THE

MENTAL GAME OF POKER 2

THE

MENTAL GAME OF POKER 2

PROVEN STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING POKER SKILL. INCREASING MENTAL ENDURANCE, AND PLAYING IN THE ZONE CONSISTENTLY

JARED TENDLER, M.S.

WITH BARRY CARTER

The Mental Game of Poker 2: Proven Strategies for Improving Poker Skill, Increasing Mental Endurance, and Playing in the Zone Consistently

Copyright © 2013 Jared Tendler, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. To request permission to use any part of this book in any way, write to: jared@jaredtendlergolf.com.

Published by Jared Tendler, LLC

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-983-95973-1

Cover and book design by theBookDesigners, www.bookdesigners.com

Jared’s headshot courtesy of Naheed Choudhry

www.jaredtendlerpoker.com

Digital book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by Booknook.biz.

Praise for The Mental Game of Poker

“The best poker book ever written—and it’s not even close.”

— Lex Veldhuis, PokerStars Team Pro

“I’ve spent years building then blowing bankrolls online. It was only after I read Jared’s book that I realized what a mental game fish I was. Every chapter I read helped me fix a leak, and since finishing it, I haven’t blown a bankroll. It’s increased both my bottom line and love of the game.”

— Niall Smyth, 2011 Irish Open Champion

“Jared has keen insight on the mental game of poker.”

— Allen “The Chainsaw” Kessler

“Jared Tendler cares about people. That’s why he is so good at helping them. And he can write! His book is a collection of treasures. No matter where you look, you will find riches.”

— Tommy Angelo, author of Elements of Poker

“I’ll give TMGP a big thumbs up. I think it’s one of the few books that breaks new ground in the poker genre.”

— Bill Rini, legendary poker blogger

“I taught a university course titled ‘Psychology of Poker’ for several semesters without the benefit of an adequate textbook. Finally, Jared’s book came along! Having used it twice so far, I can attest to the fact that it is the perfect blend of psychological theory and practical application. Students who diligently study this book, and apply its teachings, cannot help but to become successful at poker!”

— Tricia A. Cardner, Ph.D. Ed.D.

“As soon as I read the book, I decided we should make it the first book we stock in the store at Black Belt Poker. Copies have been flying off the virtual shelves like hot cakes ever since.”

— Neil Channing, 2008 Irish Champion

“The seminal work on tilt. This is no psychobabble; this is no man sitting on a leather couch in an ivory tower spewing transcendental waves. Tendler provides real steps and real answers for poker players involved in the day-to-day struggle who are too often beating themselves.”

— Jesse May, The Voice of Poker

“Quite simply it is the only book you will ever need regarding the mental side of poker.”

— Matthew Pitt, Editor of UK PokerNews

“Best thing Jared’s book did for me is to show how my learning process works. After that, I got back in the right mindset and started working my ass off, with great results!”

— Steven Van Zadelhoff, Everest Poker Pro

“I’m a tilt monkey and finished the book with the confidence knowing I can diminish tilting at the tables.”

— Paul “Tao Pauly” McGuire, author of Lost Vegas

“This book is the first of its kind and should be considered mandatory reading for any poker player.”

— Hunter Bick, DragTheBar CEO & poker professional

“TMGP is one of the most important and applicable poker books written in the last ten years. It should be a staple of any serious poker player’s library.”

— Pawel “Verneer” Nazarewicz, author of Building a Bankroll

“The book is full of so many ways to help you improve your emotional control that they are literally spilling out from the pages.”

— Lee Davy, poker journalist and poker player

“Raises the bar so high for poker mindset books, other thinkers may not be able to clear it.”

— Jack Welch, poker author, editor, and player

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’m very appreciative of all the help that I had writing this book. I have an amazing team and I know I’ve run well to find them.

Barry Carter, you’ve done a fantastic job once again helping write this book. The process is not easy, but working with you makes it a heck of a lot easier. Thank you for helping me to focus on only what’s most relevant to poker players. You often call me a B.S. detector, but you’re pretty good at it too—quickly spotting when I’m saying something that is complete crap. In the years since the first book, you’ve become a better friend, colleague, and writer. It’s great fun working with you and I’m looking forward to the next chapter.

Alexis Nahoum, you’ve outdone yourself. Thank you for all the time, effort, and care you put into editing this book. I’m amazed at how you’re able to turn my gibberish into eloquence—this is truly a skill you can be proud of. I know all the late nights you spent getting every point just right and making every word flow just right. Your dedication to making the book as good as it can be is truly appreciated.

Corey Karsch, the future Mrs. Tendler, thank you for your love and support through all the ups and downs of the writing process. You were my coach when I needed one. I’m also extraordinarily grateful that you handled most of our wedding planning, so I could complete the book before we get hitched. Now we have two reasons to celebrate!

I’m very appreciative of the love, support, and guidance given to me by family and friends. I particularly want to thank my parents, sister, and brother-in-law for always being there for me. Life is easier when I know you have my back.

I’m particularly grateful to my clients who have graciously shared their stories: Roy Bhasin, Darren Kramer, Matts Quiding, and Danny Steinberg. Having your voices in the book makes it complete, and I’m really thankful for that.

Finally, thank you to all the readers of my first book who shared your feedback with me. Your praise motivated me to work even harder on this book, and your critiques helped me understand how to make it stronger.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1  INTRODUCTION

My Background

Performance Myths

Overview

How To Use This Book

2  THE ZONE

DECONSTRUCTING THE ZONE

Energy

Learning

The Data Stream

Sidebar: You Cannot Access All Data

Client’s Story: Danny Steinberg

CONSISTENTLY GETTING INTO THE ZONE

Zone Profile

Zone Routine

Zone Warm-up

Zone Cool-down

Routine Adjustments

GETTING BACK INTO THE ZONE

Step 1: Recognition

Client’s Story: Darren Kramer

Step 2: Steady Your Mind

Step 3: Inject Logic, Goals, or Inspiration

Step 4: Strategic Reminder

Step 5: Repeat When Necessary

When These Steps Don’t Work Right Away

PROBLEMS REACHING OR MAINTAINING THE ZONE

Mental Game Issues

Fatigue

Wide Range

Bloated Brain

Thoughts of the Past and Future

Hyper-awareness

Lack of Challenge

Change in Table Dynamics

3  LEARNING

DECONSTRUCTING LEARNING

Stages of Learning

Transfer of Skill

Backfilling Knowledge

Repetition

Barry’s Take: Deliberate Practice

Feedback

Sidebar: Additional Feedback

Rest

Sidebar: Fantasy of the Fresh Start

LEARNING TO LEARN

Define How You Learn

Barry’s Take: Fixed and Growth Mindsets

Improve Your C-game

Barry’s Take: How I Fixed a Leak

Solve Your Learning Errors

Client’s Story: Matts Quiding

Make Continual Progress

Sidebar: Learn By Teaching

4  DECISION MAKING

Intuition

Instinct

Thinking

Training Decision Making

Sidebar: Panning For Gold

Errors in Decision Making

5  FOCUS

Improving Focus

Distractibility

Boredom

Barry’s Take: Online Arrogance

Burnout

Client’s Story: Roy “GodlikeRoy” Bhasin

6  GOALS

Results and Process Goals

Potential

Expectations

Conflicting Goals

The Starting Line

Why You Want It

Barry’s Take: What Drives You?

Planning for Obstacles

Examples of Well-Structured Goals

Tips for Setting and Achieving Goals

7  SELF-DISCIPLINE

Taking Responsibility

Following Rules

Willpower

Work Ethic

Time Management

Client’s Story: Darren Kramer

8  GRINDING

Automation

Increasing Mental Endurance

Rest and Recovery

Extreme Grinding

CONCLUSION

DO THE WORK

RECOMMENDED READING

APPENDIX I

KEY CONCEPTS FROM TMGP

APPENDIX II

PROFILES

1

INTRODUCTION

THERE ARE TWO major areas of skill in poker: tactics and the mental game. Tactics are where poker players spend most of their time and include things such as odds, strategy, hand analysis, image, and metagame. The mental game is given much less attention, but it’s what sharpens, strengthens, and prepares the mind to function at its highest level. Most importantly, it allows all of the learning done on a tactical level to be implemented into a player’s game.

If you’re only focused on improving tactically, your game may not be progressing as fast as it could. This is true even if you subscribe to a training site, talk about hands, read books, and study away from the table. The work you put into improving your tactical skill can show diminished returns if you’re not also improving your mental game.

When poker players think of the mental game, they typically think of tilt, fear, motivation, and confidence problems. However, they rarely consider factors such as focus, decision making, and discipline as a means to elevate their game and increase their edge. The purpose of this book is to help you refine these factors and consistently reach the peak of your mental performance, otherwise known as “the zone.” You may not have even realized that poker players can play in the zone. But think about those instances when you just know the right decisions, the game feels easy, you’re in the flow of the action, and it seems as if your opponents are playing their hands face up: That’s the zone.

Many players only experience the zone randomly, but it actually happens for predictable reasons, just as tilt does. This book breaks down the zone into its essential components and shows you how to develop a strategy to reach it consistently. You’ll learn how to study and analyze the patterns that lead to this mental peak, just as many of you did with your mental game problems in The Mental Game of Poker (TMGP). The edges in poker are getting smaller all the time, but there’s a big advantage for players who can consistently reach their mental peak.

Filled with straightforward, step-by-step instructions, this book is also designed to help you optimize your approach to learning, improve your decision making, and increase your focus, discipline, and mental endurance. It will show you that a mental game like poker shares a lot of similarities with sports. Professional athletes understand the importance of training their bodies to meet the demands of the toughest competition, and you can do the same thing for your mind. By mirroring proven techniques adopted by elite athletes, you can condition your mind to play poker at your highest level—perhaps even higher than you thought was possible.

For those who have read TMGP, I’ll make it perfectly clear what this book does for your game—it advances the front end of your inchworm. After improving your mental game issues, you brought your game to another level by moving the back end of your inchworm forward. Now you’re ready to take the front end to another level, and this book is filled with material to help you do just that.

If you haven’t read TMGP, you do not need to read it first. There will, however, be instances where mental game issues are highlighted as potential limitations in your ability to benefit from the topics covered in this book. In these situations, I will not revisit them in depth and instead refer you to TMGP. If you start to find that tilt, fear, motivation, and confidence problems are recurring in your game, you may need to read my first book, where they’re explained in more detail.

My Background

As I discussed in TMGP, I became interested in the relationship between the mind and performance after failing to qualify for the 1997 U.S. Open golf championship. (I choked.) Soon after, I looked to sport psychology to figure out a way to excel under pressure. I was a three-time All-American in college, but major tournaments were my downfall. I worked hard to improve my mental game, yet I couldn’t solve the problem. The existing material in sport psychology wasn’t working for me. So I began a master’s program in counseling psychology to learn how to identify the cause of psychological issues. I suspected that was the missing link, and what was lacking from sport psychology at the time.

I went on to earn my degree in counseling psychology, become a licensed therapist, and then started practicing as a mental game coach for golfers. During that period, I began combining what I knew about sport psychology with what I learned from counseling, and started developing a new approach. But it wasn’t until I shot 63, 69, and 65, in three consecutive competitive rounds of golf in 2007, that I realized how much my own mental game had progressed.

At times during all three rounds, I was in the zone. But, that was especially true when I shot 63. It was like I could do no wrong—every shot went where I wanted it to go and I drained nearly every putt I looked at. The work I put into my mental game wasn’t the only reason for the hot streak. I also was focused on improving my technique in all aspects of my game, especially full swing and putting. I never forgot the lesson that developing both mental and tactical skill is necessary to perform at the highest levels.

Not long after, I started working with my first poker client (who I met on the golf course), Dusty “leatherass” Schmidt. I quickly saw how the work I was doing with golfers translated to poker and how big the need was for a mental game coach in poker. Dusty was originally looking for help with his tilt problem, but once that issue was behind him, we worked on maximizing his focus, decision making, and mental endurance. Eventually, he was consistently reaching the zone.

That’s what I want for you. I wrote this book to give you the information you need to perform at your peak and to reach levels you never thought were possible. You may not have even realized that you could play in the zone consistently—many players don’t. Reaching that high a level won’t happen just by reading this book; you have to work at it too. But, once you start to see positive results and the benefits of applying the strategies in this book, you’ll realize it was worth the effort.

Performance Myths

Since the nuances of high-level mental game performance are not talked about enough in poker, misconceptions can easily run wild among players. It is important to shine a light on these misguided beliefs, as they can be a major reason why players rarely reach the zone or perform at their peak. Here are some of the most common myths that are dispelled in this book:

It’s possible to always play your A-game.

Confidence is necessary to play well.

You should never play when you’re tired.

Results-based goals are bad.

You can win just by thinking positively.

Playing in the zone happens randomly.

You can win by visualizing yourself winning.

Tweeting, texting, surfing the Internet, and other constant distractions don’t have much of an impact on your game.

You either have self-discipline or you don’t.

Elite poker players just have more innate talent than everyone else.

Overview

I had a rough outline for this book even before I finished the first one. I knew that there were two parts of the mental game—the back end and the front end. Since the issues that make up the back end must improve before the front end can advance, the first book was dedicated to those issues. Now the focus shifts to the front end, so you can make your best even better and more reliable.

Here’s a brief overview of what this book has to offer:

Chapter 2: The Zone. Learn how the zone applies to poker and discover the factors that will help you reach it consistently. Get an overview of existing theories, as well as original ones being introduced for the first time. Gain a strategy to train the skills necessary to reach the zone consistently, while removing the problems that are blocking your progress.

Chapter 3: Learning. Discover learning theories, methods, and errors that poker players rarely consider. Create a more organized and efficient method for learning, which ultimately will allow you to learn even faster.

Chapter 4: Decision Making. Optimize your decision-making process by correctly judging what information to use, when to trust your gut, and how to avoid the limits of thinking.

Chapter 5: Focus. Find out how to increase the intensity of your focus, as well as minimize distractions, prevent boredom, and avoid burnout.

Chapter 6: Goals. Learn how to set goals, avoid obstacles, and use your past experience—including failures—to drive your game higher.

Chapter 7: Self-discipline. Learn how to improve your work ethic, better manage your time, and create a healthier balance in your life.

Chapter 8: Grinding. Get an overview of the keys to successful grinding—automation, endurance, and rest—and learn how to take on extreme grinding challenges such as Supernova Elite and Rake Races.

How To Use This Book

Here are some suggestions and notes about the book to help you get the most out of it:

1.    Do the work. I paid close attention to emails, forum posts, tweets, and reviews from people talking about TMGP. Not surprisingly, those who worked harder got more out of the book. It’s okay if the theories, concepts, and strategies don’t make sense right away—the material can be complex at times. The more times you review the sections, the better you’ll understand them.

2.    If you haven’t read TMGP. Before diving into this book, read Appendix I to learn about two key concepts from TMGP—The Adult Learning Model and Inchworm. They’re important for you to understand in order to get the most out of this book.

3.    Worksheets to make your job easier. I’ve put together a packet of Word documents and Excel files to help you gather notes, break down areas of your game, and track your progress. Go to www.jaredtendlerpoker.com/worksheets to download them all for free.

4.    It’s all relative. Make sure to think of phrases such as “an extraordinarily high-level decision” not in general terms, but relative to your game.

5.    It’s less of a “choose your own adventure” book. The mental game issues covered in TMGP had a lot of interconnections that made it easy to skip around to the sections that were most relevant to you. In this book, however, the chapters build on each other, and I advise you to read them in order. Of course, the choice is yours, but if you do decide to skip around, make sure to at least read Chapters 2 and 3 first. They contain the most essential and in-depth material, and build a foundation for the topics discussed in the rest of the book.

6.    Do not read this book cover to cover and expect to know it all. The process of improvement is more like chopping down a tree with an ax than cutting it down with a huge chainsaw: it happens steadily over time. Keep this book close by as you gradually and systematically work on the various aspects of your mental peak.

7.    Questions are posed to you throughout the book. Take some time to reflect, and answer these questions as if you’re being asked them directly. It makes the material in the book more relevant to you, and gives you a better chance of improving. Ideally, you’ll also write the answers down in the worksheets you can download from my website.

8.    When rushing to understand your mental game, it can be easy to get overloaded with information. Cramming too much information into your head can make you confused. Going slowly through the book, or specific sections, may make it seem like it’s taking longer to improve—but in the long run, it’s quite the opposite.

9.    Do what works. People are diverse, so it’s hard to know what’s going to work best particularly for you. Start by following the strategies provided in each chapter to gain experience. Then, try adjusting the strategy to fit your individual needs and goals. This is no different than taking a new poker concept and molding it to fit your game.

10.  Don’t literally follow every word that’s written in this book. Even if it fits you perfectly, still take a step back to think about how each point applies specifically to you. Doing so helps you learn the material and personalize the strategies.

11.  Apply what you learn outside of poker. After working on your mental game, you can start applying the techniques in this book to things outside of poker, such as sports, business, investing, exercise, dating, and relationships. By utilizing them outside of poker, you’re in effect cross-training, which will help you to learn and improve in multiple areas simultaneously.

2

THE ZONE

WHEN IT COMES to understanding the zone, poker is behind the times. Sport psychology routinely helps athletes across the sports world reach the zone, but in poker, it’s barely even discussed. Whether reading forum posts, books, or articles, mentions of the zone occur as randomly as a player actually reaching it. In general, poker players are driven to play their absolute best, but when it comes to the zone, they don’t know where to begin. They feel like the zone is a place they can neither influence nor control. In believing this, they fail to recognize a crucial fact: By building a formula that is tested and dependable, they can entirely control their ability to reach the zone consistently.

One reason poker players often struggle to understand how to get in the zone is that they confuse it with running well. While running well, all your decisions work out and poker seems easy. The same thing happens in the zone. However, when you’re running well, your sense of reality can get skewed and cause you to believe that you’re also playing amazingly well. You may think that you made a genius value bet, but in reality, you were just lucky that you ran into the bottom of your opponent’s range.

Another reason the zone is so mystifying is that it’s hard for players to pinpoint. This is in part due to it being experienced in different ways by each individual person. However, there are a number of common similarities:

The game feels easy and decisions are made automatically.

You have gut instincts, senses, or feelings about the right decisions, but can’t explain their rationale.

You’re able to consider more factors than normal, and process them more quickly.

You feel calm, patient, and at ease. There’s no stress or difficulty; even with things that normally would cause tilt or anxiety.

You are totally engrossed and in the flow of the action. Any thoughts of the past or future are purely strategic and involve reflecting on past decisions and planning future streets.

Your perception of time is altered and you lose a sense of it. For some players, time flies by; for others, it slows down dramatically.

You’re focused purely on execution and not results.

You don’t experience any outside thoughts or distractions, including the mental game issues that typically creep in.

The zone is a state of heightened mental functioning, awareness, and concentration that allows poker players to perform at the highest possible levels. It can be mystifying, but in looking at sound theory, logic, and scientific research, it can be brought back down to size. As this happens, a path for you to reach it consistently begins to emerge.

DECONSTRUCTING THE ZONE

The zone is predictable—it can be reached consistently with sufficient knowledge and the right approach. In beginning to uncover this strategy, it’s necessary to break down and understand these three essential facets of the zone.

Energy

Learning

The Data Stream

Energy

The zone cannot be reached without the right amount of energy. This is true in a mentally demanding game like poker, just as it is in a physically demanding sport such as basketball. If your level of energy is too high or too low, you might be able to perform well, but you won’t be able to reach the zone.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law¹ illustrates the direct relationship between energy level (i.e., stress, emotion, and arousal) and performance. As you can see in the chart below, maximizing your performance does not mean maximizing your energy level. You need to find the level that works best for you.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

On the left side of the curve, performance is poor because there’s not enough energy to properly fuel higher brain functions such as thinking, planning, and decision making. Think about how poorly you play when you are tired, bored, unmotivated, depressed, or too relaxed. (Many of you won’t even play at these times to avoid playing badly.) On the right side of the curve, you also play poorly; however, it’s for the opposite reason—too much energy. When the brain is overloaded with energy or emotion, higher brain functions shut down. This means that the excessive energy associated with tilt, overconfidence, and anxiety has the power to cause your performance to suffer.

As your energy level increases up the left side of the curve, or as it decreases up the right side, higher brain functions and the quality of your play steadily improve. That means you’re better able to plan action on future streets, remember prior action, and think on the right level—even across lots of tables. However, as the graph illustrates, there’s not a lot of room for error in maintaining this peak level of performance: You can’t have too much energy, and you can’t have too little. The goal is to find your ideal middle ground; call it the Goldilocks level of energy.

