One thing that all poker players would like to do is be able to know what cards their opponents are holding just by looking at them. They might also want to know how they can induce their opponents to bet, check or fold as you want.
NLP Training includes a huge amount about how people are thinking and reacting to their external environment. This would include how to read, predict and lead people to the result that you want. You would think that NLP Practitioners would be good at playing poker, but the fact is often they are not.
A good NLP Training Course will teach you how to use you NLP Techniques in any situation including playing poker. Many NLP Courses are delivered with only a specific context in mind, usually therapy, counselling or coaching. In these situations NLP Practitioners are trained to use NLP for a win / win outcome with presuppositions that the client wants to make the changes.
Poker is a competitive game, neither you nor your opponents are looking for a win / win situation. You will hear poker players using words like crush, dominate, destroy and bully. Aggression in poker playing is a key skill and every poker player wants to be able to manipulate the betting on a poker table. All of these ideas would be totally alien in any other context and therefore a lot of NLP trainers have little experience of using their skills in this sort of environment.
One specific example would be how NLP treats reading people. This is a specific skill taught on NLP Practitioner Courses and in NLP jargon it’s called “sensory acuity”.
NLP Practitioners are taught to calibrate their skills with a particular person. They will ask a question that evokes a certain response and then watch the non verbal signals that their client gives off. For example they might ask their client about a pleasant memory and watch things like eye movements, the tightening or relaxing of various muscles around the eyes, changes to lower lip size and various other involuntary movements. From this a skilled NLP Practitioner can tell when their client is moving to a pleasant state by noticing the same involuntary signals.
Even if you know these signals for your poker player opponent there is limited information you can draw from it. For example are they moving to a pleasant state because they have a good hand and think they will win, because they have a weak hand but they have been given another opportunity, because they are intending to fold and have lost concentration and are thinking about their holidays or a whole number of other reasons? This is often compounded by the fact that players very often don’t and won’t show their hands, so you can never find out if you were right in your speculations and therefore cannot calibrate. Add in the fact that a poker table starts with ten players, a lot of sensory information and no firm data to calibrate on. You might already be seeing how NLP Practitioners can get themselves in trouble.
Good NLP Training will show you how to deal with situations that are outside the norm. With this one skill area a NLP Practitioner Course will show you how to create and calibrate on stress decision points, how to watch multiple people and use your skills in every type of situation. We have discussed NLP in terms of poker but imagine how useful these skills can become when you learn to use them just as part of your everyday life?