While there are many systems and strategies that promise to boost your odds against the house, perhaps one of the most valuable hacks to become a better gambler lies between your ears.
Specific strategies known to increase your chances of winning at a casino have been around for a very long time. Some of these techniques, such as the Martingale System, are sound and yield results. Nonetheless, many others are based on pure superstitions and don’t hold much water.
However, amidst our endless attempts to identify the best possible strategy to make our wins a reality, we often overlook the most powerful tool in our entire arsenal – our brain. Learning how to reprogramme your brain is the quickest way to becoming a great gambler.
Games of the Mind
Gambling isn’t just about luck, probability, or unexpected results. The decisions you make while wagering need to be intelligent, logical, and calculated; otherwise, you will be on a shortcut to ruin. Professional poker players have learned that discipline and memory are more important than the cards they draw. Pros didn’t achieve their success by making impulsive decisions or following gut feelings, but by hard work.
Ultimately, the brain can be trained like the body. To become a superior gambler, you will have to ditch old habits, learn new ones, increase your memory, and control emotional responses in stressful situations.
Here are a few basic activities that are sure to boost your memory and your cognitive capabilities:
Exercise Your Body and Mind
Just as physical training moulds better bodies, it also helps mental processes. Cardiovascular exercises have the most impact on brain function, boosting the blood and oxygen flow to the brain. Researchers have studied the effects of circulatory activities on brain function and have confirmed that they improve children’s school grades. This is one of the reasons why every school has a physical education department.
Meditation and Yoga
You don’t have to worry that you’ll end up as a new age, kale-chowing, trend marionette who does yoga and regularly meditates. The main benefit of meditation is to streamline your thought processes by focusing on breathing. By concentrating on one activity at a time, such as breathing, you develop mindfulness. This helps you focus entirely on essential details while letting the irrelevant ‘noise’ fizzle into the background.
Variations in Daily Routines
Old habits die hard, even though they are detrimental to a healthy brain. While it’s crucial to develop habits in order to perform critical things without thinking about them, repetitive tasks often make the brain lazy. Try taking a new road to work, make use of public transport instead of driving, or cycle. Even taking a cab occasionally takes you out of the driver’s seat and allows you to relax.
Napping and Resting
Just as the brain needs oxygen and blood to survive, it needs a fair amount of rest to recharge. It’s evident that prolonged sleep deprivation destabilises us and causes significant deterioration in cognitive functions. So, make sure to get enough rest to ensure your brain is in the best condition for cognitive reasoning and learning, as you will need both at the casino.
A Palace of the Mind
One of the earliest mind hacks dates back to ancient Greece. The art of mnemonic represents a visual reference tool that aids memory. Associating memorable phrases and imagery with vital concepts allows us to better store, memorise, and retrieve this information. Mnemonics are handy for foreign languages, mathematics, or lists.
Use a memory palace as a mental playground for storing important information. There are two basic types of memory, learned and natural. Since the brain can quickly learn geographical data (e.g., where we live, go to school, work, etc.), it can also absorb vast amounts of new data.
A memory palace is an imagined building that exists in your mind. You can visualise a familiar place or make one up. Mentally “walk” through this mindscape enough to memorise every part of the place. Next, add several stops along your imaginary tour, and at each stop, you can place a fact. Good use of this method would be a starting hands chart for Texas Hold ’em or a strategy chart for blackjack.