The first person to research differences in the levels of energy that lead to the zone was renowned sport psychologist, Yuri Hanin. He developed a theory called “Individualized Zone of Optimal Functioning”² after finding a variation in the level of energy that athletes need in order to play in the zone. He found that some athletes get into the zone when they feel relaxed, others with moderate levels of anxiety, and the rest need high levels of energy. This variation means that players who need to be relaxed to get into the zone will play much worse when exposed to the high levels of anxiety that other players actually thrive on. The opposite is true as well. Players who prefer high levels of intensity will lose their mental edge when they are too relaxed. Ultimately, you have to figure out what works best for you. So, are you the type that plays best when you’re relaxed, fired up, or somewhere in between?

Many factors contribute to your level of energy and influence your ability to reach the zone. Understanding each one is crucial. The major factors are:

Physical needs

Emotional state

Goals

Degree of challenge

Perspective

Physical needs. If you are struggling to take your game to a higher level and can’t immediately point out what needs improving, a lack of physical energy may be the problem. Better rest, a healthier diet, and more exercise have all been proven to increase overall energy levels. Consider gathering some data to see if there is a connection between the quality of your play and your eating, sleeping, and exercise habits. If you begin to notice a pattern, strive to make some small improvements and look to targeted resources about diet, sleep, and exercise for more advice.

While a proper amount of sleep, a healthy diet, and regular exercise can have many benefits to general health and wellbeing, their importance in getting to the zone is often overstated. Again, your ability to play in the zone depends on the level of energy that is right for you. If you regularly get little sleep, eat poorly, and don’t exercise, you can still perform in the zone because you’re accustomed to those habits. Players who radically improve their diets and start exercising frequently can struggle at first to handle the dramatic increase in mental functioning that occurs as a result. Don’t let that deter you, of course. Improving these habits is never a bad thing, just be prepared for the adjustment period that may accompany them.

Emotional state. Emotions can have an important impact on your energy levels and give you the boost you need to reach the zone. It’s common for players to perform at very high levels the first time they move up to a new stake, possibly due to an increase in anxiety. The pressure to perform at a more challenging level gets them amped up and propels them to play in the zone. When a player is feeling inspired by, for example, a friend who just won a big tournament, that inspiration can light a fire within them and raise their energy to zone levels. Your mind will utilize any source of energy, even an emotion with a sometimes-negative connotation like anger. If you are feeling bored or unmotivated, anger can serve as a mental boost to kick your mind back into gear.

It is important to realize that although these emotions can have positive implications on your game, they should not be relied upon as a consistent and reliable way to play in the zone. To utilize them in this way at all, you have to be able to exercise a high level of mental and emotional control. In addition, you don’t want to grow dependent on so many external factors, e.g., opponents, friends, and stakes. It is much more effective to discover ways to affect and control your energy levels from within.

Goals. Motivation is a powerful source of energy, and goals provide structure and direction for that energy. The clearer your goals, the more intense and well-directed your motivation will be. When you have weaknesses in your goals, your energy gets dispersed in too many directions and your motivation suffers as a result. When you are able to establish your exact targets, you can then effectively focus all of your motivation and energy on reaching them. And in doing this, you significantly increase your chances of success. The topic of goals is vast, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

Degree of challenge. While playing in soft games is often the most profitable way to game-select, keep in mind that you need to be sufficiently challenged in order to reach the zone. One of the most popular theories about the zone comes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychology professor and the author of the book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience³. He defines being in the zone as a state of “flow” whereby a person is fully immersed in what they are doing. Csikszentmihalyi asserts that in order to achieve this state of flow, a balance must be struck between the skill of the performer and the challenge of the task. In other words, the performer needs to be sufficiently challenged and have enough skill in that task to meet the challenge. The graphic below illustrates the relationship between skill and challenge:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Adapted from Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. (1990)

As you can see, the size of the challenge and the amount of skill you have aren’t important separately; it’s the relationship between the two that determines your ability to reach the zone. When your skills are low and the challenge is low, or when the challenge is high and your skills are also high, you can perform in the zone. However, if you’re a massive underdog, you’ll be overwhelmed by the challenge and according to Csikszentmihalyi, you’ll experience anxiety, not flow. Conversely, if you expect to easily crush a weak opponent, you’ll get bored by a challenge that’s too low and fall out of the zone.

Of course, this relationship isn’t always true. There are many instances of players who raised their games to incredibly high levels despite being severely outmatched. In addition, there are many players who ignore the size of their edge and love the challenge of competing no matter how weak the opponent. This highlights the power of perspective; as Csikszentmihalyi explains, “It’s not the ‘real’ challenges presented by the situation that count, but those that the person is aware of.”

Perspective. The mind is a powerful tool when used effectively. The right belief or perspective is powerful enough to influence your ability to reach the zone, even while playing heads-up against Phil Ivey. (Of course, that doesn’t mean you’ll win.) The battle for success in poker is as much about a player’s belief about their skill as it is about their actual skill. When players overestimate their skill level, they not only tend to play in games that are less profitable, they also reduce their chances of playing in the zone. Believing they have more skill than is actually true also underestimates the degree of challenge posed by their competition. This lowers their energy level, and as a result, they lose focus, stop looking for small edges, and don’t think through hands. The opposite is true as well. When skilled poker players underestimate their skill, they can feel anxious or overwhelmed against inferior competition. This can cause an excessive increase in energy that could have been avoided with a more accurate perspective of their game.

As you can see, having the right energy level is not as simple as just being well rested. The more you study the influence these five factors have on your energy, the easier it will be to find your own ideal level. Later in the chapter, you will be given advice on how to simplify this process.

Learning

For many players, the most recognizable feature of playing in the zone is the ability to just know the correct decision. This hunch, gut instinct, sixth sense, or soul read allows them to make some pretty amazing plays. What’s the explanation for this? How do you just know your opponent is bluffing? Where does that knowledge come from? Are you highly skilled, or psychic? The answers to these questions center around unconscious learning. When you’re in the zone, you gain access to unconscious knowledge, and this accounts for the dramatic increase in the quality of your decision making.

Unconscious learning. Since unconscious learning is by definition unconscious, you may be wondering how it’s possible to know that it exists. The proof comes from an interesting study called the Iowa Gambling Task⁴, which aimed to better understand the role of emotion in decision making. In the experiment, participants were given a fake bankroll of $2,000 and presented with four virtual decks of cards, face down, on a computer screen. Each time they selected a card, they would either win or lose money based on the value of the card. Their goal was to win as much money as possible. Dollar values were both large and small ($100 and $50) and positive and negative. What the participants were not told was that the decks were stacked. Two decks were “good” in that they contained more positive values, and the other two decks were “bad” because participants lost money when mainly choosing cards from them. The good decks were of lower value, e.g., +$50, -$10, and the bad decks were of higher value, e.g., +$100, -$80.

Participants were wired up to a machine that measured their “anticipatory SCR level,” which is a measure of unconscious stress reactions. When stressed, the body secretes micro amounts of sweat through the fingertips. This is what the researchers used to identify when the body was experiencing stress, even when participants weren’t feeling it consciously. The research showed that, on average, participants began showing a greater stress reaction when reaching for a bad deck after selecting only 10 cards. (See the chart on the next page.) Curious if this stress reaction was registered consciously, researchers asked participants if they had developed a strategy to maximize profit. This was a ridiculous question at the time. The participants had no idea that their bodies had begun to recognize a difference between the four decks; their minds were still blind to this early stage of pattern recognition.

Participants continued picking cards, and as they did, the gap between the anticipatory SCR levels for the good and bad decks widened. This effect continued throughout the rest of the study, which consisted of 90 more card selections. However, something changed around the 50th card selection. At that point, when researchers asked if they had found a way to maximize profit, participants reported having a feeling or a hunch, but they couldn’t explain themselves. It was as though the knowledge about how to beat the game was on the tip of their tongue. Finally, after around the 80th card selection, the light bulb turned on—they could explain the difference between the good and bad decks. What started as a small, unconscious difference in stress reactions grew into a hunch, and eventually turned into conscious recognition.

Anticipatory SCR level for the good and bad decks

The Iowa Gambling Task proves that there is constant data collection and pattern recognition happening below the level of our awareness. The zone makes this knowledge accessible and usable. The ideal level of energy previously described maximizes the brain’s ability to pull this data to the surface and use it to make extraordinarily high-level decisions.

The next step is to actually become aware of this data and eventually be able to apply it in your sessions. In order to do this, you first need to understand the process this data goes through in order to become fully learned and consistently accessible to you. The Zone Learning Model (ZLM) outlines the four stages of this process.

Level 1: Intangible Competence. You know what’s right, but can’t explain why it’s right. In other words, you’re blind to the reason you performed so well. In a vacuum, the move might even look like a mistake, but you have such a strong hunch that you just go with it. The real reason you called or folded could be due to your opponent’s prior action, a physical tell, a timing tell, a bet-sizing tell, the momentum of the game, G-Bucks, table image, table position, metagame, range balancing, or something entirely new. You know there are so many factors that can go into making a poker decision, but this decision is one you simply can’t explain. The knowledge you have at this level is composed of the same unconscious data that was highlighted by the Iowa Gambling Task.

Level 2: Conceptual Competence. After an “aha moment” or looking closely at decisions made while playing in the zone, you now realize why you knew what was right. You’ve become aware of a skill or concept that will take your game to a new level; however, you haven’t gained enough experience yet to consciously apply it on a regular basis. When you reach this level of knowledge, you’ve gathered up enough unconscious data and are at the same stage the participants of the Iowa Gambling Task were in after picking up the 80th card. There are two ways to reach this level: develop original concepts or learn them from other players. Doyle Brunson, and other innovators, conceptualized parts of the game such as the importance of table position after years of experience and reflection. The alternative method is to learn from others by watching videos, reading articles, and working with a coach.

Level 3: Conscious Competence. This stage is exactly the same as it is in the Adult Learning Model (ALM)⁵. You have done sufficient work to understand the concept and can now apply it on a regular basis, even when not in the zone. You still have to do it consciously though—it isn’t yet second nature.

Level 4: Unconscious Competence. This is the final stage of both the ALM and the ZLM. Knowledge about the concept is now so well learned that it’s automatic at all times, even when you’re tilted or exhausted.

Consistent access to new Intangible Competence is necessary to reach the zone. In order to gain that access, you must regularly convert Intangible Competence into Conceptual Competence. The reality is it can take weeks, months, or longer for you to become conscious of these complex patterns in poker. The A-game journal is a tool that simplifies and accelerates that process.

A-game journal. In the A-game journal you’re gathering notes about the peak of your game. Here are some ideas for how to get the most from this tool:

After every instance that you play in the zone, take exhaustive notes about your experience. Some of what you write about will make sense right away, and other things may be tougher to explain. You can also talk this out with other players, just be sure to write down notes after your conversation. Recording video or audio notes can work as well.

Focus on hands where you had a strong intuition or made a spontaneous move that worked, and try to explain why they were correct. These are likely to be the toughest hands to explain, but it’s important that you try. Don’t edit, censor, or force your thoughts, just write (or talk). You’re too early in the process to know exactly what is right and what can provide any insight. Trying to force an answer can lead you to arrive at an incorrect conclusion. If you’re unable to make sense of your notes, revisit them in the future, and try again to explain what you saw in the hand. You may still be unable to conceptualize why your play was correct, but each time, you will inch your way closer.

While playing, you may have clear thoughts about why your decision was correct, but then you forget just a few minutes later. Consider quickly writing down your thoughts without analyzing them any further until after the session. You’re trying to balance continuing to play in the zone with capturing high-level data about your game. If you divert your focus too much, you could end up falling out of the zone.

This process can’t be forced. Like the participants in the Iowa Gambling Task, you may struggle to explain this unconscious knowledge that you know had a role in your decisions. That’s okay—struggling is expected. Merely attempting to access this knowledge will prove to be helpful in digesting some of the accumulated data.

Record any insights that you have while watching a training video, talking with other players, or at random times.

The A-game journal becomes a record of your exploration of the highest levels of your game. Revisit it after you have new ideas, play in the zone, or develop insight after watching a poker video. Over time, as you continue to think, gather more experience, and learn about these areas of your game, you will be able to transform a hunch into Conceptual Competence.

The work you put into the A-game journal may not immediately bear fruit. But, as you continually revisit it, you’ll steadily get closer to creating new insight, or Conceptual Competence. If you’re already aware of the concept, having learned about it from a video or another player, the A-game journal will help you develop an even higher level of comprehension. The process is a bit like a baby learning to walk. They can’t be forced; they can only be encouraged. Encouragement in the A-game journal comes in the form of regular attention, attempted explanation, repetition, trial and error, and gathering ideas from other sources.

The A-game journal is not only a great tool for keeping your mind clear so you can consistently get into the zone, it also helps you learn at the highest level of your game. There is no one perfect way to use the A-game journal, but the more you work with it, the more you’ll discover which methods work best for you.

The Data Stream

The action in poker flows like a stream of data with an endless supply of betting patterns, bluffing tendencies, physical tells, and more. While the flow of data is constant, your ability to access that data is not. The mind absorbs a lot of data while playing poker, and even more so while in the zone. If this data that’s absorbed is not regularly moving through each stage of the learning process, too much will eventually accumulate. This slows down the learning process and prevents you from regularly getting into the zone.

To prevent data accumulation after a session, you need to actively facilitate the movement of knowledge through the stages of learning by correcting tactical and mental mistakes during and after sessions. Converting data to the next level of learning can help to free up the necessary space to acquire new intangible competence. The methods you use depend on your level of performance. After a session in which you reached the zone, use the A-game journal to assist in converting Intangible Competence to Conceptual Competence. If you didn’t reach the zone, use the suggestions for cooling down and reviewing your game offered later in the chapter.

Correcting tactical or mental mistakes during a session is automatic when you’re in the zone. This is because you have access to your full range of knowledge. Those immediate corrections minimize the accumulation of data, keep your mind clear, and allow you to stay in the zone. From a mental side, things that are normally tilting don’t even faze you in the zone. After taking a bad beat, for example, you immediately realize that bad beats are a normal part of the game. However, when you’re not in the zone, you need to consciously inject logic to make the correction and minimize accumulation. Correcting tactical mistakes uses the same strategy. If tactical and mental leaks are left alone and additional layers of thought are piled on, this accumulation of data creates a bloated brain. In the next section, you’ll learn more about how to minimize accumulation.

YOU CANNOT ACCESS ALL DATA

There is a maximum amount of data that the mind has access to at any one time. You can’t know it all because the definition of “all” evolves as you master skills and acquire knowledge. As that happens, you can dig deeper into the data stream and understand the game in new ways. To see the evolution of your game, look back to a point in your poker history when you were a weaker player. Chances are, you can now see more detail or nuances within those old hands than you could back then. Whereas previously you might have only seen the value of your hand and had a vague idea of your opponent’s range, now you can also consider implied odds, reverse implied odds, range balancing, and previous history. As your skills in poker evolve, you gain knowledge that enables you to dig deeper into your past experiences, allowing you to see them in new ways.

This process can be illustrated in something as basic as watching a movie. When you watch a movie several times, especially a great one, you’ll see more depth in the characters and in the story line each time you watch it. You’ll also understand the movie differently if you’ve gone several years without seeing it. The movie didn’t change, you did. Whether watching a movie or playing a hand of poker, the details you see for the first time were there all along—you just didn’t have the knowledge or perspective to pick up on them.

CLIENT’S STORY

Danny Steinberg

High Stakes Heads-Up Cash and SNG’s*

“I used to think being in the zone was something you could just will yourself to do. I would try and talk myself into it by saying, ‘hey, knuckle down and focus. Go slow and just process everything; just do it.’ That was never really a successful approach for me, but it’s all I knew how to do. After learning more about the zone, I realized that having a sense of awareness was something you work towards, and it doesn’t happen instantly. I was really motivated to get my brain functioning at the highest possible level and was willing to do whatever I could. That meant not only improving tactically and mentally, but I also ate better, exercised more, and used a warm-up routine and journal religiously.

For me, the zone is like a heightened sense of awareness. It’s being aware of all the information coming towards you and being able to process that information well. When I’m having a C-game experience, I either miss a crucial piece of information or am just not able to process it. A great example of being in the zone happened at the WSOPE main event in 2010. I had made a deep run and played really well against some incredibly tough competition. In the tournament just before the main event—the 10K Heads-Up—I felt like I was outplaying a very good opponent, but ended up busting on the bubble. That gave me a lot of motivation to go in to the main event focused on playing my absolute best—that’s all I wanted. That meant making decisions slower and really trying to take in every single piece of information possible—how quickly did the person tap the table when he checked, how did his eyes look, how was his posture, how did he bet in past, what were our previous experiences. I was really going all out to play my best.

That goal carried me through to the final table, and it helped me remain calm against Phil Ivey and Viktor Blom along the way. Throughout my career, I had a real problem playing against players that I really respected. I gave them way too much credit for putting me on an exact hand or figuring out what I was up to. But that time, I stayed committed to my plan and played really well against them. I’m not sure if I was in the zone then, but when I reached the final table I certainly was. One hand in particular stands out. I was dealt pocket jacks preflop and opened in late position. James Bord—the eventual winner—reraised me. I looked at him and realized he looked and acted exactly the same as he did during a hand two days before when he had aces.

Being mainly an online player, physical tells were not a big part of my game, but concentrating on only one table and committing myself to take in every piece of information I could, I noticed so much more going on in each hand. It was just a little piece of information that, until this hand came up, I didn’t even know I had noticed two days before. And now I was about to base my decision on it. I had an active image at the time, and it was a situation where I just couldn’t fold such a strong hand given how loose I had been playing. But there was another important factor that helped me decide. James was a tight player who rarely reraised and had recently reraised me preflop. Whenever a non-aggressive player became aggressive in hands within close proximity, I tended to interpret the latter as strong. I decided to fold my jacks and he ended up telling me later that he had pocket aces. (Obviously, he could have remembered the hand wrong since it was an uneventful hand to him.)

Picking up on all these small details that usually would go over my head, and being able to weigh each one of them correctly is what the zone is all about for me. In a vacuum, this was never a fold, but in the moment I just knew that this small detail I had honed in on was correct. I think what was so surprising to me about this hand was how much information that was so subtle managed to help me make a big fold. If I weren’t as aware, it would have been something that passed me by. This was a moment where I felt like I was playing at the highest level I could possibly play.”

*Unfortunately, Danny hasn’t played poker much because of Black Friday. However, he is using the same lessons in his work at a hedge fund and in day trading.

Fueled by a balance of challenge and skill, an ideal energy level can unlock the unconscious data present deep within your mind and propel you to play in the zone. Using the basic theory around these factors as a foundation, you’re ready to take the next step and personalize a plan.

CONSISTENTLY GETTING INTO THE ZONE

You can’t summon the card you need just by saying “one time,” and by the same token, you can’t will yourself into the zone by using some mental trigger word. Instead, the zone is something you’re trying to cook up by mixing in the right ingredients. Now that you know the outcome you’re aiming for—an ideal level of energy and a mind clear enough to continually access Intangible Competence—the question becomes how to make it happen. Here’s how you can begin tackling that challenge:

Create a zone profile

Get into a zone routine

Start with a zone warm-up

Finish with a zone cool-down

Make routine adjustments

Zone Profile

To begin getting into the zone consistently, rather than randomly, start by identifying the specific features that define your experience of the zone. Gaining an understanding of what being in the zone means specifically for you sets the target that all your efforts will be centered around. Poker players are often quick to assume they know when they’re playing well and when they’re not. They give up a lot of mental game edge by failing to recognize the subtle differences in their levels of performance. The best way to capture and analyze these differences is by creating a zone profile.

This profile is not something you complete once and never refer to again. It becomes a living document that first serves as a baseline, and then becomes a tool that tracks and measures progress. The zone profile can be so eye-opening for some players that just by completing it, they improve their chances of playing in the zone.

Here are some questions to get you started:

What is it like to play in the zone?

How is the quality of your focus?

What is your decision-making process like?

What is your energy level? Do you feel calm, fired up, or somewhere in between?

What contributes to an ideal level of energy for you?

Does your sense of time speed up or slow down?

In what percentage of your sessions or tournaments are you able to reach the zone? How long does it typically last?

What is different about your warm-up, sleep, or level of physical activity on days when you are able to play in the zone?

Are you more likely to get in the zone when playing at higher stakes or at lower stakes?

What causes you to fall out of the zone?

What is the first sign that indicates you’re no longer in the zone?

Do you raise your game when playing in certain events or against certain players?

After studying your experience in the zone, create a document and name it “Zone Profile.” Put the date on it and write out the answers to the questions on the previous page, either as a list or in paragraph form. Work on it for several weeks, or until you feel confident that you’ve created a solid description of the zone and the factors connected to it. Try and gather the best information you can find, but don’t get obsessed with thinking your description has to be perfect from the start.

