There is a lot of talk on the Internet these days about artificial poker players taking on human opponents -- these poker bots scare a lot of people, and the jury is still out on whether or not they are either effective, a threat, or even real. In some ways, to be a great poker player, you have to become like a poker bot -- you have to become a machine. A machine has a set program that it follows, only acting in certain ways when certain criteria are met. There is no emotion to get in the way, and it is emotion that is one of the poker player's worst enemies.

The range of human emotion is too great to cover in this article, but it is safe to say that the majority of emotions can cause a poker player grief in his game. Emotions in tournaments are bad enough, but at least in these kinds of poker events you have a cap on how much you can lose. Unless it is a rebuy event then the buy in is the only amount you have put at risk. In a cash game, however, emotion can wreck havoc on your bankroll.

If you start to fall behind then any negative emotion is going to push you into playing more, when in reality you should play less, or not at all. If you are having an off day, for what ever reason, you should get up and leave the table, or log off the computer, rather than try to catch up. Pulling out your ATM card or going back to the cashier to load up on chips in a cash game when you are either embarrassed, frustrated, angry, etc., is only going to cost you money.

You need to become an analytical machine when it comes to decision-making in poker -- leave the emotion out of it.