There is a clear link between music and emotions, a link that has been exploited by advertisers and retailers to influence our shopping habits for decades.
Walk into a store during the week and there will be soft pop playing to keep you and your fellow shoppers calm and relaxed, which will encourage you to spend longer in the store.
Go to the same store after 5 pm on a Friday and the playlist will have changed. There will be upbeat classic hits, ballads and soft rock blaring out over the in-store speakers. Retailers want to exploit that ‘Friday feeling’ and get you in the mood to spend big in their shop.
It’s not just retailers that use music to influence the habits of their customers, the same can be said of casinos and poker halls. The end goal of casinos is to make money, which they do by encouraging players to stay for long periods – calming music is, therefore, the norm in large gambling venues.
You may be starting to question your relationship with music and viewing it suspiciously as a tool designed to make you part with your money. However, a carefully curated playlist can actually help you to make money.
There are a number of poker music playlists on Spotify and iTunes that have been designed to help you boost your game. Read on to find out how two distinct musical genres could help you through specific online poker situations.
Stressful Games
The skill level of your opponent will often come secondary to the amount of money that’s at stake in a particular game. Whilst it can be stressful to come up against card sharks and players that should be competing at a higher level, that is no match to the stress encountered in a high-stakes game.
What is needed in poker at all times is a cool head and a sense of detachment from the goings-on in the game that is out of your control. To help reduce your stress levels and retain an element of cool thinking, pick out a playlist including Enya, Yanni, and Shadowfax.
These artists are some of the biggest names in New Age music, a piano and synthesizer-based genre that rose to prominence in America and Europe during the late 1960s.
For three decades New Age was a genre that was enjoyed by millions of fans around the globe. However, in the 1990s a number of artists took a bizarre turn in linking the musical style to space travel and strange intergalactic theories of alien civilizations…
The result was that a number of truly gifted artists like Irish singer Enya never received the praise and recognition that they deserved. In addition to that, the genre almost collapsed with sales figures dropping to an all-time low. The effect of that is still being seen to this day with many people viewing the genre with derision.
However, you can honor the good work of pioneering New Age artists by listening to them at high moments of stress. Various scientific papers have claimed that listening to New Age music is a proven way to reduce cortisol levels in the body, thus reducing feelings of stress and anxiety. When the stakes are high and the heat is on, there really is no better genre of music to listen to.
Take a musical ‘chill pill’ by listening to New Age
Deadlocked Games
Poker is a unique game that tests a variety of different skills. Perhaps the most important asset of all is your ability to problem-solve. There are a number of different scenarios that you can face during a poker game where the only way to succeed is by remembering all of your possible outs and tactics and then applying them effectively.
To do this you need a cool head under pressure as well as the ability to creatively problem-solve. In order to give you the edge and get those creative juices flowing make sure you’re listening to a classical music playlist during the very trickiest of games.
The Mozart Effect refers to a series of research projects that concluded that listening to music by the composer Mozart provided a short-term boost to the spatial-temporal reasoning of subjects.
In plain English, this means that the people that listened to Mozart demonstrated higher levels of creativity than those that didn’t. Later research has found that this effect isn’t just limited to the work of Mozart, it applies to all classical music.
So the next time you’re in a tough game of poker and feel like you’re going to need some creative problem-solving skills to win, load up a classical music playlist on Spotify.