Here are some tips to help you complete your zone profile:

When you first begin to describe what the zone is like for you, it’s often easier to start by defining what it is not.

When considering the questions listed on the previous page, players often base their answers on instances where they played at a high level, but weren’t necessarily in the zone. Do your best to distinguish the difference between playing at a high level and playing in the zone. This will make it easier for you to recognize the first sign that you’ve fallen out of the zone, which will make getting back there easier as well.

As with any assessment, accuracy is more important than speed. Your ability to get into the zone consistently depends entirely on the quality of the information you’re using. Gathering high-quality information could take up to a month, or even longer if you play infrequently. Taking more time to get it right the first time doesn’t mean you’re delaying the process. In fact, you’ll more likely be saving time by avoiding the delays that come when you have to repeatedly correct mistakes and inaccuracies.

Be sure to update your zone profile after each time you play in the zone. It is important that you take notes about the new instance before reviewing your existing profile, so that you won’t be influenced by previous descriptions. When adding new notes, you may find that many of the characteristics you wrote about in the original zone profile show up repeatedly. This confirms that your initial assessment was correct. On the other hand, if you notice new characteristics each time you take notes, you’re still in the process of defining your experience.

Keeping your profile up to date is also important for the following reasons:

A well-defined target is easier to hit.

You can see the evolution of certain qualities of the zone, e.g., improved tactical knowledge, increased focus, the slowing down of time, and a sharper and clearer mind.

Faster recognition of when you are slipping out of the zone means you can get back into it more easily.

With a lot of attention being given to playing in the zone, you may immediately see an increase in the frequency that you get there. Increased focus often provides an instant boost in the quality of your mental game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you truly have it mastered. Stay focused on building a longer track record that really proves you can get there consistently.

Zone Routine

In life, as well as in poker, we develop and maintain routines. Imagine how complex your days would be if you had to think about each mundane task: brushing your teeth, getting dressed, eating, and driving your car. After several hours, you would be exhausted. Many people take for granted how many routines and habits are ingrained into the fabric of their lives until their routines are disrupted. If you have ever moved into a new home, you know what this is like. The changes to your routines and habits are a big reason why moving is so stressful. You no longer easily know where things are, so it takes more time and mental energy to do what used to be second nature. Even something as simple as making a morning cup of coffee becomes harder since your coffee, cups, and coffee maker are in a new place. Eventually, you settle into a routine and life becomes easier.

In poker, you can increase your chances of getting into the zone by developing and maintaining consistent routines. When you get into the zone more frequently as a result of your routine, a causal relationship can grow between them. When this association becomes strong enough, you’ll begin to anticipate playing in the zone just by starting your routine. So, even when your energy isn’t ideal before you begin your routine, that association alone can act as a spark. However, it is important to not depend on this association as the sole catalyst for getting you into the zone. That dependence compromises your mental edge and practically guarantees that you will not play in the zone. Instead, make executing your routine a high priority and remain committed to keeping it up to date. While you want a routine that is consistent, that does not mean it should be static. As soon as your routine becomes stale, it starts to lose its effectiveness.

Look at any successful athlete, amateurs and professionals alike—they all have structured routines. One major reason is that their routine puts their minds in a bubble where nothing can distract them from focusing on their performance. Your poker routine serves the same purpose, and allows you to become completely immersed in the action. Once inside that bubble, only allow things inside that help you to play at your absolute best. Playing in the zone is tough enough under ideal circumstances, so it’s worth removing all activities from your routine that compromise your performance.

Your zone routine must include two essential components: a warm-up and a cool-down. Warming up before you play and cooling down afterwards eventually need to become such a natural part of playing poker that you do them automatically. If you have struggled in the past to add these elements to your game, just remember that learning your routine follows the rules of the ALM and can take a while to become learned to the level of Unconscious Competence. In the early stages of developing your warm-up and cool-down, you might need to try several options before determining what works best for you. Don’t expect it to work perfectly right away, and don’t overload yourself by trying to do too much too quickly. With enough time and effort, incorporating a warm-up and cool-down will eventually go from feeling like a chore to an automatic part of your routine.

Zone Warm-up

Every player has a warm-up, even if they are not aware of it. A warm-up is simply what you do just prior to the start of playing poker: drinking coffee, driving to the casino, reviewing hand histories, or simply turning on your computer and firing up tables. The goal, however, is to create a structured warm-up routine that:

Allows you to build momentum so you’re ready to play at a high level from the start.

Gets you ready to quickly identify and correct any tactical or mental game problems.

Creates a buffer against excessive stress and pressure.

Separates poker from everything else in your life.

Regardless of what you’re currently doing to warm up, this is the question you have to ask yourself: Is what I’m doing before I play preparing me to play in the zone, or at least at a high level? While many players have a structured warm-up, few can say that it adequately prepares them to play in the zone. If your warm-up needs work, that doesn’t mean it needs to change entirely. You just have to figure out what aspects of your warm-up are working which ones aren’t. You can then steadily remove what’s broken and add new elements that increase both the quality of your play and the duration that you can sustain that quality.

Consider adding the following steps to your warm-up in the order below:

Remove and minimize the potential for distractions.

Review long-term goals and set short-term goals for the day, session, or tournament. These can be a combination of tactical, mental, or other poker-related goals.

Review strategic notes that will help you to correct your tactical and/or mental game weaknesses.

Do some deep breathing and/or visualization.

The first step narrows your focus and creates the bubble around poker by removing all potential distractions. Depending on the environment in which you typically play, there might be a long list of potential distractions. Write them out so that you can check them off before each time you play. You will then be ready to move on to reviewing and setting goals.

Review your existing long-term goals so you’re reminded of how important this session or tournament is in the pursuit of them. Then, review or set specific goals for the day. One essential short-term goal is to play in the zone. As you probably suspect, setting this goal makes getting to the zone more likely. This is true because you first have to acknowledge that getting there isn’t automatic, and that forces you to make the necessary adjustments. You can also set results and quality goals, such as increasing the length of your session, playing a certain number of tables, and improving specific areas of your tactical or mental game. Make sure you’re aware of the impact that your goals have on your energy and the degree to which you feel challenged. If they are too high or too challenging, you may only be able to play in the zone for a short time, if at all. On the other hand, if your goals aim too low, they won’t generate enough motivation to play in the zone.

Once you have your goals clear in your mind, the next step is to review your tactical strategy. This is similar to what most professional athletes do prior to every game. They get themselves ready to win by reviewing the competition, their strategy, and areas that need improvement. You need to do the same thing with both your tactical and mental game. Begin by reviewing your C-game, and then steadily work upwards toward your A-game.

Be prepared to improve the back end of your range—your C-game—every time you play. Remind yourself of the areas you’re working on in your B-game, and minimally in your A-game as well. You can do this by reviewing the following:

Hands in a hand replayer along with a list of corrections to your mistakes.

Your tilt profile along with your injecting logic statements and strategic reminder.

Notes from a coaching session, strategy article, or training video specifically aimed at an area you are working on.

Reviewing these keeps the corrections to these errors in the front of your mind, which gives you the opportunity to correct them before they become problematic.

The last step of the warm-up is not as essential as the previous ones, but it increases your chances of playing with an ideal level of energy—and thus your chances of getting into the zone. Deep breathing and visualization are two ways to quickly solidify what you’ve done up to this point in your warm-up so that it can be effective throughout your entire session. For example, you can take slow, deep breaths into the lower part of your stomach, known as “diaphragmatic breathing,” for a minute or two. This helps to clear and steady the mind.

Even though the value of visualization has often been oversold, it can still be a useful tool in preparation and learning. It is important for players to realize that imagining what they want to happen is not enough to, for example, win a tournament or beat the best players in the world. If this were true, the power of your visualization would matter more than the amount of poker skill you have. Clearly this is not the case.

Visualization is often portrayed as a tool to become instantly successful, even though research shows that visualization requires a high level of tactical skill to even be effective⁶. In sports, visualization works in tandem with an athlete’s existing skills, and has a significant effect on the body’s muscle memory. When athletes visualize an action involved in their sport, such as running, kicking, and jumping, their muscles fire in the same coordinated patterns that they do when the athlete is actually performing those actions. Many even report sensing their bodies move during visualization, even though they never physically move an inch.

Through visualization, athletes create a bridge between warm-up and competition so that they can perform at a high level from the start. It’s like a downhill skier getting in another training run moments before a big race without leaving the locker room. With visualization, they can slow down their movements like a video in slow motion and focus on features of the course, their technique, and previous practice runs. PGA Tour players often envision playing the first few holes while warming up on the driving range. They picture the first hole in their minds, hit the tee shot, and then hit their second shot from where they envision the first tee shot stopping. This rehearsal isn’t guaranteed to improve their performance, just as practice doesn’t guarantee that either; it can, however, improve their chances.

While there is a lack of research on the use of visualization in mental sports, it’s reasonable to conclude that this kind of practical visualization can have a similar effect in poker as it has in physical sports. One way players can use visualization is to imagine being in a situation where they tend to make mistakes. They can prepare for specific tactical goals, such as being more aggressive on the turn, making larger value bets, or balancing their range. They can also use it to improve mental game issues such as tilt, which can then help them quickly recover after falling out of the zone. Just remember that you must have also acquired enough skill to be proficient in controlling tilt. If a new player uses visualization to warm up, they might imagine making a big hero call or easily quitting before they tilt, but without real skill in these areas, visualization won’t have an effect on their performance.

Zone Cool-down

Just as every player has a warm-up before they play, they also have some form of a cool-down afterwards. A cool-down is simply whatever you do after you’re finished playing poker. This includes evaluating hands, moaning about bad beats, updating your mental game journal, and just switching off your computer.

While your cool-down has no impact on the session that just ended, it can have a significant influence on your ability to reach the zone in future sessions. Consider an athlete’s cool-down routine after competing. They help their muscles recover by icing and stretching them. The mind requires a similar level of maintenance in order to function at high levels. While playing, a lot of unconscious tactical and mental game data accumulates in the mind. If you had a particularly intense session, you will have absorbed a lot of information without even realizing it. If your head has ever been swirling so much after a session that you struggle to fall asleep, this is why. You also could have taken an emotional battering due to wild swings in variance, mistakes you made, or difficult opponents. Mental game issues such as tilt can accumulate and carry over into the next time you play. To prevent this from happening, the data has to be cleaned out and digested. This can be done by following these steps:

Evaluate your success by revisiting the goals you set in your warm-up.

If you reached the zone, take notes using the suggestions made in the zone profile section.

If you fell short of the zone, evaluate your efforts and the reasons why they fell short. Do the same if you reached the zone and fell out of it.

Evaluate how you played tactically. Did you improve upon any areas of weakness, learn anything new, or strengthen existing skills?

Review hands that forced you to think hard. Often players look at their biggest winners and losers, even though the decisions in these hands are often standard. Hands that really make you think are a better indication that there is something to learn.

Focus on details of your mental game. Did you notice a new sign or cause of tilt, a loss of confidence, or increased levels of anxiety?

Review your best and worst decisions of the day. These don’t have to be the biggest or most costly pots, just instances where you were especially pleased or annoyed by your decisions.

Take game flow notes on hands that you want to review in more detail at another time.

Evaluate how big of an impact variance had on your results.

Evaluate how well your opponents played against you.

Evaluate the difficulty of the session or tournament.

A proper cool-down is one of the most effective tools available to poker players, yet it’s widely underused and undervalued. You may be able to avoid doing a proper cool-down and ride the momentum of good play for several days or even longer. Eventually, however, that ride will come to an end and your game will start to slip. The mental weight of the accumulated and undigested unconscious data will be too much for your mind to handle, and you’ll end up failing to reach the zone in future sessions. If you are one of those players who rarely utilizes a cool-down, make it a goal to get to the point where you wouldn’t consider playing without it.

Lastly, as was mentioned earlier in the chapter, your routine cannot become routine. An easy way to ensure it stays current is to have the information collected in your cool-down feed into your next warm-up. For example, if you noted in a cool-down that your value bet sizing could have been bigger, add this as a goal in your warm-up for the next time you play. Or, if you noticed that you started calling wide from the small blind when you got tired, set a goal to look out for this as a sign of fatigue and try to correct it in future sessions. Rather than have your warm-up and cool-down become mundane, develop a dynamic process in which they both feed into the other.

Routine Adjustments

There are certain scenarios in poker that require adjustments to your routine. Examples of this include jumping into a game before an amazing seat is taken, playing several sessions in one day, and waiting a long time for action—often a problem for online heads-up players. Unpredictability and breaks in the action are not excuses that justify skipping your routine. This is something that athletes regularly have to deal with. Tennis players are forced off the court when it rains, football players have breaks during timeouts and halftime, and boxers never know the exact starting time of their fight because it depends on the length of the previous bout.

Here are some ways to adjust your routine to these types of situations:

When a game is too good to pass up. Some games might be so good that you have to jump into them right away before the seat is taken. To deal with this type of situation, create a mini, 30-second version of your warm-up to do after settling into your seat. For example, have a note that can quickly remind you of the specifics of each step. You may even decide to wait for the blinds to come around just so you can do your warm-up. Then you can compensate with a longer cool-down.

Online heads-up play. If you’re an online heads-up player, you often have the issue of intermittent action. Since there can be a long wait before you get action, do a full warm-up as usual and then do a mini, 30-second version once your opponent sits down. Then, each time you have a long break without playing, repeat the mini warm-up to quickly refresh and sharpen your mind. For a cool-down, take a couple of quick notes after each match, and then do your full cool-down at the end of the day.

Tournament play. Sustaining high-level play throughout the long grind of a large-field tournament, especially one that spans several days, is a big challenge. As you now know, the accumulated data that builds up in your mind and clouds your thinking can cause your performance to suffer. In order to maintain the highest level of play throughout the tournament, use your breaks wisely. Start the day with a big warm-up like you normally would, but then do mini cool-downs and warm-ups at the beginning and end of each break.

Most players already have a break routine that includes talking about hands with their friends. The aim here is to build on that practice, as it helps you to digest tactical and mental game data. However, players tend to use most of their breaks venting about hands or their opponents, and fail to allow their minds to rest. Instead, do a mini cool-down at the end of each level and take notes on your phone, iPad, or notepad. If you spot one or two hands that you want to talk about, focus on only those hands when talking with your friends. Then, just before the break ends, do a mini warm-up so that you go back to playing at your peak from the start of the next level. Ultimately, the more effective you are at recovering during breaks, the better you’ll be at reaching and sustaining the zone.

While the information contained in this section can help you to reach the zone more consistently, you must also address the issues that can cause you to fall out of the zone. The rest of this chapter is devoted to helping you understand the most common problems and prevent them from getting in your way.

GETTING BACK INTO THE ZONE

Even if you’re successful at consistently playing in the zone, you will eventually fall out of it. Often, that fall seems to happen suddenly. In one moment you’re rolling along, playing great, in the flow of the action, and then all of a sudden you’re not. You make a few mistakes, feel tired or bored, and then the overaggressive regular you didn’t think much about before starts to annoy you. You go against your gut and know instantly it was a mistake. You’re shocked at how you can go from playing amazingly well to doing that! Caught in a downward spiral, you react like you’ve woken up from an amazing dream and are eager to return to it.

As you’ve already learned, getting into the zone happens for predictable reasons, and falling out of it is no different. While the cause of your fall from the zone may seem random, it’s not. You simply lack the skill to realize how it was predictable. When in the zone, the triggers that typically lead to tilt and other mental game issues don’t have a noticeable impact because they are defused automatically. However, when the impact of each bad beat, 4-bet by a regular, or minor distraction accumulates faster than the mind can digest them, you will inevitably slip out of the zone.

In addition to major mental game issues such as tilt, fear, and low confidence, the following is a list of issues that can cause you to fall out of the zone:

Fatigue

Wide range

Bloated brain

Thoughts of the past or future

Hyper-awareness

Lack of challenge

Change in table dynamics

There is a general strategy that can be applied to each of these issues when they start to have an effect on your ability to reach the zone. If you have read TMGP, you’ll notice this strategy is similar to the one presented to address tilt and other major mental game problems. There are a few differences, however, so make sure to read through it.

Step 1: Recognition

It’s difficult to fix a problem without acknowledging that one exists. If you can first define and then pick up on the earliest signs that you’ve fallen out of the zone, you can then use this strategy to get back to the zone quicker and more efficiently. The longer you wait, the farther your mind slips from the zone and the harder it is to recover. This is why early recognition is the most important piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, players often overlook it and assume that it happens automatically.

Recognition is a skill that becomes stronger with knowledge and experience. A great resource for improving recognition is an A- to C-game analysis—a tool that expands the zone profile to include your entire mental game and tactical range. It will also help you to see the differences between each level of your performance in an organized way, making improvement more efficient and the zone more likely.

Follow these steps to create your A- to C-game analysis:

Brainstorm and gather notes about each level that your game has reached over the last three to six months (or another sample size that gives you an accurate snapshot of your current range). Think back to previous hands, sessions, and tournaments that you’ve played. What is your mental game like and what are the obvious mistakes you make when at your absolute worst? What mistakes do you make when you’re playing decently? How do you experience tilt when it’s manageable and not overwhelming? What is the first tactical mistake or mental issue that indicates you’ve fallen out of the zone? Even if they’re basic, include all the things you do tactically and mentally at all levels of play.

If you are struggling to determine your greatest weaknesses, get a friend or coach to help you identify them. Also, make sure that your true C-game isn’t being concealed by quitting, a stop-loss, being staked, or simply not playing. This is not suggesting that you put yourself in spots where you could lose a lot of money just for the sake of evaluating your game. Instead, try and predict the mistakes that would be made if you tilted really badly, lost more buy-ins than you’d like, were playing with your own bankroll, or played on a day when you felt less than perfect.

Categorize your notes from the first step using your zone profile as a starting point. The level of detail you recorded determines the number of categories. If you found a lot of detail, consider using a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the zone and 1 is your absolute worst. If you found less detail, consider using the common A- to C-game scale. You may find it easier to define the outer extremes of your range—best and worst—and then work your way in. If you’re struggling to categorize the variations in your game, keep at it. Completing this A- to C-game analysis is similar to the zone profile, and may take you several weeks or even longer to complete.

Define your tactical and mental game range together so you can see how they relate. If you have two or more mental game issues, consider doing separate analyses for each issue. That way, you can see the effect that each mental game issue has on your tactical decision making.

Study your range as you would any poker concept that you were trying to master.

Review your range during your warm-up so it’s fresh in your mind. This makes finding new details easier.

Review your range during your cool-down and add new details as you notice progress.

Without this crucial first step of recognition, your chances at recovering after slipping out of the zone are slim. All of the subsequent steps in this process depend on it. Put in the effort to build the skill of recognition and you’ll create the potential to control your game in new and valuable ways.

CLIENT’S STORY

Darren Kramer

High Stakes Omaha Player

“Getting a clear idea of my game was the first thing I worked on with Jared. The big thing for me was awareness. Looking back on it now, I’m amazed by how blind I was. Seeing the differences between my A-game, B-game, and C-game opened my eyes to just how bad my game could get at times. Just having the awareness of the range in my mental game and poker game gave me all the signs I needed to know when my game was off, so I could make corrections. Within a few seconds, I could recognize that I had started to play badly. To build my awareness at first, I wrote a few notes on the back of a card protector and was constantly looking at it as a reminder. That alone was brilliant and really helped me avoid big mistakes. Then, once I learned my range in more detail and better managed my energy (another issue we worked on), I was able to get in the zone much more frequently.

I’ve gotten to the point now where I don’t even have to make mistakes to know my game has slipped. Last year, one of my B-game mistakes was becoming creative and making too many fancy plays. After calling this out and working on it over many months, I was able to recognize when I was just thinking about being creative. I didn’t have to make a mistake to know I was in my B-game! This gave me so much control over my game and allowed me to prove that I was making real progress with my mental game. Now, when my game slips and I start to feel like I want to get creative, I say to myself, ‘Darren, you know the things you do well—be patient and clear.’ That stops me immediately, and then I can look to what I do in my A-game and try to play that way. The knowledge I have from working with my A- to C-game analysis is incredibly empowering. I have extra knowledge about my game that not many players have. When I sit down at a table full of good regs, I feel like I have one or two extra tools in my back pocket.

Below are my old and current A- to C-game ranges to show how much I’ve improved this year. My A-game is only slightly better, but it’s happening a lot more frequently. The big change was in my C-game, which is dramatically better and happens much less. The really exciting part is that I know I’m going to keep making progress in the future, because now I really understand how to do that.”

