Poker is an interesting game for many reasons, one of those being the impact of emotion on how a player acts. When there is real money involved, emotions are bound to be at their highest levels. For this reason, the game can become complicated and players can make moves that defy poker strategy and all logic. If you are going to play poker at a high level, you need to understand how to use emotion to your benefit during poker tournaments. While other players allow emotions to wreck their play, you can stand tall and use it as an advantage.

What any poker player will tell you is that emotion is a much bigger factor in live poker than it is in online poker. To put it simply, online poker takes out a lot of what makes the game special, since it’s impossible to pick up on many tells from a computer screen. Still, players can be blinded by their emotions when they are making plays. As you learn poker in the beginning, one thing that you should know is that each move must be calculated and made with a clear mind. When you lose a big pot, the idea is to not let that hand beat you twice by influencing your decisions on subsequent hands.

The way that you can use emotion to your advantage in online poker is in knowing when a player is on tilt or close to going on tilt. For instance, if a player has just lost a bad pot in a poker tournament and they only have a few hundred chips left, they might make a move to push all in with any two cards. Though you still don’t want to call with a trash hand, you might consider calling with something less than a premium hand in hopes that they are acting out of pure emotion. This can lead to more chips in your pile. It’s an important principle of poker strategy that you must avoid tilt. Not enough is made of taking advantage of another player going on tilt, though.

Likewise, you must also use emotion in other ways. For instance, if you are constantly raising before the flop and pushing a guy out of his big blind, then he is going to get angry eventually. If he’s like the typical guy who plays online poker, he’ll want to show off and take a stand at some point. That move might come out of anger, so if you keep pushing this guy over the edge, he is bound to make a poor decision.

These are little things that you can do to earn an edge. Emotion is like any great weapon, though. It can be used for your betterment or your destruction.