The Mental Game of Poker: Proven Strategies for Improving Tilt Control, Confidence, Motivation, Coping with Variance, and More
by Jared Tendler, Barry Carter
A practical framework for diagnosing and correcting tilt, fear, confidence swings and motivation problems in competitive play. It treats emotional reactions as traceable performance flaws and uses an inchworm model of skill learning plus a structured mental hand-history process. Adds a step-by-step method to Mind Gym's general athlete mindset.
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More resources on Professional Gaming Psychology
Esports Earnings
Esports Earnings is a searchable database that tracks prize money and earnings for esports players, teams, and events across major games. It provides up-to-date tournament results, prize pools, and historical earnings data to analyze income trends in competitive gaming.
Liquipedia
Liquipedia is a community-edited esports encyclopedia that documents tournaments, teams, players, and match results across major game titles. Its pages cover event schedules, prize pools, rosters, and historical standings for esports competitions.
Healthy Gamer
Mental-health platform founded by psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K), offering free guides, videos and coaching programs for gamers. Explains how motivation, attention, anxiety and burnout affect play and daily life, helping players build sustainable habits around competitive gaming.
Identifying Stressors and Coping Strategies of Elite Esports Competitors
A qualitative interview study with seven elite esports players. It sorts their stressors into internal ones (communication breakdowns, unclear team goals) and external ones (event audiences, media duties), and maps the emotion-, problem-, approach- and avoidance-focused coping strategies they use.
The psychology of esports: Trends, challenges, and future directions
Most current evidence map of the whole topic (stress, emotion, teams, health). A 2025 rapid review of five years of esports research from a sport and exercise psychology view. It synthesizes 125 empirical studies on emotion, cognitive-motor performance, team dynamics, training, mental health, sleep and nutrition, and sets out a research agenda.
Mind Gym: An Athlete's Guide to Inner Excellence
Sports psychology book by counselor Gary Mack with David Casstevens, built from short chapters on athletes' mental habits. Covers confidence, focus, visualization, handling pressure and self-talk, giving readers concrete routines for performing under competitive stress.