Old Range

A-game:

Very relaxed and decisive

Not in spots where decisions are tough

Time is endless

Mind is sharp

B-game:

Slightly creative and looking for action

Slowly starting to get distracted

Trying to generate more action

Feeling myself getting tired

C-game:

A lot more aggressive

Trying to win every pot

Playing more tables online

Very hasty and not thinking at all

Current Range

A-game:

Seeing the action very clearly

Even more relaxed and decisive

Mind is super sharp and focused

Very aware

Intuition is really strong

B-game:

Feeling myself preparing to improvise

Not as focused and a little tired

Slight distractions

Thoughts of forcing the action

C-game:

Slightly passive

Autopilot

Going through the motions

Slightly hasty

Step 2: Steady Your Mind

When your game slips out of the zone, you need a way to stop the bleeding before you start trying to climb back up. A deep breath is one way to do this. The purpose of a deep breath is not relaxation, but rather to steady and prepare the mind for the third step. If you find that standing up, stretching, or closing your eyes helps you to achieve this, then do that for this step instead. One reason to try using a deep breath is that it can be done quickly, without leaving your chair or giving your opponents any information while playing live.

Step 3: Inject Logic, Goals, or Inspiration

After you’ve steadied your mind, this step helps you to “dig deep” and work your way back into the zone. Injecting logic, goals, or inspiration into the front end of your game helps you to return to the zone by addressing the specific problem(s) that caused you to fall out of it.

We often watch athletes dig deep within themselves to find a spark that gets them back on track after the momentum has shifted against them. When they find that spark, their resurgence is striking; it’s as if they’re a different player. In interviews afterwards, they often say that in the process of digging deep, they are able to find reasons why winning is so important to them and that fuels their drive to win. Their goals don’t change, but remembering why their goals are so important to them proves invaluable to their mental recovery. This is the essence of injecting logic, goals, or inspiration. Implementing this technique can give you the mental boost necessary to break through the problem and get back into the zone.

Basically, the goal of this step is to come up with a statement, goal, or inspirational note that you repeat to yourself, or say out loud. Write it down and make it easily accessible so you don’t have to rely on your memory. Also, consider using audio recordings, videos, music, or other forms of media to make the message more powerful.

Injecting logic. When minor mental game issues, such as frustration, cause you to slip out of the zone, you need a statement or phrase that cuts straight to the core of the issue. This allows it to dissipate enough for you to refocus and get back into the zone. Here are some examples of how injecting logic can help:

You get frustrated after getting coolered by a weak player.

INJECTING LOGIC | IF IT WASN’T FOR VARIANCE, POKER WOULD NOT BE PROFITABLE. I NEED BAD PLAYERS TO WIN IN ORDER FOR ME TO MAKE MONEY OVER THE LONG TERM.

You get overconfident after winning several pots in a row and start playing too many hands.

INJECTING LOGIC | THE QUICKEST WAY TO LOSE THE MONEY I JUST MADE IS TO PLAY POORLY. I NEED TO MAKE ADJUSTMENTS, AND NOT ASSUME I’M GOING TO WIN EVERY HAND I PLAY. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE.

You start to feel pressure as you get close to the final table.

INJECTING LOGIC | PRESSURE IS FUEL TO PERFORM AT MY ABSOLUTE BEST. NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, I’LL WALK AWAY FEELING THE BEST IF I PLAYED MY BEST. I CAN’T CONTROL THE OUTCOME ENTIRELY, I CAN ONLY CONTROL HOW I PLAY.

Injecting goals. When you get bored, disinterested, or tired, remembering your goals and their importance can provide the boost of energy you need to get back into the zone. Every time you play, have your goals—both short-term and long-term—written down and easily accessible. Read and connect your actions to them. What you’re able to achieve in poker is often a direct result of the actions you take in those moments.

Injecting inspiration. Sometimes remembering your goals is not enough; you may need a stronger dose of inspiration. Fortunately, we are often inspired by the same thing over and over again. Be prepared with a sampling of things that inspire you: a meaningful song, a quote from a great athlete, a clip from a favorite movie, footage from a championship victory, or a phrase you say to yourself.

Step 4: Strategic Reminder

The previous three steps are occasionally enough to get you back into the zone, but usually you need a strategic reminder to finish the job. When you slip out of the zone, you lose access to part of your skill set. In your A- to C-game analysis, if you were able to specifically identify the tactical differences between playing in the zone and the levels below it, take it one step further and write a list of every component of your game that is lost when you slip out of the zone. Keep this list easily accessible with your injecting logic statements, goals, and inspirational notes so it can act as a guide for knowing what to focus on tactically.

Step 5: Repeat When Necessary

Once the door to exit the zone has been opened, it becomes easier to open again. For this reason, it’s likely that you’ll have to repeat these steps throughout your session or tournament. Stay ready to recognize the signs that you’ve slipped out of the zone and implement this strategy each time it happens.

When These Steps Don’t Work Right Away

Developing the skill of recovering the zone takes time, and you’ll most likely make mistakes in the process. Success will eventually come after you gain stronger recognition of the subtle nuances in both your tactical and mental game and have found injecting logic statements, goals, and inspirational notes that have proven to be effective. To speed up the process, be sure to regularly update your zone profile and mental and tactical A- to C-game analysis. Also, evaluate the effectiveness of your injecting logic statements, goals, and inspirational notes to see what adjustments need to be made.

The good thing is that even if your attempts to get back into the zone fail, doing all this work puts you in a great position to play at a high level. That means you are avoiding B- and C-game level mistakes, which over time narrows your range and makes it easier to reach the zone.

PROBLEMS REACHING OR MAINTAINING THE ZONE

While you’re in the zone, it can be easy to assume that it will last forever. You’re so caught up in how well you’re playing, you don’t even consider the possibility that it could end. However, the zone is not a self-perpetuating state. While you may not be affected by major mental game issues, don’t blind yourself to the reality that even the mentally toughest players in the world are susceptible to the problems outlined below. Note that the more severe the problems are, the more they may limit your ability to reach the zone.

Mental Game Issues

Being in the zone doesn’t provide immunity from the mental game issues lurking beneath the surface. While in the zone, you’re able to quickly disarm triggers that may cause tilt, fear, or overconfidence. As they continue to mount, though, the weight becomes too difficult for your mind to handle and you fall out of the zone. If you have already read TMGP, you’re familiar with the most common mental game issues in poker. If you haven’t, the following questions can help you identify any problems you may have in one of the four major areas of the mental game. (If you end up answering yes to many of the questions below and are struggling to get into the zone consistently, you may need to tackle these issues using the comprehensive strategies in TMGP.)

Tilt. Tilting is far and away the most common mental game issue in poker. You may never have suffered from full-blown monkey tilt, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still have a problem with tilt. Do you:

Feel that poker is unfair or that you’re cursed by the poker gods?

Become very critical of yourself if you make even a slight mistake?

Quit sessions early to avoid tilting?

Hate losing to bad players?

Look to avenge losses to a player you play against frequently?

Have trouble understanding how terrible players can walk away with your money?

Break a stop-loss or jump up in stakes when you’re down money?

Want to always win money and have trouble quitting?

Fear. Since tilt tends to be the most prominent mental game issue in poker, players tend not to recognize signs of fear. Do you:

Constantly overthink decisions at the table and have difficulty shutting your mind off when away from the table?

Drop down in stakes during a bad run?

Play much lower stakes than you are rolled for, or avoid good games at higher stakes?

Avoid games with tough regulars, even when there are plenty of softer players at the table?

Quit a session early to protect a win?

Rush to make decisions without any obvious reason?

Always opt for lower-variance decisions?

Motivation. Lacking enough motivation is a major problem in poker. Do you:

Always look for external challenges like prop bets to motivate you to play?

Avoid playing unless you feel at your best?

Burn out from playing too much without a break?

Constantly procrastinate instead of playing or studying?

Not play enough during a bad or a good run of cards?

Confidence. Having too little confidence is as big of a problem as having too much. Do you:

Lose trust in your decision making and go against your gut?

Dismiss advice from good players?

Think you’re not making progress and feel down about your ability to succeed in the long term?

Think your dream of playing nosebleeds is so close that you decide to play outside your bankroll?

Become embarrassed when you have to drop down in stakes?

Feel like you can beat anyone?

Accumulated emotion. Accumulated emotion is a hidden resource hog, sucking up the energy and mental space you need to play at your peak. When issues such as tilt, fear, and a lack of confidence accumulate over weeks, months, and even years, they become an internal force that limits peak performance. Accumulated emotion—or emotional baggage, as it’s often called—can cause even mild-mannered people to lose control at the poker table. When triggered by a certain event, such as a bad beat, mistake, or big pot, accumulated emotion instantly overwhelms your ability to think and remain in control. Consequently, your range stays very wide because without the ability to think, progress at the back end of your range moves very slowly. The more emotion you accumulate, the wider your range will be, and the tougher it will be to resolve. Solving the mental game issues that are causing your accumulated emotion is paramount, but in the short term, it is equally important to have a solid cool-down process to prevent future accumulation.

Fatigue

Some amount of your mental energy is burned up with every decision you make at the poker table—tough or easy. Therefore, if you play long enough, at some point you will fall out of the zone simply because you have depleted your energy. When you notice that you’ve started to feel tired, it’s a great time to push through and attempt to play in the zone a little longer. This builds mental endurance, so that over time you’ll be able to play longer and endure more tough decisions before fatigue sets in.

INJECTING INSPIRATION | “MOST PEOPLE NEVER RUN FAR ENOUGH ON THEIR FIRST WIND TO FIND OUT THEY’VE GOT A SECOND.” —WILLIAM JAMES, PHILOSOPHER

Burning energy inefficiently can also cause fatigue. Overexcitement and overconfidence can make it hard to stay in the zone. You have a finite amount of energy with which to play, so don’t waste it.

INJECTING GOALS | I MUST LEARN TO BE IN GREATER CONTROL OF MY ENERGY. LIKE A RUNNER HAS THE ABILITY TO CHANGE SPEEDS, I NEED TO LEARN HOW TO DO THE SAME THING MENTALLY.

Wide Range

Some players are unable to stay in the zone for long periods of time because their range is too wide. They often play in the zone for a chunk of time at the start of their session or tournament—maybe 45 to 75 minutes—and then their game rapidly deteriorates. It’s as though they’ve hit a wall and have no idea what happened. If this is a common occurrence, the odds are low that it’s caused by a severe problem. The more likely cause is that the gap between their A-game and C-game is too wide. This gap causes them to have to burn so much energy to play in the zone that there isn’t much left in the tank to play there for long. The reason they are burning so much energy is they have an excessive amount of knowledge that has yet to be mastered. In order for them to play in the zone, they have to burn energy thinking about all of the information in their range. The narrower a player’s range, the less information their mind has to analyze and the less energy they have to expend.

You can narrow the width of your range by focusing on improving your current C-game. During this time, try not to focus on learning anything new until you can play in the zone longer.

INJECTING GOALS | IF I WANT TO PLAY HIGH-QUALITY POKER FOR A LONG TIME, I HAVE TO DO THE WORK. PLAYING IN THE ZONE IS EARNED, NOT AUTOMATIC.

Bloated Brain

When too much data accumulates, it slows down the mind and prevents you from remaining in the zone. This concept is called bloated brain because it’s similar to how your body reacts when you overeat. After a big meal, your body feels tired and has to work extra hard to digest all of the food you just ate. When your mind becomes bloated with an excess of data, you’re no longer able to access your highest levels of knowledge. This issue is subtle and hard for players to identify. They feel tired and assume that it’s just the natural consequence of playing a lot. However, if they do a proper cool-down and feel less tired, bloated brain—rather than fatigue—emerges as the real problem.

The solution to bloated brain is twofold and needs to happen both during and after play. During play, take pit stops, just as high-performance race cars do in order to keep running at peak levels throughout a race. During these breaks, you can reduce some of this accumulation by taking notes, meditating, doing some deep breathing, or taking a walk. For online players hesitant to sit out—you don’t need to. Mentally taking a step back for as little as 30 seconds can have a positive impact. The idea of a pit stop is all about taking away mental stimulation for a moment and allowing what has already accumulated to be absorbed. In the long term, schedule pit stops ahead of time so that you don’t have to take unexpected breaks. In tournaments, these are already scheduled, but in cash games, consider setting an alarm as a reminder to take a break. Ideally, the timing of that alarm is set based on the amount of time it typically takes you to start feeling tired. You should study your game first to determine your own patterns and then set the alarm accordingly.

Completing a proper cool-down is the second part of the solution. Accumulated data is similar to accumulated tilt, where tilt from the day before carries over to the next session and makes it more likely that you’ll tilt again. If accumulated data is not dealt with at the end of your session, it too will carry over, and your mind will fill up more quickly the next time you play. The solution to this is to have a solid cool-down routine that helps you to digest that data. The additional benefit of this is that separating from poker will be easier and you won’t continue grinding on the action well after you finish playing.

INJECTING GOALS | TAKING REGULAR BREAKS KEEPS ME PLAYING AT A HIGH LEVEL AND IS HOW I WILL BE MOST PROFITABLE OVER THE LONG TERM.

Thoughts of the Past and Future

A surefire way to kick yourself out of the zone is to suddenly start thinking about something in the past or future. You’re chip leader deep in a tournament and you start dreaming about what you’ll do with the first-place money. You lose an all-in with AA against JJ, and automatically your mind fixates on the big downswing that happened right after you lost that exact hand a few months ago. Other examples of these thoughts include:

Wondering what it would be like to crush a higher limit.

Assuming you’re going to win a heads-up match that you’re dominating.

Fixating on whether you were outplayed in a recent hand.

No matter what the specific thoughts are, thinking about either the past or future means you’re focusing on things that are irrelevant in the moment. It’s a waste of valuable mental space and energy. Plus, these thoughts decrease the quality of your decision making because you’re unable to absorb as much unconscious data. It can be a bit complicated to eliminate these thoughts, as they’re often unconscious reactions that you can’t immediately control. Trying to force yourself to remain in the present won’t be effective. You have to identify and resolve the underlying flaws causing these reactions in order to truly plant yourself in the present action at the table. Start by answering these questions:

Do you wish you could change the past?

Do you wish you could know the future?

If the answer is yes to either, why do you want power you cannot have?

What have you not yet learned from the past that could be contributing to your need to know the future?

Becoming distracted by thoughts of the future can originate from both fear and from the anticipation of something happening, whether good or bad. If you’re up a bunch of money in a cash game, you might become worried that you’ll lose it back. This could be a result of sensing that you are tired, but feeling like you have to keep playing. Predicting that you will lose offers you a more legitimate excuse to quit than just feeling tired. When you have chip lead deep in a tournament, you may start focusing on what you’ll do with the first-place money. This could be connected to your need for the money, respect from your family, and vindication for past injustices. These underlying issues could be causing you to feel an immense amount of pressure, and imagining the money in your hands relieves some of the weight.

Once you’ve identified the reason(s) for your fixation on the past and/or future, you can compose a strong injecting logic statement that allows you to be more in control, both mentally and tactically. Just remember that defusing the underlying trigger takes a lot of repetition. Be prepared to use it until your mind can automatically remain focused even when those past triggers are lurking.

INJECTING LOGIC | MY IDEAL FUTURE WON’T BECOME A REALITY IF I DON’T CONCENTRATE ON WHAT I HAVE CONTROL OF IN THE PRESENT.

INJECTING LOGIC | THE PAST IS OVER AND NO MATTER HOW MUCH I THINK ABOUT IT, I CAN’T CHANGE IT. I CAN ONLY CONTROL WHAT I DO NEXT.

Hyper-awareness

Becoming overly aware of the fact that you are playing in the zone can actually cause you to fall out of it. Playing in the zone means you’re playing at a very high level. Sometimes you’re playing at a level beyond what you’re typically capable of, so you become excited and start to fixate on it. This causes your mind to focus more on your performance and not as much on continuing to perform. These kinds of higher-level thoughts about your game should only happen after you’re done playing, so try using an injecting logic statement to keep you focused. After the session, allow yourself to acknowledge and feel confident about your new level of play. Then, the next time you play at that level, you won’t be caught off guard and can avoid losing focus.

INJECTING LOGIC | IF I’M FOCUSED ON HOW WELL I’M PLAYING, I’M WASTING FOCUS THAT’S NEEDED TO KEEP ME PLAYING WELL. CELEBRATE AFTERWARDS, STAY FOCUSED NOW.

Lack of Challenge

Playing in the zone can make the game feel easy. Dominating a tournament, running over a cash game table, or crushing a heads-up opponent is of course what you want to happen, but it comes with a potential cost. When poker is too easy, the lack of challenge causes your energy level to drop. Consequently, you lose interest, become easily distracted, and start playing a default ABC game. If you really are crushing your games, the solution is to set higher goals. If you are winning comfortably at 3 BB/100, aim to win 4 BB/100. If you are crushing over eight tables, try to add two more. If you have the bankroll to do it, take some shots at bigger games.

Some players with this issue may also have problems distinguishing the quality of their play from their results. They place too much emphasis on the good results and not enough on how well they actually played. They need to learn the ability to crush when already crushing, instead of playing down to their opponent’s level.

INJECTING GOALS | I WANT TO LEARN HOW TO DOMINATE WHEN I’M ALREADY DOMINATING.

Change in Table Dynamics

Players sometimes expect that a change in table dynamics should have no effect on the quality of their play. The reality is that moving to a new table, making a final table, having a new player join their table, taking a long dinner break, or changing formats in mixed games all have the potential to throw off their game. Instead of expecting to always remain in the flow of the action, do the following:

Accept the reality that the change has affected you, and give yourself the time and space to work back into the flow of the action.

Learn why this change in table dynamics affects your game using the mental hand history on page 81. That way you can minimize it in the future.

INJECTING LOGIC | I CAN’T CONTROL ALL ASPECTS OF THE GAME. I HAVE TO TAKE WHAT THE GAME GIVES ME, ADJUST, AND STEADILY CLIMB MY WAY BACK INTO THE FLOW OF THE ACTION AND THE ZONE.

_________________________

¹ Yerkes R.M., Dodson J.D. 1908. The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18: 459–482.

² Hanin, Y.L., 1997. Emotions and athletic performance: individual zones of optimal functioning model. European Yearbook of Sport Psychology 1: 29-72.

³ Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

⁴ Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., and Damasio, A.R. 2005. The iowa gambling task and the somatic marker hypothesis: some questions and answers. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences. 9 (4): 159-162.

⁵ See Appendix I for more details.

⁶ Murphy, S.M., & Jowdy, D.P (1992). Imagery in mental practice. In Advances in Sport Psychology. T.S. Horn, Ed. (221-250). Human Kinetics Publishers. Champaign, IL.

3

LEARNING

IN GENERAL, POKER players understand the value of working on their games away from the table. Arguably, the fact that you picked up this book is proof of your desire to work on and learn how to improve your game. The problem is that players don’t always have a particularly organized approach when it comes to how they learn. In some instances, they’re too passive and hope that by following the lead established by other players, they will get to where they want to be. In other instances, they become victims of their own enthusiasm and overwhelm themselves by trying to learn too much.

Ultimately, everything you attempt to improve is connected to the methods you use to learn—in particular, the development of tactical and mental skill. By taking a more organized and dynamic approach to how you learn, you can:

Become more adaptive to a rapidly changing competitive environment.

Develop a structure for consistency through the ups and downs of poker.

Maintain interest and enthusiasm in the game, which prevents plateaus, boredom, and burnout.

Forge transferable skills that apply outside of poker.

Create new ways of evaluating improvement that go beyond poker results.

Strengthen your autonomy as a player.

Make it possible to reach the zone consistently.

In an environment that is becoming increasingly more competitive, players who can learn at a faster and more efficient rate can gain a distinct advantage.

DECONSTRUCTING LEARNING

Learning is one of the most researched and written-about subjects in the world. Poker players already have a strong knowledge base for learning, so this section focuses on critical topics they may not always consider:

Stages of learning

Transfer of skill

Backfilling knowledge

Repetition

Feedback

Rest

Stages of Learning

“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” —Albert Einstein

In order to accelerate the learning process, you must gain a clear understanding of its distinct stages. You then need to find out in which of those stages each of your skills is currently located. Although there are differences in how each individual learns, the overall process is the same for all of us. You can’t snap your fingers and magically master new concepts in poker—you’re not in The Matrix. However, by really zeroing in on each of your individual skills, you can determine the steps needed to accelerate their journey through the learning process.

Knowing how to actively develop and grow a skill is a skill in itself. Skills that are already well-known require repetition at the table and need to be tested in challenging situations. On the other hand, areas of your game that are in earlier stages of development require study between sessions, instruction from coaches, and detailed note-taking after sessions. When you improve your ability to determine where your skills are within the learning process, you’ll make fewer mistakes in determining their means of progress. You’ll also be maximizing your efficiency in the time you spend working on your game.

