winning 4/5 of the time. You are never going to win every hand you play, but
hands with better equity (favorites) preflop will win more often in the long run. Win more than you lose and you'll be fine.
3. Getting knocked out from a tournament?
Again, it's inevitable. While it does suck to sometimes play for hours and end up not having anything to show for it, you're going to bust out of MTTs a lot. Get used to it. A decent ITM% for decent MTT players is ~20%. This could be lower if players give up easy bubble cashes in exchange for deeper runs or it could be higher at the cost of a lower ROI%, but 20% is good. That means, 80% of the time you're busting without cashing at all. In 100 MTTs, you're only cashing in ~20 of them.
That's nothing to be afraid of if you have a good ROI, which comes from running deep and making final tables/winning MTTs. If your ITM is 20%, but you have a negative or break-even ROI, then you have some leaks in your game that need plugging. That's a completely different topic, but the main point is, you don't need to cash in every MTT to show a profit (because that's impossible), so don't fear busting out of a few MTTs.
Think of it this way: whoever your favorite MTT player is, they've busted out of more MTTs than they've cashed. They still do well because when they do cash deep, it makes up for those losses.
Everything ties together.
You're going to bust out of a number of MTTs as you play; possibly going on some pretty bad downswings, because variance. But if you're playing hands with good equity preflop and maximizing your value when your big hands hit/hold, then you'll find yourself running deep, where more profit is made. Remember, you only need 1 good, deep MTT run to negate the downswings. Having strict BRM helps you handle the downswings since you're only putting a small amount of your BR at risk each time.