Poker and Mind Control

By Tim Ryerson - March 2005

Is it possible to use hypnosis and other mind control techniques to win at poker?

Picture the scene; you're sat at the same poker table as Paul McKenna (the famous stage hypnotist). After a few hands you look down and find a royal flush and put in a big raise. McKenna re-raises and looks you straight in the eye. The next thing you know, you muck your cards and pass your chips to the smiling hypnotist.

You then move table and are now sat opposite Derren Brown (the psychic entertainer). This time you have absolutely nothing, but after a few words of wisdom from Mr Mind Control, you feel the urge to call his bet. You lose and are out of the poker tournament.

So what happened? Were you hypnotised, brainwashed, subjected to subliminal messages? Or were you just a complete muppet who can't play poker?

I've always had an interest in psychology and techniques such as hypnosis. I'm lucky to have met and worked with the person who actually taught hypnosis to Paul McKenna, and over the years I have learned a great deal on this subject and other psychological techniques. The main thing I've learnt about hypnosis is how much it is misunderstood by people.

Put simply, hypnosis is the art of communication and the avoidance of conflict. For rapid hypnotic inductions, such as those used by stage hypnotists (hypnotherapy is very different), only certain types of people can be influenced and manipulated. For many reasons, conventional hypnosis techniques would not work at the poker table. I wish it would work with poker, but it won't!

Although there is no reason why self hypnosis cannot help you become a better poker player. It could be used to help you stay relaxed, increase your attention and focus, improve your unconscious memory, control your emotions, and much more. However this is more about controlling yourself rather than the idea of making other people do what you want them to.

As for Derren Brown, he uses a bit of hypnosis, a bit of NLP, and a lot of conventional magic tricks to create his TV masterpieces. NLP is a 'mind control' technique which stands for Neuro-Linguistic-Programming. It is a popular self help communication tool, sort of like hypnosis but with the eyes open. That's a pretty basic description, as I don't want to go too deep. This is a poker website after all.

NLP has some devoted followers and contains a lot of rhetoric. To be honest it's mostly a pile of crap. However, it might be worth looking in a little more details how some of the better aspects of NLP 'might' help at the poker table.

Gaining rapport is a major aspect of NLP. Once you have rapport with someone, you can take the pace and start to lead them in the direction you want. If you've ever bought something you didn't want then the sales person did their job properly and used such techniques on you.

In poker terms, you could start pacing them into doubting their hand. Suppose you were to use the following language pattern:

"I'm not too sure about my hand. I think it's good and it feels like a winner, but there are doubts in my mind, major doubts . You know when you look at your hand and think about it. You know those hands that you were positive would win and then you lose a lot of money!"

This brings me onto the subject of anchoring. This is an NLP technique which 'anchors' a feeling or emotion to anything from a movement, word, or touch, etc. This is the same process as when we hear a certain song and the memories and emotions associated to that song come flooding back. How about 'anchoring' a poker player into doubting their hand?

The first step is to gain rapport, and once the player is in the peak state of realising how rubbish their hand is, you anchor this state with a touch or gesture, such as tapping the table in a particular manner. This is repeated a few times to enhance the association. This would then be used later for the desired response i.e. getting them to doubt there hand and fold it.

Anchoring could also be used on yourself. How about anchoring the feeling of having the best hand, and firing this anchor when you want to bluff. You'd have the perfect poker face!

There are many other NLP techniques such as eye accessing cues, but these are too unreliable and deserve no explanation here. As I said earlier, much of NLP is utter rubbish and many of better techniques are rather hit and miss, and not very reliable. However I hope I might have opened your eyes to what could be possible.

Of course the most reliable way of winning at poker is to play the good hands and fold the bad ones. However it would still be interesting to see Derren Brown on the next instalment of celebrity poker TV!

Note: I recommend the Perfect Poker Self Hypnosis CD from New Way Productions Ltd.