Locating skills in the learning process is similar to finding your position on a roadmap. If you only have a general idea of where you are—as many poker players do within the learning process—traveling to your destination will include a lot of wrong turns. The odds of finding your way without any mistakes are very low. Determining precisely where you’re positioned on a map allows you to set a specific route for how to arrive at your destination in the quickest and simplest way possible. In regards to learning, the destination of every poker skill is Unconscious Competence.

Measuring processing speed is one of the easiest ways to determine in which stage a particular skill is located. The faster you can make a decision at the table, the more knowledge you have and the farther along that skill is in the learning process. Logically, knowledge trained to the level of Unconscious Competence processes the quickest. Knowing something instantly without having to think about it is proof of mastery. Another clue to help you determine where a skill is in the learning process is how well you’re able to explain it to others. The more easily and clearly you can explain a skill, the farther along it is. This method can also help you to highlight that a skill isn’t as learned as you think it is. For example, you might think you have a solid understanding of the concept of implied odds, but find yourself getting frustrated when trying to explain it to another player.

Locating a skill becomes much easier when you understand the unique features of each stage of the learning process. While these stages have already been covered in the ALM and the ZLM, the following guide will deepen your understanding by illustrating how your skill set can apply to each stage.

As you can see in the graphic above, there are four stages in both learning processes. There are two separate sets of the first two stages, one addressing your strengths and the other your weaknesses. They both share the third and fourth stages in common.

Stage 1 – Strengths: Intangible Competence. Your knowledge at this stage of learning is beneath your level of awareness. You have competence, but it’s too new for you to explain. When playing or thinking at a high level, you may get momentary flashes of insight where you’re close to being able to explain why your decisions are so good, but they quickly slip away. Sometimes players feel so desperate to understand that they unknowingly make things up. Because these assumptions are forced and usually inaccurate, they steer them off track and ultimately slow down the learning process. If you catch yourself doing this, try using the A-game journal to uncover the real explanation—this will help you to avoid making mistakes and will ensure your decisions are accurately informed.

Stage 2 – Strengths: Conceptual Competence. When you gather up enough unconscious knowledge from Stage 1, eventually it will become conceptualized and you’ll have the ability to explain it. However, that doesn’t mean you’re consciously able to apply it. You have conceptualized a high-level concept, but it can only be utilized when you’re playing at a high level. If you do attempt to consciously apply it at other levels, you may even play worse, as it requires so much concentration that other important areas of your game get neglected. The concept may seem very clear in your mind off the table when talking about it with players at your skill level, or when watching your friends play. However, when you get to the table and try to apply it, you end up making errors. Pay close attention to instances at the table when you’re in the zone and able to apply it correctly. After enough study and experience, you’ll eventually get to the point where you have solidified the concept in your mind and can start to use it consciously.

Stage 1 – Weaknesses: Unconscious Incompetence. This is your blind spot—the part of your game that you don’t know is weak. If a better player points this weakness out to you, you don’t have enough knowledge to even understand what they’re talking about. Imagine an experienced player talking to a beginner about fold equity—it would go straight over their heads. In this stage, players are often dismissive of ideas given to them by better players, because they don’t yet have enough knowledge to make sense of them. Not until a moment of insight hits you after watching a video, reviewing hands, reading an article, or getting advice from a friend will you recognize this weak area of your game. While it may be disconcerting to know that you have this blind spot, just know that every player has them and many are content to overlook them. For this reason, there’s edge to be gained by becoming devoted to uncovering and resolving these areas of weakness.

Stage 2 – Weaknesses: Conscious Incompetence. This is the stage where you have successfully uncovered an area of weakness. When the weakness you’ve recognized is simple enough that just a slight improvement can correct it, you can quickly advance to the next level. However, when you’re trying to correct several of these minor mistakes at the same time, you must be very organized, otherwise they will easily be forgotten. When the weakness is more complex, you’ll remain in this stage until you figure out the correction and how to apply it to hundreds of unique situations. Often, players too quickly assume that simply identifying the problem automatically means that they will know how to correct it. Recognition is an important first step, but there is much more to the process.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence. At this level, your weaknesses have turned into strengths, and your strengths have advanced to even higher levels. You can think through both a new concept and a correction to a weakness in your game while at the table. Perhaps you can remember the first time you stopped yourself from playing a rag ace under the gun or were able to control tilt at a time you previously couldn’t. There are variations in the ease with which you can think at this level, and the stronger your competence, the easier it is to think about the concept or the correction. Whereas in the previous stage, mistakes were made because you had to put so much effort into applying your new skills, here you make them only when trying to apply them in foreign situations. When at your peak, you may be able to apply them with such ease that you mistake them for being completely learned. However, if at any time you are tired or tilted and revert back to incompetence, it is an indication that the skill is still at this level and requires more work to become truly learned.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence. This is the level where knowledge is applied consistently, instantly, correctly, and without thinking—even under the most extreme circumstances. Whether you’re playing heads-up for a bracelet, at high-stakes, at more tables than usual, or while tilting your face off, there is no resistance in applying this knowledge. It’s second nature and explaining it is difficult because of how basic it seems to you now. With it so deeply embedded in your game, remembering what poker was like without it is hard. Think back to a concept you learned early in your career and you’ll see how this is true. For example, think about how you felt like a mind reader the first time you folded pocket jacks in the face of heavy pressure, but now you consider it standard. Also at this level, decision making is nearly instant and may seem more like an instinctive reaction than a decision.

In going through the model, it’s evident that each stage has clearly defined parameters that distinguish it from the other levels. However, the execution of this process is much more fluid and can sometimes blur the seemingly solid lines between the stages. A particular skill or piece of knowledge will often go back and forth between two levels many times before being firmly planted in the more advanced one. The point is to keep skills steadily moving through the learning process so that high levels of play can be maintained. Missteps are predictable obstacles to this feat, but identifying the stages where they occur allows you to better understand where your learning tends to slow down or stop completely. Here are a few examples that will be revisited in more detail later on:

Plateau = Intangible Competence and Unconscious Incompetence

Premature realization of skill = Conscious Incompetence

Immediately knowing the mistake = Conscious Competence

Intentionally learning while playing = Conscious Competence

Overconsumption = Lacking Unconscious Competence

Transfer of Skill

In poker, the more challenging the situation, the more skill is required to be successful. Value betting a medium-strength hand is a lot easier against a fish at $1/$2 than against Tom Dwan in a $200/$400 game. With an equal level of skill, your performance will progressively decline as the difficulty of the situation increases. Too often, poker players expect their performance to be at the same level across all situations they face, regardless of their difficulty. In actuality, they need more skill to perform at the same level in tougher situations. Golfers make this mistake all the time: They can’t understand why they don’t hit the ball on the golf course as well as they do on the range. The driving range is a less challenging environment, so success there doesn’t automatically generate success on the course.

It is essential to understand this point when you are analyzing your game and determining where your skills are located within the learning process. When using your performance as an indicator of which stage a particular skill is in, you must also consider the degree of difficulty of the context in which that skill is being utilized. First, let’s look at an example of how contexts in poker vary in their degree of difficulty (Level 1 is easiest and Level 5 is hardest):

Level 1:

Talking, thinking, and reading about poker

Watching poker on TV, or sweating a friend online

Level 2:

Playing lower stakes than usual

Playing fewer tables online

Playing a soft game

Level 3:

Running well at your normal stakes

Playing a normal amount of tables

Playing within your bankroll

Level 4:

Playing more tables than usual

Playing at a final table

Facing a tough opponent at your normal tables

Being bored playing lower stakes

Running quite bad at normal stakes

Level 5:

Running bad at higher stakes

The first time playing a higher limit

Your first final table with a big first prize, in front of a crowd

Now, think about your own game and analyze each situation that you have encountered—or want to encounter in the future. Write them out and rank their level of difficulty from 1 to 5. The process of evaluating your performance can be skewed if you’re not considering the degree of difficulty in which you played. For example, if you’ve been working hard to improve tilt, and you avoid tilting in a level-3 situation, you can mistakenly think you’re close to mastering tilt. Then, when you experience a tough level-5 day, you end up failing to control tilt and so you abandon a strategy that was actually working, but just needed more time to be mastered at all levels of difficulty. You must compare apples to apples—level 3 to level 3. This will make your evaluation and progress more accurate and ultimately maximize the efficiency of your learning process.

It is also important to realize that you have an A-, B-, and C-game at each of these levels. Your A-game at level 2 might be equivalent to your C-game at level 4. For example, say you come to realize that squeeze plays are mastered in your level-2 contexts. This doesn’t mean that you will always know when to, or have the nerve to, make a profitable squeeze play when you’re at a big, level-5 final table. A skill mastered in level 2 might transfer to a level-3 challenge, but expecting it to show up at level 5 will not only set you up for disappointment, it will also give you an inaccurate portrait of your game.

Backfilling Knowledge

Unless you are one of the rare incredible poker talents, you rely on other players and coaches to help you learn. While this is certainly more efficient, it requires you to fill in the knowledge and experience you would have gained had you learned the concepts on your own.

The concept of backfilling knowledge can be illustrated in looking at the way a house is built. If you built the outside structure of a house without any interior framework or any solid foundation beneath it, the house would fall apart with the smallest amount of wind. From the outside, it would appear to be a house like any other, but it would be lacking the crucial things that give the house integrity and strength—things that are in place before it ever even appeared to be a house. Your skills need to be built in a similar manner.

When you learn from others, you miss out on a lot of the unconscious data that was highlighted in the Iowa Gambling Task. It is the coaches and players you learn from who went through the beginning stages of the ZLM and ALM, and transformed their Intangible Competence into Conceptual Competence, or Unconscious Incompetence into Conscious Incompetence. You come into the learning process farther along and are piggybacking on their experience in the initial stages. Your knowledge is acquired without having to go through the process of accumulating Intangible Competence. The importance of backfilling knowledge is that it solidifies and builds a foundation beneath these new concepts or corrections. Without it, your ability to implement them into your game will be more difficult, and even if you are successful, their flimsiness may prevent them from ever being effective.

If it’s taking a while for a new concept to truly sink in, don’t worry, you’re in the process of backfilling knowledge. Merely grasping a concept does not make it fully learned; you need ample experience in a variety of contexts to really solidify it in your mind. Once you gather enough knowledge and experience, the concept will firmly stick in your mind and it will feel as though you’re really making progress. A good example of this is learning about the importance of position when you first start playing the game. This is something many players learn early in their poker education, but no matter how many times they hear it, playing marginal hands out of position is still invariably one of the biggest leaks they’ll have for a while. Even though the concept made perfect sense in the training video they learned it from, the concept isn’t really grasped until they’ve gained enough experience to give it a solid foundation.

Backfilling knowledge is something that happens naturally, but the experience component takes time and effort. When you learn something very mentally taxing, such as Phil Galfond’s concept of “G-Bucks,” you then need to seek out education and experiences that support and reinforce it. Watch training videos and talk out hands with friends with the new concept in mind. Review your old hand histories looking for examples where it applied. Start your sessions with the goal of applying G-Bucks to your play, and afterwards, evaluate how it went. This extra work will allow you to backfill the intangible knowledge that you bypassed initially.

Repetition

In order to move a particular skill through each stage of the learning process, you must gain sufficient repetition. The million-dollar question is… how much repetition is necessary to master a skill or craft?

One of the reasons poker has progressed so quickly recently is that online poker has allowed players to gain a lifetime’s worth of live poker experience in a fraction of the time. The speed of online poker combined with mass multi-tabling means that several thousand hands can be played in a day. It would take a month for a typical live player to play that much. Along with a surplus of quality instruction, online players have the chance to repeatedly implement what they’re learning because they get such a variety of recurring situations in just a single day. A live player would be lucky to practice playing pocket queens twice in a session, whereas an online player might play them 10 times, with slight variations in each occurrence.

A theory made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers¹ states that success in any field comes from 10,000 hours of deep practice. In this book, he looks at several masters of their field—the Beatles, Bill Gates, and Beethoven—and highlights the fact that they all achieved 10,000 hours of practice prior to breaking out. Framing success in this way helps people to realize that success doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s also a results-oriented way of viewing the process. Success, mastery, and learning are all achieved from a large number of hours practicing, but the quality of those hours matter. What you practice, how you practice, and the effort you put into that practice are just as important—if not more important—as the quantifiable amount of time you practice.

It is important to draw a distinction between the 10,000-hour theory of success, which relates to mastery of an entire discipline, and the success achieved in the development of individual skills. It won’t take you 10,000 hours to fix a tilt problem, just like it didn’t take you 10,000 hours to learn how to do an EV calculation or drive a car. When working on individual skills within a discipline, it is more accurate to think in terms of the number of quality repetitions and not just total time.

Imagine that it takes 1,000 repetitions to master a skill, such as knowing when to value bet on the river. Playing within your normal game (i.e., level 3 in the transfer of skill model), each time you correctly value bet on the river equals one repetition. So, based on this hypothetical estimate, you need 1,000 reps to master that skill. More difficult situations have a multiplying effect on the value of repetitions. Proper execution in a level-4 situation is valued at two reps, which means you could master it in 500 repetitions instead of 1,000. Then, let’s say that you find yourself in a level-5 situation, for example, playing in a tough high-stakes game full of professional poker players, including a few who intimidate you. River value-betting situations in this scenario might be worth four reps, meaning you could potentially master it in a quarter of the time.

At the other end of the scale are repetitions that have less value. For example, studying, warming up, cooling down, or talking over hands with a friend might each be worth a quarter of a repetition. This is because, comparatively, they are taking place in low-stress situations. Although these repetitions aren’t worth as much, they’re still valuable and at no cost to your bankroll. Get into the habit of doing them regularly because they accumulate rapidly and facilitate gaining the more valuable reps you need at the table. Keep in mind that how you study can have this multiplying effect as well. Active study, such as taking notes and asking a coach questions, can be worth more than just passively watching a video or reading an article.

You also need to make sure that what you are repeating is what you actually want to learn, otherwise you’re just training bad habits. Repeating a negative habit (e.g., playing weak hands from the small blind or skipping a warm-up) costs you twice. Not only did you lose an opportunity to reinforce the correct play, you repeated the bad one; in other words, you got better at the mistake, not the correction. Now it’ll take two repetitions to get back to where you could have been had you made the correct play in the first place.

Hopefully, you are beginning to realize that playing only in soft games is not always the best approach. Putting yourself in situations where you might struggle is a fantastic way to accelerate learning. This is not to say that you should jump into the toughest game you can find; you could go broke before ever coming close to being world class. On the other hand, taking shots in tough games or higher stakes, pushing yourself even when you don’t want to, playing through when you are tired or tilting, and trying to learn concepts you have a hard time understanding, will all have a profoundly greater impact on your learning than just showing up and playing your standard game.

Many players don’t realize how effective and helpful playing can be in their learning process. Playing poker is like taking a test, and educational research has recently shown that retention for knowledge is stronger and lasts longer when students are given tests rather than just studying². The act of taking a test, or playing poker, forces you to dig information out of your memory and communicate it in a coherent way. It’s one thing to take information in, but it’s the quality of the output of that information at the poker table that enables you to be successful.

BARRY’S TAKE

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice refers to a form of training that consists of grueling, repetitive practice whereby performers constantly respond to feedback and correct errors. Over the last decade, a growing body of research is emerging that debunks the idea that natural talent alone is what produces elite performers. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson from Florida State University is the pioneer behind this research, which concludes that expert performers in all fields share the same traits in how they approach practice³. Almost everyone we consider to be “naturally talented,” such as Tiger Woods in golf and Jerry Seinfeld in comedy, are actually just the hardest working.

One common trait found among expert performers is not just the fact that they practice so much, it is that they constantly practice doing something that tests the limits of their ability. They strive to reach higher than their current capability, very often fail, and then try again. Michael Jordan is one of the most recognizable examples of this dedication to challenging oneself, as he is noted for a devotion to turning his weaknesses into his greatest strengths. Why are Brazilians so good at soccer? One of the reasons is because as children they play a game called Futsal, which uses a smaller, heavier ball in a smaller playing area. When they finally get on a normal soccer field, they make the game look easy; but it’s really a product of intensive training in a tougher environment.

Another attribute of deliberate practice is breaking down the specific skills required to be successful in your craft and focusing on improving those chunks of skill. In his autobiography titled Open⁴, Andre Agassi describes regular practice with a ball machine he dubbed, “the monster.” Andre’s father had rigged the machine so it would send balls flying at him at speeds much faster than normal. So fast, in fact, that it helped him to become one of the best tennis players in the world and one of the best at returning serves. Thousands of hours battling the monster honed his reactions so deeply that serves in excess of 130 mph posed little challenge.

How does deliberate practice apply to poker? Well, the most important thing is to be aware that this concept exists. Most people look at Phil Ivey and assume he is just a natural talent, but not everybody knows that he played poker illegally for years as a teenager with a fake ID. So before the rest of his peers ever set foot in a casino, he had already acquired years of experience. While Ivey doesn’t speak often about his game, he shared this in an interview during the 2012 WSOP:

“There are tons of mistakes every session, even for me. What separates me from a lot of the other players is that I recognize the mistakes when I make them… I just practice, I think about the game all the time and am continually trying to get better.”⁵

The next thing to consider is the idea of challenging yourself. Even though the conventional wisdom says to look for soft games, players like Phil Galfond seek out tough games to become more formidable. Deliberate practice is all about flexing muscles you didn’t know you had, failing, and getting better. Practice is not supposed to be fun; if it were, everyone would do it.

If you want some additional reading on deliberate practice, check out these three excellent books: Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, and Bounce by Matthew Syed.

Feedback

Feedback is the information about your performance that you gain from sources such as people, data, and results. The accuracy of the information you receive in your feedback is paramount, because it determines the adjustments needed to keep you moving toward your goals. There is no superior form of feedback that alone can help you maneuver through the immense amount of uncertainty inevitable in poker. The best you can do is to gather several forms of feedback to generate the most complete and accurate portrait possible.

While there are many potential forms of feedback, poker players tend to overuse the one that is the least reliable in the short run: results. It is simply lazy to use results as the primary method of determining your edge and evaluating your progress. Results are handed to you in poker; no work is required to gather this data—you just have look at your stack size, cashier, or bankroll. The problem is that focusing solely on results can create chaos in your game, mental game, and learning process. If you believed everything your results said, 10-6 offsuit might be a monster and pocket kings a terrible hand. Plus, your confidence would be based on whether you won or lost, not on how you played. That being said, ignoring results altogether is equally problematic. If you tend to ignore results, it is even more important to use other forms of feedback, otherwise you will have no way of navigating the inevitable uncertainty of the short term.

Other valuable forms of feedback include:

Your opinions: How well you played, the severity of variance you experienced, and the quality of the games.

Emotions: Emotions such as anger, fear, or loss of motivation provide feedback on your mental game.

Math: Pot odds, equity calculations, EV calculations, and ICM calculations.

Statistics: Hold’em Manager stats, EV graph, and time elapsed.

Others’ opinions: Thoughts from a coach, friend, or other player at the table.

Instruction: Coaching, books, articles, training videos, and hand history reviews.

All forms of feedback have biases; even statistics can be misleading. For example, all-in EV is often relied upon as a measure of how a player is running, when in fact it measures just a slice of overall variance. Opinions, emotions, and instruction are all biased in some way too. Players are often biased when evaluating their performance because of their strong desire to believe they played well. Plus, it’s easy to convince yourself that you played well when results are good. Emotions are the purest form of feedback, but so few players know how to read them properly and so they are often misinterpreted. A coach may think you should adapt your style to fit their own, or might see mistakes in your game that are really only leaks at their stakes, not yours. A friend might be too sympathetic to be objective. You can minimize the chances that these biases will have negative impacts on your game by considering the pertinent information from multiple forms of feedback. When measured against and next to each other, they can even function to highlight a particularly glaring bias that you would otherwise have accepted as accurate and credible information. This will give you the clearest possible picture of your progress and the current state of your tactical skill and mental game.

Incorporating additional forms of feedback into your learning routine can be challenging and overwhelming at first. Nonetheless, it is worth putting in the work. Which scenario sounds more accurate and convincing?

You know you are beating $1/$2 because you have been winning at 5BB/100 for the last 40,000 hands.

You know you are beating $1/$2 because you have a solid winrate, your coach thinks you are doing well, you’re fixing the C-game mistakes you have been working on, you better understand the instruction from training videos, you feel confident in your play, and tilt has not been an issue.

You probably feel more convinced by the second scenario, since it describes your progress with so much more depth. The first scenario seems quite one-dimensional and flat by comparison. For it to be reliable, you’d need such a large sample of results that by the time you had enough, you’d have missed out on a lot of opportunities to improve. Ultimately, you have to become skilled at distinguishing the valuable information from all the rest.

ADDITIONAL FEEDBACK

This may sound obvious, but when you speak, you hear what you say, and when you write, you also see what’s been written. When learning, it is always beneficial to stimulate as many of your senses as possible to allow your brain to understand the information on multiple levels. Just thinking about something often doesn’t allow you to connect with the material in a dynamic and long-lasting way. Ever think you’ve come up with an interesting way to play a hand, only to say it out loud or write it down and realize how dumb it is? When studying, try to utilize other tools besides just thinking, regardless of whether it’s a video, book, article, or forum post. By writing, talking, hearing, and/or seeing, you automatically increase your interaction with the material. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to write down everything in your head. Beyond being impractical, it’s simply not necessary. Just keep in mind how thinking can be isolating, and how valuable it can be to employ a variety of methods in your learning process.

Rest

The connection between rest and learning is not as widely understood as the connection between rest and performance. When you study and play poker, you absorb information like a sponge; when you rest, it’s as if that information is squeezed out. Try and remember an instance where you kept thinking about hands long after you had finished playing, perhaps at a time when you were trying to sleep. The brain is digesting that information and uses it to grow new neurons⁶, make stronger connections between existing ones, and eliminate old ones. This not only helps your poker skills to become more solid, it also clears your mind and makes absorbing new information easier the next time you play.

The importance of rest is similar for both the mind and body. Getting intensive mental repetitions while working on tilt control, bet sizing, or preflop calling ranges, is similar to working out with weights at the gym. While lifting weights, you tear muscle fibers. This is normal and happens as you push your muscles beyond their current capabilities. Resting allows the body to repair these tears so your muscles can grow stronger; without it, these tears cannot heal and so instead, your muscles become weaker⁷. The same is true as you learn to “lift” more mental weight playing poker. When you get proper rest, your knowledge base becomes stronger, so your decisions are clearer, quicker, and easier. Mental game issues become less of a problem because you have returned with more strength and can remain in control at times when you previously couldn’t. When your mind is overworked and unable to recover, it won’t be able to handle those issues and will crumble under their weight.

Many poker players, especially high-volume grinders and those who live close to a casino, have a hard time taking breaks away from the game. Players who find themselves playing all the time don’t realize the unintended consequences this has on their ability to improve over the long term. Their shortsighted attempt to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, can ultimately lead to a decline in their long-term profitability. They rely on the momentum of playing to help them maintain high-level play. As a result, when they come back from even a short break, their game has slipped so far that it’s difficult to recover. The reason this happens is that their minds can only absorb so much of the data that they are accumulating during their nonstop play. So the information that hasn’t had the time to truly be learned ends up dissolving and can no longer be accessed. This means that each time they come back from a break, they have to recapture that data all over again in order to start rebuilding their game.

Rest replenishes the energy you need to perform at a high level, and enables you to return to your game in a better place both mentally and physically.

FANTASY OF THE FRESH START

Some players view rest, not as a way to improve their skills over the long term, but as a way to wipe away a downswing, tilt, or a streak of bad play. The time off is a good way to clear their minds and come back fresh, ready to play at a high level. While that can work, some players take this idea to extreme levels. They delete a losing Hold’em Manager database, ignore previous mistakes, or wake up and say to themselves, “Today is a new day,” and automatically think something is different. They believe that their past is holding them back and that these actions somehow give them the power to escape it. Unfortunately, they’ll be repeating the past until they’re able to learn from it.

You don’t want to wipe away poor results and mistakes because learning what not to do is valuable. When you make mistakes, you’re basically paying for your education. The important question isn’t whether you pay to learn, it’s: Are you repeatedly paying for the same information? If learning is like completing a complicated maze, why would you want to forget all the wrong turns you took? Mistakes help you to learn what is right, and so “starting fresh” really only means that you’d have to pay for all of those valuable lessons again. Using rest as a way to get a fresh start is reasonable only if you also directly address the real problems in your tactical and mental game. Otherwise, they will force you to keep taking time off from playing. Rest is best used as a tool to help you learn and develop a stronger game, not as a way to wipe out your past without learning anything from it.

LEARNING TO LEARN

Learning is incredibly complex, and knowing how to best approach it can be difficult. It’s quite common for poker players to feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of material and formats available today. Great attention has been given to keeping the information in this section simple, yet potent. By the end, you’ll be armed with an advanced method of learning poker. Whether you’re a new player or a nosebleed regular, these are the four steps that are key in learning to learn:

Define how you learn

Improve your C-game

Solve your learning errors

Make continual progress

Define How You Learn

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” —Peter Drucker, educator and management consultant

There are players with an innate talent for learning poker, just as there are players with an innate talent for playing it. Learning and playing are skills that typically aren’t thought of separately because better players are assumed to be better at learning. While this is generally true, many talented players lack essential learning skills. This allows other less-talented players, who are better learners, to gain an edge. These two skills together are a powerful combination.

To become more skilled at learning, you first need to understand the range that exists in your current skills. Players don’t regularly assess their ability to learn, but it’s just as important as assessing tactical or mental game skills. Just as you did when analyzing your A- to C-game range, start with the biggest areas of strength and weakness, and then fill in everything in between. The following questions will help get you thinking:

What does your approach to learning look like when you’re highly motivated to work on your game?

What does your approach to learning look like when at your very worst?

What are your biggest learning strengths and weaknesses?

Do you benefit from talking with other players about hands?

How often does a mistake distract you while playing? Does a mistake ever get stuck in your mind long after you’re done playing?

Do you avoid working on your game off the table and instead learn mainly by playing?

While watching a video or reading a book, do you have specific areas of your game in mind? Are you actively trying to understand the material and looking for information that can benefit your game?

Are you a visual learner, or do you learn better by experiencing or hearing something?

Do you learn better by working on your game independently, or by talking with other players?

If you study or talk over hands with other players, why is it valuable to you? What does it provide that you can’t get by working alone?

Thinking back to when you were in school, what were the most enjoyable and effective ways that you studied or learned?

What bad habits did you develop in school that are still a problem today?

A simple way to improve your learning is to do more of what already works for you and less of what doesn’t. That may sound obvious and overly simplistic, but have you ever taken a step back to ask if what you’re doing to learn or develop skill is actually working? It is standard for poker players to question their decisions at the poker table, but it is far less common, yet equally important, for them to question their approach to learning.

BARRY’S TAKE

Fixed and Growth Mindsets

Some of the most groundbreaking research on learning in the last 20 years comes not from how you learn, but your attitude towards it. Carol Dweck, Ph.D., the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success⁸, has spent most of her career studying achievement and success, and she found two distinct ways in which people think about their own ability. She calls them the “fixed mindset” and the “growth mindset.” The fixed mindset believes ability is static, predetermined, and unlikely to improve beyond current capability. The growth mindset believes that talents and abilities can be developed through training and hard work.

People with a fixed mindset tend to be biased towards seeking out information that confirms the view they have of their ability. One of the classic examples of a fixed mindset in Dweck’s book is John McEnroe, winner of seven Grand Slam titles in tennis. She observed that his insistence on arguing with umpires is a textbook example of a fixed mindset—he argued in order to preserve his image of greatness, rather than recognize errors that he could have learned from. Although McEnroe was a tennis legend, Dweck highlights a number of areas where his fixed mindset potentially held him back from further greatness: for example, not playing mixed doubles for 20 years after being beaten in straight sets. People with a growth mindset are much more receptive to hearing new things that challenge their beliefs. Dweck draws on a huge range of examples from the world of sport, business, entertainment, parenting, and education, and illustrates how the top achievers in almost all fields exhibited traits of the growth mindset. From Thomas Edison and Tiger Woods to Winston Churchill and Michael Jordan, they all embraced their failures and constantly strived to grow.

As a poker journalist, I have interviewed most of the big names in the game. The one thing I have noticed above all else is that the consistently successful ones are still actively working hard on their game and love to discuss hands like most of us did when we first started playing. They have reached the highest levels of the game, and their commitment to learning and growth is what got them there and what keeps them there. The variance in poker makes it perhaps easier to maintain a fixed mindset than in most fields. You can dismiss your losses as bad luck where you did nothing wrong, instead of looking for areas where you can make improvement. Players with a fixed mindset don’t have to remain fixed. Just look at Phil Hellmuth, whose nickname the Poker Brat came directly from his similarities with John McEnroe. In recent years, he has recommitted himself to improving his game and that has translated into both success and respect at the tables.

Improve Your C-game

To build a taller pyramid, you need a wider base; for your game to grow stronger, you need a bigger and stronger foundation to build it on. Your C-game is the cracks in that foundation. Even if you take nothing else from this section, carefully consider the following advice, as it can have a very valuable impact on your ability to learn.

If you are unsure of what to work on in your game, your C-game will be the most beneficial and rewarding place to start. It’s also the simplest. Learning can be overwhelming, daunting, and complex at times.

Knowing you can always focus on the three or four worst things in your game gives you a reliable and easy starting point. If you maintain an up-to-date A- to C-game analysis, you will always know what to work on. That saves you time and energy, and prepares you to improve your C-game every time you play.

Looking at the mental side of your tactical leaks is very important. There is always some mental component to a C-game tactical mistake, even if only a subtle one. For example, you might take too passive a line in a hand because of a risk aversion; or, if you are overly aggressive on the river, it could be because deep down you think you can win every hand. The degree to which a mental game leak is involved directly corresponds to the severity of the tactical error: The more severe the tactical error, the more involved the mental game issue. Breaking through mental game problems makes it much easier to eliminate tactical mistakes. In order to fix a mental game problem, such as fear, tilt, or low confidence, you must first understand what’s causing it. The mental hand history is a process that was developed to help players quickly get to the root of their mental game problems. Just as a weed grows back if it’s not pulled out by the roots, so too will a mental game problem if the underlying cause isn’t corrected.

How well a player can complete the mental hand history is dependent on their knowledge of the issue and the mental game in general. Going through the process for the same issue several times allows new details to emerge. They can then dig deeper to find new insights that further strengthen the correction and reduce the intensity of emotion around the problem. If you struggle to complete the process, look to resources—including TMGP—to help you. The mental hand history has five steps and works best when your answers are written out rather than done in your head. The steps are as follows:

Describe the problem in as much detail as you can. Include thoughts, feelings, actions, and associated tactical decisions.

Explain why it makes logical sense to think, feel, react, or play that way. In other words, why does this problem occur? All mental game problems are rational, so if you think yours doesn’t make sense, it’s only because you don’t yet have enough information to complete this step. This step is the hardest, so don’t be discouraged if it takes you several days or weeks to complete it.

Figure out how the logic in step 2 is flawed.

Come up with a correction to that flawed logic. This correction can be used as an injecting logic statement. You can also write out a strategy that you can use to learn the correction.

Ask yourself why the correction you came up with will work. This is an extra step that reinforces the rationale behind the correction, and helps to firmly implant it in your mind.

To illustrate these steps in action, here’s an example that deals with tilt:

    1. Describe the problem. I get angry when I lose to bad players and play too aggressively against them. I can never believe it is happening, and all I can think about is getting my money back.

    2. Explain why it makes logical sense to think, feel, react, or play that way. I feel like I deserve to win more than they do because I work much harder on my game. I know it’s not smart to play more aggressively, but I also know it’s the quickest way to win back my money.

    3. Figure out how the logic in step 2 is flawed. Several reasons: Without luck, bad players wouldn’t even play and poker would stop being profitable. It’s also not really my money anymore. The money on the table is an investment in my edge. Some days that investment pays off and others it doesn’t. But if I play worse trying to get that money back, I’ll make less money in the long run. Lastly, every time I make the same stupid mistakes, I actually get better at them and limit my ability to improve in the future. So, not only am I losing money right now, I’m also increasing the probability that I’ll lose money in the future.

    4. Come up with a correction to that flawed logic. My hard work isn’t destroyed when I lose to a bad player; it’s destroyed when I make mistakes trying to win money too aggressively. I’m also destroying the future of my game and need to work hard to play solidly no matter how pissed off I get.

    5. Ask yourself why the correction you came up with will work. It allows me to make the most money over the long term by consistently making the best decisions, period.

Players sometimes have difficulty creating injecting logic statements that work, but the information from steps 3 and 4 cuts straight to the core of the issue. Here are a few options from the example above: “Without luck, bad players wouldn’t even play and poker would stop being profitable,” “The money on the table is an investment in my edge. Some days that investment pays off and others it doesn’t,” or “My hard work isn’t destroyed when I lose to a bad player, it’s destroyed when I make mistakes trying to win money too aggressively.” The one you should select is simply the one that works best, and you may have to try out a few in order to determine that.

Although the mental hand history was originally designed as a tool for breaking down and correcting mental game issues, it can easily be adapted to address tactical leaks as well. Here’s an example of how to break down a tactical error using the mental hand history:

    1. Describe the problem. I am bluffing too much against a player who has a high calling percentage.

    2. Explain the logic behind that. He can’t have it all the time. He must be due to fold.

    3. Figure out how the logic in step 2 is flawed. The only information I have so far is that he doesn’t fold easily. Also, my image will be viewed as wild and my range will be perceived as wide. Both make it more likely I’ll be called.

    4. Come up with a correction to that flawed logic. I need to narrow my range and value bet more.

    5. Ask yourself why the correction you came up with will work. With my image, I’ll be called by this player at a high frequency, so I really need superior hands in order to win.

Ideally, you want to take each tactical C-game mistake and its associated mental game leak through this process. The reason for this is that you will likely uncover similar theoretical errors among them. Let’s say you have eight specific tactical errors as part of your C-game. When you analyze each one, you’ll often find that many of them have the same flaw. In other words, you might not find eight flaws for the eight errors—there could be lots of overlap. So, rather than having to remember eight different corrections, you now only need to remember the few overlapping ones that apply to all eight different spots. When these tactical leaks have a strong connection to a mental game issue, it makes more sense and is more efficient to solve both at the same time.

BARRY’S TAKE

How I Fixed A Leak

One particular leak of mine that developed over a couple of years was being too passive with second pair type hands. I would get dealt pocket queens, the flop would come king high, and I would go right into my default line of either bluff catching or check folding. Even though it’s often right to do this, there are also tons of times when betting for value or to take down the pot is the best option—now is not the time to go into the merits of each line because it’s very situationally dependent. It’s clear, however, that I was shutting down way too much in this spot and it was hurting my game.

Being passive with second pair hands was what was learned to the level of Unconscious Competence; it was my instinctual reaction. I usually play eight or more tables and needed to find a way of making a quick decision about whether the conditions seemed right to continuation bet or check. So I set a goal to remind myself to be aware of this issue by writing it on a notepad at the start of my sessions. Then I marked every hand on Hold’em Manager where it came up. At the end of my sessions, I evaluated all the second pair hand situations to assess how I did. In my journal, I would answer questions such as: Did I bet where I would previously have checked? What did my gut tell me to do? Was I right to do it in these situations? Then, in my warm-up before future sessions, I reviewed my notes and looked over some of the hand histories as a reminder of my progress and recent mistakes.

Away from the table, I studied my hand histories further by putting players on ranges, doing EV calculations, posting hands on forums, and generally assessing the merits of each option in each spot. Thankfully, Hold’em Manager has preset filters to pick out these spots so I could even look at hands from ages ago to see how I played them. I also watched training videos with the specific intention of seeing what the instructors did in second pair spots. For the most part, I ignored the rest of the information on display in the video to avoid getting overwhelmed. I wrote out their reasoning for betting out with second pair hands, as well as for the times they didn’t. Probably the biggest leaps came when I discussed specific hands with poker friends. Not only did they challenge my viewpoint, just talking about my reasoning out loud made such a huge difference. All of this went in my journal, so I could easily review it later.

Four months and 80,000 hands after I first started, the correction was learned to the level of Unconscious Competence. It wasn’t easy. There were a lot of instances where I felt like I had solved the problem, but then would find myself insta-checking second pair hands in tough spots, such as in deep pots or live games. Ultimately, what helped more than any other correction I had used in the past was varying the way I attacked the issue and constantly assessing where the correction was in the ALM. I even took an extended break from poker and the correction was still there when I came back, without even thinking about it.

After completing the process of defining and understanding your mental and tactical C-game, you can then start implementing the corrections with the goal of training them to the level of Unconscious Competence. Here are suggestions for creating a cycle of improvement that will help you to efficiently master corrections to your C-game:

Warm-up. You must be prepared to make corrections to your C-game every time you play. It may take a few minutes to refresh your memory and get focused on your C-game mistakes and their corrections, but it’s time well spent. The cost of failure is too high, especially when simple reminders can make a big difference. Review your A- to C-game analysis, injecting logic statements, strategic reminder, hand histories, or anything else you need to prepare for preventing your game from crashing.

Performance. Stay focused on playing well until you recognize that your game has begun to slip or you see a sign of one of your mental game problems. When that happens, quickly make the appropriate tactical and mental corrections. Addressing these problems as soon as they arise, and not waiting for them to accumulate, will make it easier for you to remain in control. Also, keep in mind that even if you’ve been successful at preventing tactical and mental mistakes early in a session, it doesn’t mean you should become complacent. As the session wears on, fatigue and accumulation can make it harder, not easier, to continue to be in control. Remember to quit the session if, for any reason, you’re no longer able to correct your C-game mistakes. The goal is to improve upon them, not reinforce bad play.

Cool-down. After your session, review your progress in correcting your C-game mistakes. Remember, the transfer of skill concept makes it necessary to consider the difficulty of the session. Review or repeat your mental hand history on days that are particularly difficult. This helps to reduce accumulated emotion and makes learning the correction easier. Yes, this is repetitive, but would you rather repeat a mental hand history or continue to make the same mistake at the table?

Analysis. Away from the table, you can gain valuable repetitions in improving your C-game by posting hand histories, editing and reviewing mental hand histories, watching videos, speaking with a coach, and doing anything else that directly addresses it. This feeds into your warm-up and completes the cycle of improvement.

Your progress might be steady, or it could be full of steps forwards and backwards. Either way, stay focused on improving your current C-game until you have enough proof that it’s gone and has been replaced by your previous B-game—this is the concept of inchworm⁹ in action. The simple way of knowing that your game has moved forward is that your previous C-game doesn’t show up even in the most difficult, level-5 contexts, and without any effort. Invariably, players make a lot of progress over a few weeks or months, and then become lazy. They assume these improvements have reached the level of Unconscious Competence, but don’t realize the importance of the transfer of skill concept. Keep them on your radar until you have proof; it doesn’t take a lot of time and will prevent major steps backwards.

Solve Your Learning Errors

Since learning is a skill with a range, you have a learning A-game and a learning C-game. The approach to solving your learning errors is the same approach you use to solve your performance errors: Eliminate the C-game mistakes. Unfortunately, they are not always obvious. Below are five common learning errors and their corrections, with the stage of either the ALM or the ZLM in which they occur.

Plateau: Intangible Competence and Unconscious Incompetence. The biggest strides in your learning often come during periods of great inspiration. So, what do you do when your previously steep learning curve has flat-lined? Maybe this has happened because you don’t know what to work on next or because you achieved a long-term poker goal, such as winning a large tournament. Poker could be feeling like a grind and you wish you were as excited about the game as when you first started playing. Whatever the reason, you need a way to make poker exciting again. If you choose not to address this problem, your game is at risk of becoming outdated. If that happens, you’ll face a huge investment of time in order to catch up. Instead, try challenging yourself with new goals, learning a new game, or getting a coach. You don’t have to dramatically increase your learning curve right from the start; you just need to get it climbing upwards again.

Premature realization of skill: Conscious Incompetence. In the race to master skills, poker players often think they’ve reached the finish line when they’ve actually just stepped up to the starting line. This often happens while working away from the table, when they feel as though they really “get” something. Their sense of understanding feels so strong that they assume the concept can easily be applied at the table. Then, when they actually get to the table, they make mistakes that reveal how much improvement is still required for mastery. They hadn’t accounted for how much repetition is needed to master a skill; it is not instant, as much as players wish it were. The simple solution to this issue is to realize that the first time you recognize a new mistake or a new tactic, you’ve entered the first conscious stage of learning. You still need to work through the next two stages of the process before the correction to that mistake is truly learned.

Immediately knowing the mistake: Conscious Competence. Ever make a play and realize immediately afterwards that it was a mistake? Part of the problem was failing to know the right decision in the moment, but many players fail to dig any deeper than this. They assume that because they recognized the mistake immediately, the problem is solved and no further work is necessary to prevent the mistake from happening again. However, this is the perfect time to focus on it. Why? You’re so close to mastering it! Putting in the extra work can help that skill reach the level of Unconscious Competence so that the next time, you will know the correct decision before you act, not after.

Intentionally learning while playing: Conscious Competence. During a session is not the time to be actively learning; it is the time to take the test and prove what you have already learned. Many players use up valuable mental energy reviewing previous hands, doing equity calculations, and fixating on past mistakes while playing. The problem is that if they’re actively trying to learn and play at the same time, neither process will get the amount of mental energy it needs to be done well. Still, some players believe this is an effective way to learn, which in fact makes them more likely to repeat the same mistakes they are trying to learn from. They don’t realize this method of learning is flawed, and fail to put in the required work off the tables.

If you’ve become accustomed to learning in this way, breaking out of it can be tough. Aim to make only slight adjustments while playing, and do your active learning away from the table. If it’s helpful, jot down the things you want to revisit after a session so you don’t have to try and remember them all. This will allow you to remain focused on the action while still making sure that issues that come up will be addressed later on.

Overconsumption: Lack of Unconscious Competence. There is a lot of poker material available, and it’s easy to consume so much of it that you can’t make practical use of it all. This could even happen if you try to apply the material in this book to your game all at once. If you’re constantly learning new things and not spending enough time mastering what you have already learned, you will have too much to think about and not enough space in your mind to consider it all.

New information is exciting and can make you feel hopeful about its potential to better your game. In actuality, new information often proves to be a false prophet. It may improve your game, but not as substantially as you had hoped. When you haven’t yet mastered the knowledge you currently have, a new piece of information becomes just another thing you have to consciously think about. This puts you at risk to outlevel yourself, become lost in your own thoughts, and suffer a big step backwards during a downswing. Make sure you are mastering existing knowledge and eliminating C-game mistakes before trying to add new concepts to your game.

CLIENT’S STORY

Matts Quiding

Midstakes Limit Hold’em

“My biggest learning problem was accepting the reality of my level. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning a lot of things only to the level of Conscious Competence. Then, the bottom would fall out and I would be back to my C-game without even realizing what happened. This cycle was slowing down my learning process. I was spending too much time focused on parts of my game that I already knew really well, rather than training the things I didn’t know well. I realized the reason I was cutting my learning short was related to being a perfectionist. I would become overly emotional and fearful of failure when I didn’t know something. That compelled me to overthink situations and end up playing in a safe and predictable way—not using any moves that weren’t mastered. Now, I’m working in a much more process-oriented way. I can see the overall plan for learning and this takes away all the stress. I have much more trust in my decisions, even when I’m not certain they’re right, because I have a process for finding and fixing any mistakes. That allows me to learn a lot faster and keeps me focused on improving the consciously competent parts of my game until they become mastered.

I’ve found that keeping a written journal really helps a lot. (Now I make video journals because they’re just as effective and take less time.) The journal keeps me constantly aware of my weaknesses and my A-game, so I always know what I’m working on—especially in the weak parts of my game. I use the mental hand history to think deeply about the cause of my mistakes and to search for good strategies for eliminating them from my game. I like how it digs deep below the surface to uncover the real reasons why problems show up. When I can understand the problem at a deep level, I automatically feel at ease and never need to overthink it.

I’m not perfect; sometimes I still get a little lazy when it comes to working on my mental game. Recently, I was annoyed by a poor run and started to miss a lot of bets, which is a huge mistake in Limit Hold’em. In the past, this setback would have led to mistake tilt. But instead of getting annoyed and making bigger mistakes, I was able to analyze the situation and see the real problem: I was tired. I had started a demanding new schedule and wasn’t giving myself enough breaks. Awareness is the most important thing for me. When I know the enemy better, he’s easier to defeat.”

Make Continual Progress

Athletes across the sports world are constantly trying to improve. This goal is built into the fabric of their careers. They understand how intensely their competition is working, and realize that if they aren’t moving forward, they’re bound to fall behind.

Whether you’re playing great or horribly, there’s always an opportunity to improve. The key is to always be tuned in to your capability, which is why maintaining your A- to C-game analysis is so important. If you are having an off day, acknowledge it and realize that it’s a great opportunity to improve. If you’re tired, tilted, or just not feeling it for some reason, prepare to play a solid B-game and don’t even worry about playing your A-game. Improvement on a day like that means making sure your C-game leaks don’t show up, or you at least hold them off for longer than you were able to previously. Too often, poker players don’t even play or won’t take the opportunity to work on their games when they’re not feeling 100%. However, as the transfer of skill concept illustrates, one of the best times to improve your C-game is on a day when it’s most likely to show up. Plus, since preventing C-game mistakes is a significant challenge, you gain high-value repetitions each time you’re successful. Go into the session prepared to battle your weaknesses and celebrate even the slightest improvements. This will not only improve your tactical game, but will also increase your confidence and mental endurance.

On the other hand, when you’re feeling strong, fresh, and ready to play at a high level, it’s important to continue to push yourself and not get complacent. Your definition of improvement should be progress relative to your capability on a given day. You can’t know the limits of your capability until the day is over; so push yourself to play better, no matter where you are within your range.

At the heart of continual improvement is your A- to C-game analysis. When things start to go badly at the poker table, it can feel as though your game is in a free-fall. Knowing exactly what level your game has fallen to gives you something tangible to grab hold of. Rather than reminding yourself to just focus and play well, you have knowledge of what exactly needs your focus. If you rotate a bell curve 90 degrees counterclockwise, you’ll see a bell curve ladder. The better you’re able to define each rung in this ladder, the easier it is to stop your game from falling and to climb back up once your game has stabilized.

When evaluating progress, it is critical that you compare apples to apples. As the transfer of skill concept illustrates, comparing an incredibly difficult day to an easy one not only causes frustration, it also leads to inaccurate conclusions and misconceptions. Making an appropriate comparison allows you to see progress where you probably rarely see it—at the back end of your range. On a day when you played poorly, realizing you were less terrible than a previous session can be strangely satisfying. It validates the hard work you’ve been putting into improving your game, which is a pretty rare and amazing thing to see on a bad day. On the flip side, after a profitable session, you may realize that you could have played a lot better. So rather than becoming complacent the next time you play well, you are instead motivated to challenge your best and raise the bar even higher.

The following suggestions will further help you to get in the habit of improving your game:

Make small stuff big

Aggressively learn from failure

Practice

Take a vacation

Make small stuff big. When looking to improve, players often only focus on the major leaks in their game, when often it’s the small stuff that has the biggest impact. At every level of poker, the edges can be very small, so any improvement matters. While each improvement may seem minute, when done consistently day after day, they have an exponential effect—similar to compound interest on a mortgage.

Another mistake players often make is giving too much attention to their biggest winning and losing hands. These are hands that have the greatest impact on how much they win or lose, so it seems logical to focus on them. However, not only do these hands usually involve standard decisions, they rarely contain anything to learn from. Here are a few examples of the types of hands that players often overlook when attempting to learn from their sessions:

Hands where your decisions didn’t come easily: Rather than reviewing a hand based on whether you won or lost it, instead focus on the hands that were the most challenging. In general, the more thought a decision requires, the more there is to learn from it.

Small pots that you won or lost: Ask yourself if you could have made or saved an extra blind here or there.

Unique hands you played: Ask yourself how you would have played in your opponent’s position or if you were dealt a different hand.

Smaller spots where you didn’t know how to proceed immediately.

It can be easy to presume you have nothing else to work on, but that’s never the case; there will always be small details of your game for you to analyze. If you don’t address small issues while they are still small and relatively easy to fix, they will eventually become bigger and more complex issues down the line. A tiny leak may not hurt your winrate much at $2/$4, but it could prove to be a major problem at $5/$10. Why wait for the mistake to become more costly before beginning to work on it?

Aggressively learn from failure. Read stories about successful people in any field and you’ll see an important commonality in how they view failure: They see it not as something permanent or to be avoided, but as part of the process of learning and succeeding. There are innumerable famous and inspiring quotes about failure; here are a few:

“Would you like me to give you a formula for... success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all... you can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember, that’s where you’ll find success.”

—Thomas Watson, founder of IBM

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

—Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company

“I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

—Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb

It’s natural to get a little down when you make a mistake or experience failure. What’s most important is how you recover from it. Does the disappointment fuel you to work harder and to make the most out of the mistake, or do you get stuck and allow those negative feelings to linger? Failure provides a great opportunity to learn because it highlights the limitations in your capabilities. Only when you can learn from those limitations will you be able to truly push your game higher.

Practice. In all sports, there are clear ways for athletes to increase their level of skill without having to compete. Golfers hit balls on the driving range and play practice rounds, runners utilize a track and weight room, and boxers have heavy bags and sparring partners they can hit. Poker, on the other hand, doesn’t have a clearly defined training environment without monetary consequences. Some would argue that play-money games provide a good training ground. However, beyond teaching the basic rules of the game, this style of play is too unlike real poker to be valuable.

The benefit of practice is that you get to test new skills in an environment where there is less pressure. Plus, you can rack up valuable repetitions that make it easier to transfer a skill to tougher situations. Here are a few suggestions for ways to practice:

Play lower stakes. Drop down several limits to play a session where, for example, you focus entirely on pre-flop play, turn aggression, or C-game mistakes. Then see how much that practice pays off in your normal games.

Play more tables at lower stakes. Playing more tables online than normal is a great way to work solely on your tactical C-game mistakes. The high frequency of hands makes it a lot harder for you to think, and that forces you to work on a part of your game that typically feels easy.

Play fewer tables. If you are trying to expand your A-game, playing fewer tables is a good way to put more focus on each table and decision. It allows you to think more deeply over each hand and explore any new insight you’re able to gain. It’s also a great way to improve focus, since the slower pace makes it easier to become distracted.

Hand replayers. Replaying old hands from your Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker database is the rough equivalent of a basketball player reviewing game tape. This is the most common way that poker players practice and it is genuinely risk-free. Load up a bunch of random hands or ones fitted for specific situations. Then pause the hand on every street and make a decision as though you were actually playing it for the first time. You can also play the hand from the villain’s perspective. Simulators like SNGWiz and Hold’emResources Manager are good examples of dynamic hand replayer options.

Change game formats. Some skills can be developed just by changing the type of game you play. Tournament players can replicate final table situations by playing heads-up cash games and SNGs. They can also play deep stack cash games to work on the early stages, and short stack cash games to practice for the middle stages. Also, heads-up games are generally a great way to improve mental game issues, as they tend to be mentally tougher.

Use these suggestions or come up with your own ways of integrating practice into your learning process. It’s a low-cost option that can pay huge dividends in the long run.

LEARN BY TEACHING

There are many reasons that players decide to become coaches: to make money, to give back to the community, and to gain exposure. Many coaches also do it because they know it’ll make them better players. Writing articles, recording training videos, and working with students reinforces concepts they already know and allows them to be understood at even higher levels. Each time a coach shares what they know, they get additional repetitions and their knowledge becomes more deeply ingrained. Coaching helps knowledge move through the learning process, and that includes helping Intangible Competence become Conceptual Competence. Sometimes in the process of sharing their expertise, they often communicate something they didn’t even realize they knew. This spontaneous understanding is exactly the same as making a creative new move while playing. When in the zone, a coach has access to more knowledge, and that allows them to bring their own intangible competence to the surface. And you don’t even have to be an official coach to reap the benefits of coaching. For example, if you’re in a study group and you’re the best player, don’t be discouraged that you don’t have anyone to learn from. Take advantage of the opportunity to solidify what you know by communicating it to the other members of the group. Encourage them to ask questions so you’re forced to explain things in various ways. This helps to conceptualize poker decisions and frees you up to acquire new Intangible Competence.

Take a vacation. Poker players are often quite reluctant to take time off. Even though the value of rest is well known, they still don’t like the amount of time it can take to knock off the rust and get back to playing at their pre-vacation levels. Consequently, they don’t take enough time off during the year, and their ability to learn suffers as a result.

The solution all comes down to organization and planning. Keeping your A- to C-game analysis up to date makes this easier. Before you leave, take notes about your game as though you’re writing them to your post-vacation self. This not only allows you to put poker down so you can truly enjoy some time away, it also helps to refresh your memory when you return. When you get back, you have two options:

Jump right back into playing without reviewing your notes.

Review your notes and play fewer tables or lower stakes so you can steadily work your way back up to a high level.

The value of jumping right back in to your normal routine without any preparation is that it gives you a great opportunity to test whether being away has improved your game. You could find, for example, that areas of your game that previously took a lot of mental effort feel easier after your break. It’s as though the time away allowed them to sink deeper into your mind. You can then use your vacation notes as a measuring stick to compare your game pre- and post-vacation. The other option—using the notes, practice, and a solid warm-up to steadily climb back up to the top of your game—is less risky. Since players who prefer this route often want to accelerate their climb, consider making it a goal to get to the top of your game in less time after each trip. For example, if it currently takes you one week to get back on top, try to reduce that to four or five days after the next trip.

_________________________

¹ Gladwell, M. 2008. Outliers: the story of success. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

² Karpicke, J.D., & Blunt, J.R. 2011. Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science 331 (6018): 772-775.

³ Ericsson, A.K., Krampe, R.Th., & Tesch-Romer, C. 1993. The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review 100 (3): 363-406.

⁴ Agassi, A. 2010. Open: an autobiography. New York, NY: Random House.

⁵ Dalla, N. (2012, July 10). Ivey league: a one-on-one interview with the world’s best poker player phil ivey [Interview]. Retrieved from: http://www.wsop.com/news/2012/Jul/3929/IVEY-LEAGUE-A-ONE-ON-ONE-INTERVIEW-WITH-THE-WORLDS-BEST-POKER-PLAYER-PHIL-IVEY.html

⁶ Coyle, D. 2009. The talent code: greatness isn’t born. it’s grown. here’s how. New York, NY: Bantam Dell.

⁷ Bompa, T.O. & Haff, G.G. 2009. Periodization: theory and methodology of training – 5th ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

⁸ Dweck, C. 2006. Mindset: the new psychology of success. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

⁹ See Appendix I for more details.

4

DECISION MAKING

LONG-TERM SUCCESS in poker comes down to the quality of your execution at the table. The money you make, the number of tournament titles you own, and the respect you get as a player are mainly a result of your ability to make correct decisions. Grasping exactly how to make correct decisions is such a critical part of success, yet many players don’t spend enough time working on it. They assume that their constant focus on gaining greater tactical knowledge automatically upgrades their decision-making abilities as well. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

There is a critical difference between having tactical knowledge and being able to extract that knowledge in order to make a correct decision. For example, when facing a bet, your decision making could be broken down like this:

What is my opponent’s range?

What odds is the pot laying me?

What is my equity vs. my opponent’s range?

What are the odds that my hand will improve?

Will my opponent pay me off if I hit my hand?

In the process of making a decision, you evaluate the answers to these questions. This is different from the actual answers themselves, which are derived from, for example, your tactical knowledge of pot odds, equity, and your opponent’s skill. Ideally, you want your decision-making ability to be on the same level as your tactical knowledge. When they are out of sync, the following two problems can occur:

Players outlevel themselves when they attempt to consider factors in a hand without the knowledge to back it up. This happens when a brand-new player tries to spot a physical tell on their opponent. Having watched TV, they think this is what they’re supposed to be doing. Their mistake is that they’re attempting to apply knowledge that they don’t have yet. It’s like trying to pump water out of a dry well. While this problem is often thought to be the exclusive domain of weaker players, it also happens to highly skilled players when they don’t adapt to a drop in their mental functioning when tired, tilted, or distracted.

Players make poor decisions when their decision-making process fails to utilize their existing knowledge. The well isn’t dry, they just can’t drink from it.

A poker player making the right decision is essentially the same as a golfer, quarterback, or downhill skier selecting the right shot, pass, or angle. Athletes spend countless hours not only honing their techniques, but also their decision-making abilities. They know that all their hard work can be wasted if they are not able to make the right decision when it matters most.

Within the decision-making process, there are three types of knowledge accessed by your mind:

Intuition: Intangible Competence reacting in the moment.

Thinking: Conscious knowledge that requires effort to extract.

Instinct: Knowledge trained to the level of Unconscious Competence.

Players often make the mistake of assuming that intuition and instinct mean the same thing, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Intuition utilizes your entire range of knowledge, whereas your instinct is only based on knowledge that exists at the level of Unconscious Competence. Between them is a conscious decision-making tool that you don’t always use as effectively as you’d like: thinking.

Intuition

Intuition is a strong feeling, sense, or thought about the right decision in a hand that is based on new and existing knowledge, particularly intangible competence—new knowledge that you can’t yet explain. Intuition happens spontaneously while in the zone or playing at a high level. When you’re faced with a decision, both new and existing knowledge react to the unique details of the situation and result in an intuitive decision. This is the mental equivalent of a goalie making a split-second adjustment to block a shot, a defensive back in football sniffing out a receiver’s route to make an interception, or a tennis player picking a lethal moment to hit a drop shot.

Poker players who tend to rely mainly on their intuition are often called “feel players” and refer to their intuition as their “gut.” These players still think through hands, but when choosing the right play, they rely more on feelings than constructing an argument in their head. And while this may come naturally to them, it doesn’t mean that their gut is always right.

The farther you fall from the zone, the more your feelings are influenced by flaws in your tactical and mental game. At these lower levels of performance, you’re no longer able to make smart intuitive decisions and relying on a feeling becomes risky. You might feel as though your opponent has a very strong hand, but you’re really only looking for a justification for folding because of your issue with risk aversion. Or, your gut might be saying your opponent “doesn’t have it,” because you like to make hero calls or you’re seeking revenge from a previous bad beat. These examples highlight why it’s important for all players—especially feel players—to not blindly trust their gut at all times.

Many players believe that they should trust their gut or intuition more often, and even give this advice to other players. They don’t realize that they first need to trust and understand their gut reactions, and not just blindly rely on them. If you were playing live and faced a tough decision, you would never ask a random stranger for advice. You would, however, consult with a person who has repeatedly proved to be a reliable source in helping you make good decisions. You can learn to trust your intuition in the same manner by gathering data on how often and in what situations it tends to be reliable. Whether or not your intuition proves to be overall more trustworthy than your conscious reasoning, there is still edge to be gained by knowing when to trust it and when to go against it.

Typically, players go with their gut while in the zone and only begin to question it when they’ve fallen out of it. Questioning your gut makes sense when playing out of the zone because you no longer have access to your full range of knowledge. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should completely ignore it in these cases; you just need to include it as one of several other factors to consider when making a decision.

If trusting or going with your gut is a problem for you, gather some data to identify the situations when you tend to go with your gut and when you typically go against it. The next step is to consider the educational value of choosing to just go with it. Think of these instances as paying for your poker education. If you go with it and are correct, you win (or save) money. If you go with it and are wrong, you will lose money, but you will probably learn something in the process. Going with your gut often means folding, which means you may never find out whether or not it was right. This requires you to have a high tolerance for uncertainty. That uncertainty can be so difficult for some players to deal with that even when their gut says to fold, they’ll call just so they can avoid feeling uncertain.

All players have an intuitive sense; some are just more tuned in to it and value it more. If you’re ignoring this level of decision making, or can’t identify its flaws, you’re not capitalizing on the potential edge to be gained from it.

Instinct

Instinct uses our most ingrained and basic knowledge to inform our decisions. It’s common to view players with strong instincts as having an innate gift that doesn’t result from any training. The truth is, you don’t have to be a “natural”: Instincts, can be enhanced by training knowledge to the level of Unconscious Competence. This knowledge is so well trained and basic that you may struggle to explain decisions that are made using it—a phenomenon called “expert induced amnesia.”¹ When knowledge is so deeply ingrained, you can sometimes forget the steps and details that it took to learn it so well. This concept can explain why experts sometimes make terrible coaches. It’s also important to understand that your instincts can be guided by your bad habits and C-game leaks. Even though they’re undesirable, they too are mastered skills.

Grasping the difference between instinct and intuition can be hard because they’re both unconscious reactions that can be difficult to explain. An intuitive decision is hard to explain because it includes knowledge that is so new you can’t yet explain it. An instinctual decision is tough to explain because it’s based on so much knowledge and experience that you can’t explain it anymore.

Thinking

In between intuition and instinct is thinking, i.e., the conversation in your head. The ability to think is what allows players to be consciously active in their decision-making process. It is how they can weigh information from multiple sources, replay previous action, focus on certain details, and filter out what’s irrelevant. Thinking is how some of the most important decisions are made, and yet it’s often taken for granted. Only when an issue like tilt blocks a player’s ability to think do they realize how terribly they play without it.

The thoughts you hear in your head are in a part of the brain called working memory². For a poker player, working memory is some of the most valuable real estate in their mind. It’s essentially a mental desk where they can consciously work with data that gets brought in from many different sources, such as memories, observations, instincts, previous action, HUD stats, physical and timing tells, bet sizing, pot odds, and table chat. Research³ has shown that there’s a limit of between five to nine pieces of data that can be considered at any one point in time. Since this differs slightly in each person, it’s logical to assume that elite, winning players have a larger working memory than the average player.

While the size of working memory is limited, “chunking” is a way to get more out of it. Chunking is when the brain compresses a lot of information into one small piece, kind of like a zip file or a cue card. Chunking can be illustrated in the way football teams name their plays. Each football team has a unique language for plays that helps them communicate large amounts of data very quickly, for example, “Right Double Gun Montana Screen Left.” Just these few words allow the quarterback to instantly give detailed instructions to the other 10 offensive players. Pages could be written about each player’s assignment during the play, however, intensive practice and study allows them to recall all of it with just a few words.

In poker, an example of chunking several pieces of information is color coding players or stats on an HUD. Green might mean a loose and passive player, red might mean a dangerous and aggressive player, and yellow might mean a bad regular. When any of these players 4bets and you have pocket jacks, you don’t necessarily need to remember their screen name, review your notes, look at their stats, or replay previous hands to arrive at your decision. Simply looking at a single detail—their color—instantly gives you enough information to know that green and yellow might mean fold, and red means call.

When you’re working on your game, chunking can give you a quick, useful reminder about an area of your game that you’re trying to refine. For example, if you have an issue with hero calling, having a note on your desktop which simply says “hero call” might be all you need to remind yourself in the moment not to do it. That two-word reminder represents the tactical inefficiencies of hero calling, the way you feel after making a bad hero call, the deep mental root of why you hero call, and why it is a sign of underestimating your opponents. By putting in the work to chunk this information together, you make it easily retrievable without having to use up much capacity within your working memory.

To make the concepts of working memory and chunking easier to understand, below are several examples of how they can apply to a poker decision. Let’s say you’re in a No Limit Hold’em tournament with a below-average size stack, the blinds fold around to you, and you have pocket queens on the button. You raise and are re-raised by the big blind. In a vacuum, you might be thinking about the following things:

Your opponent’s range

Your opponent’s stack size

Your range

Your strength versus your opponent’s range

Your stack size

Your stack size if you win or lose the hand

Your opponent’s previous actions prior to the hand

Assuming you’re playing well and in a solid state of mind, processing these seven factors and coming to a decision isn’t a problem. In fact, some factors are even calculated quickly because of chunking. Now, let’s assume you’re in the same spot except you have a fear of losing money and you’re near the bubble. This is what you might be thinking about:

Your opponent’s range

Your opponent’s stack size

Your range

“I’m probably going to get sucked out on again.”

Your strength versus your opponent’s range

“I have a good hand but it’s not the nuts.”

Your stack size

“I could fold and make it into the money.”

Your stack size if you win or lose the hand

Your opponent’s previous actions prior to the hand

“I could probably pay off my student loan if I made the money.”

While chunking allows you to expand on the number of things you can consider at any one time, there are still too many things going on in your head to handle all at once. Plus, since excessive emotion has the power to shrink the size of working memory, you now have less space to consider more things. You’re likely to get lost in the hand and fail to think about important factors, such as your opponent’s range. If you can’t isolate the right pieces of information to focus on, you’re going to make a mistake. And even if you force yourself to think about the right things, you won’t be able to think about them in the same way—fear has diminished that power too.

When making a decision, the factors in your mind are not weighted equally; some will understandably have more of a presence than others. To illustrate this concept, here is one more example using the same hand situation, only this time you’re playing at your first TV final table and the villain is Phil Ivey. In this situation, the space in your working memory might be broken down like this:

Your stack size - 5%

Your opponent’s stack size - 5%

Your stack size if you win or lose the hand - 6%

Your range - 7%

Your strength versus your opponent’s range - 7%

Your opponent’s previous actions prior to the hand - 7%

Your opponent’s range - 10%

“I will look really stupid if I mess this hand up on TV.” - 24%

“Holy shit, it’s Phil Ivey!” - 29%

In this example, more than half of your working memory is consumed by your fear of making a mistake and the fact that you are playing Phil. Very little is left to help you make one of the most important decisions of your poker life. This is clearly not a recipe for success.

This example also shows why mastering skills to the level of Unconscious Competence—the highest form of chunking—is so important. Anyone that thrives in high-stakes games has a very active working memory. With standard tactical knowledge mastered, players such as Tom Dwan have a lot of extra space within working memory to focus on high-level details. Tom doesn’t need to worry about things like odds, ranges, and positional considerations. Even higher-level concepts of the game are automatic, which is why he can seemingly play several moves ahead of his competition.

Training Decision Making

Now that you’re armed with an understanding of this breakdown of decision making, you can begin to improve the process. Analyzing your decisions at the table is always easier than analyzing your decision-making process as a whole, since the latter requires more awareness. There are no statistical programs or simple formulas for calculating the quality of your decision-making process. Over the course of a long online session, thousands of decisions are made and it’s impossible to analyze every single one. While playing live, the number of decisions are considerably smaller, though arguably more complex since there are more factors to consider.

There are generally two dominant styles of decision making for poker players. One is routine, where they think in the same order through every decision that isn’t automatic. The other is tailored, where they think through all of the important factors in an order that is most suitable to the hand. For example, a player that uses a routine style would always ask these questions in order:

What is my opponent’s image?

What is my opponent’s range?

What is my perceived range?

What was the previous action?

What is my table image?

Will a worse hand call or will a better hand fold to a bet?

Using the tailored style, in a hand with an inexperienced player, you might put the questions about your perceived range and table image at the bottom of the list, as they probably won’t be considering it too extensively. In a table where you have been playing a lot of crazy hands, you might put the same questions at the top, given that the table dynamic is likely to be informing the action much more.

The first step in training your decision making is to determine how you personally make decisions. Here are some questions to get you started:

What factors do you consider in a hand?

What questions do you ask yourself in a hand?

Do you consider these factors or ask these questions in the same order every time, or are they in an order that fits the hand?

What factors do you fail to consider when your mind isn’t as sharp?

How you make decisions should mirror your strategic reminder from the second chapter, since it’s your way of reminding yourself how to get back to making quality poker decisions when you’ve fallen out of the zone. Use this section to refine that strategic reminder. If you make a decision by considering factors or questions in a specific order, write them all down in that order and highlight the one(s) that most often goes missing. If you opt for a style more fitting to the hand, then you can either write down all the factors to consider or just the ones that tend to disappear. Combining this with your A- to C-game analysis will allow you to recognize spots where your decision making tends to break down and know immediately how to improve it. Regularly forcing yourself to properly think through hands at times when it’s most challenging makes you much stronger at decision making.

There are two major types of mistakes in decision making that you want to be looking out for in your game:

Mistakes that happen when you forget to consider a vital factor that you usually know quite well, for example, when you play a bad hand out of position. Even if you’re positionally aware, a breakdown in your decision making caused you to fail to consider the importance of position in the hand.

Mistakes that happen when you outlevel your tactical knowledge. This happens when you try to force a decision, think too much about factors that you have little knowledge of, overweight the importance of one factor, or think too hard about a new concept when you’re tilted.

No matter at what level you’re performing, your decision-making process should always be aligned with the tactical knowledge that is accessible to you. Having a clear A- to C-game analysis makes this easier to accomplish and also helps you to avoid making the previous two types of mistakes.

Professional golfers know before their round starts how aggressive they can be with their shot selection. On days when they know that their game isn’t as precise, they’ll play more conservatively and try to max out whatever they do have on that day. In essence, they’re trying to play their absolute best B-game. You can do the same in poker. On days when you are not performing at a high level, it’s a mistake to force decisions that require access to high-level knowledge. Without access to the full range of your skills, you can outlevel yourself and arrive at incorrect conclusions. Instead, concentrate on playing your absolute best B-game, where you adopt more of a locked down ABC style. Yes, you might be giving up edge compared to your A-game, but that A-game isn’t available to you. Sticking to solid B-game decision making while playing your B-game means you are more likely to get into a flow, at which point you may naturally begin to build up to your A-game.

As you improve as a player, your decision-making process must upgrade as well. This is what poker players talk about when they discuss 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-level thinking. You will have likely experienced this already many times as you moved up the ranks. At first, you only thought about your hand; then as you improved, you started thinking about your opponents’ hands; then later, you considered what your opponent thought about your range, and so on. By the same token, sometimes it is necessary to downgrade your decision-making process when the opposition demands it. Even some elite players make the mistake of thinking too hard when they play against recreational players. They give them too much credit for things like metagame and combinatorics, when a standard ABC style would work the best.

One way to really train your decision-making process is to just practice and repeat it a lot. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is through hand history reviews. Whenever you are reviewing a hand, ask yourself the same questions you would ask yourself if you were playing in the moment. Use your strategic reminder if you get stuck. The more practice you get rehearsing your ideal decision-making process away from the table, the more you will train it to show up during play. You can also pick out specific hands where this decision-making process did not show up and try to determine why.

PANNING FOR GOLD

Successful poker players become successful in large part because of their ability to ignore the things that are irrelevant to their success. Their ability to find quality data among the irrelevant is a lot like panning for gold or the CIA monitoring the communications of suspected terrorists. There’s a lot of dirt and meaningless chatter that has to be filtered out in order to find what’s truly valuable. Similarly, in a poker hand, there’s a ton of information available to you and a lot of it will only help you find a way to lose. Knowing what not to focus on in a hand is a skill that poker players often undervalue. If you were told the information that mattered and didn’t matter before the start of a hand, your decisions would be easy. Of course, that’s not how poker works. One of the benefits of playing in the zone is that you are able to easily filter out irrelevant information so your mind can stay focused on the information that really matters.

Errors in Decision Making

There are a few other common decision-making errors besides the ones already covered in this chapter. The following list isn’t exhaustive, so always be sure to keep an eye out for any others that create unnecessary variations in your decision making.

Confirmation bias

Being too attached

The “fuck its”

The Dunning-Kruger effect

The flaw of hindsight

Confirmation bias. There are an incredible number of cognitive biases that influence your perspective, and ultimately your decision making. One of the most common, as well as the most costly, is the confirmation bias. This is where you seek out information that confirms a preexisting belief and you reject information that opposes it. The biggest confirmation bias poker players have is about their skill levels. They believe they’re a winning player, so when they win, this belief gets reinforced; when they lose, they rationalize it as being a result of bad luck. This leads them to ignore good variance, since winning was a result of their skill and not good luck. Ultimately, they end up believing they run worse than anyone else in the game because in their minds, they never get their fair share of good luck.

Here are a few other examples of confirmation biases:

You want to believe you’re the better player so you dismiss any instances where your opponent may have outplayed you, claiming they just got lucky. This is a big reason why so many players don’t give other regulars enough credit.

When quickly labeling a player as a fish, you discount future information that shows areas of strength in their game because it doesn’t confirm your first impression. This lowers your edge against them and can make it harder for you to see instances where you made mistakes.

You believe you have mastered a tactical concept, so you only focus on the instances that confirm this belief and ignore ones that challenge it. This could stop you from working on an area of your game that might really need it.

To begin solving your confirmation bias, you have to break down the reason(s) that it exists in the first place. Here are a few questions to get you thinking:

Why do you want to believe you’re a winning player?

Why do you want to believe you’re better than another regular? Why is it hard for you to admit that another player is better than you? Don’t you want to actually be better, rather than pretending to be?

Why do you want to believe a fish is terrible in every way? Why don’t you want to understand how to best exploit their true weaknesses?

Why do you want to rush to believe you’ve mastered a concept? Do you wish you could be a better player instantly, without putting in the work?

When players hold rigidly to beliefs of superiority without being open to information that proves they have weaknesses, they have an underlying confidence issue. Their confirmation bias is protecting them from realizing that they aren’t as good as they want to believe. The reality is that every poker player on the planet has weaknesses in their game. Only when you’re realistic about your game are you in the best position to succeed in the long term.

Being too attached. You like your hand—pocket aces—and don’t want to give it up. Actually, you liked your hand; now you hope it’s still good. Deep down you suspect they’ve been cracked, but can’t bring yourself to fold such a good starting hand. You also might get too attached to a tip you heard in a video or put too much emphasis on a physical tell or previous history. When you have a strong attachment to your hand, new tactics, or a piece of information, you’re essentially blocking out new or contradictory information from your working memory. If you were truly open to it, your decisions would adapt.

You can’t solve this problem just by forcing your decision making to adapt throughout the hand, although you may need to do this in the short term. Ultimately, you want your decision making to adapt automatically, otherwise you’re using up valuable space in your working memory. In order to truly eliminate this problem, you have to correct the underlying flaw causing your tendency to become attached. Find out the reason and break it down using the mental hand history. Common flaws include trying to win every hand, needing to prove that you’re right, and wanting to be instantly better. After you discover the reason, work really hard to recognize attachment in the moment so you can inject logic and stop it from happening. With enough repetition, you’ll eventually break the attachment and automatically be more adaptive in your decision making.

The “fuck its”. “Eh, fuck it…let’s gamble.” This is a common phrase said by players who are unable to make a decision and choose to gamble instead of taking the less risky route. This may happen to you when you’re in a tough spot in a big game. Perhaps facing an all-in call and the pressure of the situation has gotten to you. Overwhelmed by the moment and the number of thoughts rolling through your head, you can’t find an answer. Eventually, you just decide to roll the dice and make the call.

Having a routine that you can fall back on when you’re having trouble making a decision can help prevent you from giving up and having to gamble. Take a deep breath and use your strategic reminder. Methodically go through each step to remind yourself of what’s missing from your decision making, and then make the best decision possible. You may end up still choosing to gamble, but do so because that’s the best decision, not because you’ve given up trying to decide. Afterwards, win or lose, mark the hand for later review and do some work to find out what was missing and why you couldn’t arrive at the decision in the moment. The long-term consequence of the “fuck its” is that you fail to give yourself an opportunity to improve decision making in spots that are hard for you. It can also indicate a real gambling problem, or a mental game issue such as tilt, fear, or accumulated emotion. If you find that you’re having trouble solving this problem, look at these issues as potential obstacles.

The Dunning-Kruger effect⁴. This refers to the tendency of poor performers to overestimate their abilities, and conversely, for high performers to underestimate their abilities. On one side, players with very little skill become overconfident because they are unable to recognize their own incompetence. On the other side, players who are highly skilled falsely assume that others have the same amount of skill and as a result have low confidence. This concept is a perfect example of why confidence is not essential for long-term success in poker. Players with a ton of skill but little confidence will always be more successful than extremely confident players who possess hardly any skill.

The Dunning-Kruger effect leads to decision-making errors when highly skilled players overthink or second-guess decisions, and when unskilled players outlevel themselves. A skilled player who lacks confidence may doubt their decisions, but they usually have enough tactical knowledge to still make the right plays. On the other hand, weak players think they have the capability to crush souls, when really they’re only able to have their aces come up against kings. Confidence is important for success in poker, but you want it to be a true reflection of your skill level. Whether you’re an overconfident weak player or an underconfident strong player, it’s important to get an accurate picture of your game using the A- to C-game analysis. It may never be completely flawless, but maximizing your awareness of your strengths and weaknesses can help you to avoid misleading levels of confidence.

The flaw of hindsight. Players often lose a hand only to realize immediately afterwards why they lost. If they had considered that piece of the action, they would have been able to make the right play. This doesn’t sound so unreasonable, but becomes problematic when they think that realizing the mistake is sufficient enough to solve the issue. This is wishful thinking that doesn’t get to the real mistake: Why they didn’t think about it during the decision. That answer is far more interesting and a heck of a lot more helpful. Here are a few examples of why your decision-making process can break down:

A problem such as low energy, tilt, bloated brain, or loss of focus limits access to your full knowledge base and decision-making process.

Your mind is moving too fast to pick up all of the relevant details that are necessary to make the right decision.

Overthinking the factors in the hand causes you to lose track of the right line of thinking.

Only when you solve the root cause of why you made a particular mistake are you truly putting in the work to improve your overall decisionmaking process.

Note: This error is related to the learning error “Immediately knowing the mistake,” which is caused by a deficit in knowledge.

_________________________

¹ Syed, M. 2010. Bounce. mozart, federer, picasso, beckham, and the science of success. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

² Also commonly referred to as “short-term memory.”

³ Goldstein, E.B. 2010. Cognitive psychology: connecting mind, research and everyday experience – 3rd Ed. Independence, KY: Cengage Learning.

⁴ Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. 1999. Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence leads to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology. 77(6): 1121-1134.

5

FOCUS

FOCUS IS AN integral part of playing poker, as it is what allows a player to collect a range of data about a particular hand, opponent, or game dynamic. The stronger their focus, the more accurately and precisely that data can inform their decisions.

When poker players think of an ideal level of focus, they might conjure up the scene from Rounders where Mike McDermott innocently walks in on the Judge’s home game. He’s just there to drop off some papers to his professor, but gets drawn in to conversing with the guys around the poker table. Despite having walked in while the hand is in progress, Mike is able to quickly deduce that, “in this collection of great legal minds, there isn’t a single card player.” After a scan of the table, he manages to correctly read everyone’s exact hands:

“Okay. Well, you were looking for that third three, but you forgot that Professor Green folded it on Fourth Street, and now you’re representing that you have it. The D.A. made his two pair, but he knows they’re no good. Judge Kaplan was trying to squeeze out a diamond flush, but he came up short, and Mr. Eisen is futilely hoping that his queens are gonna stand up. So, like I said, the Dean’s bet is $20.”¹

It’s an inspiring, entertaining, and completely unrealistic portrayal of poker. Still, many poker players dream of how amazing it would be to intuitively know every detail of a hand. They assume the top players in the world have this level of focus, and believe it would allow them to dominate the game as well. However, they fail to recognize the connection between their level of focus and their ability to read their opponents. When they lose a hand, they don’t see how distractibility, boredom, or lack of focus prevented them from picking up information that could have led to a different outcome. In other words, they have a black-and-white perspective when it comes to a hand—either they have the right knowledge or they don’t. They underestimate the value of attaining a high level of focus and instead, attribute their losses to things out of their control.

Improving Focus

While you’re playing poker, you want to try and avoid expending too much energy on maintaining your focus and fighting off distractions. Ideally, being focused should come effortlessly. When you reach that point, mental space is freed up and you can dig deeper into the action.

Focus can be broken down into two parts: attention and concentration. People often use these terms synonymously with focus, but there is an important distinction. Attention is the direction of your focus determined by your goals, needs, motives, interests, priorities, and values. Concentration is the amount of focus you have, which is ultimately determined by your level of energy. If these subtle differences are unclear, think about the way in which people talk about focus. When someone says, “pay attention,” they’re telling you where to focus. When they say, “concentrate,” they’re telling you to increase your level of focus. This distinction is important because it illustrates the two ways of improving focus—give it better direction and increase the amount of it.

Improving focus employs a method you’ve become very familiar with: assessing your range. Answering the following questions will help you to analyze the varying levels of your focus while playing live and online, and when studying or working on your game.

What are the factors that lead to your ideal level of focus?

How long does that ideal level of focus last and what’s the first sign that you’ve lost it?

What causes you to lose focus?

How frequently do you lose focus during a session?

How long does it take for you to notice that you’ve lost focus, and once you do, how long does it take to get refocused?

When is your focus typically at its worst?

When distracted by thoughts, what are you typically thinking about?

Do you tend to have poorer focus at the beginning, middle, or end of a session?

How well do you handle being card dead?

How do sleep, diet, and exercise affect the quality of your focus?

Some of these questions measure focus quantitatively, such as length of time spent distracted and frequency of distractions. Tracking these statistics can provide a more precise impression of the quality of your focus, including any problems. Plus, it can help you to set goals and track progress. For example, if you find that you’re averaging ten distractions in a three-hour session, you can set a goal to reduce it to seven. Sure, you’d prefer to not have any distractions, but expecting that to happen right away is unrealistic. In addition, you can aim to increase the speed with which you recognize a distraction and the amount of time it takes you to get refocused. Keeping track of these real-time statistics can be a distraction in itself, so find a way to take them quickly and without diverting any focus from your game.

Once you have a strong idea of the range that exists, you can inject logic, goals, or inspiration to improve your focus at the table or while studying. Since goals contribute to the direction of your focus, reminding yourself of what they are can accelerate the process of getting refocused. If you are lacking concentration, inject inspiration from a song, movie quote, or picture of your dream house to give you an immediate boost of energy. Just remember that this strategy only provides temporary progress. In order to make your improvements permanent, you must train the correction to your focus problem and/or resolve any mental game problems connected to it.

Here are some other general ways to improve focus:

Change gears. In poker, “shifting gears” describes a player’s ability to change how they’re playing against a specific opponent. The same strategy can be used to improve your level of focus, especially when playing live. Think of focus as similar to shifting gears in a car. When you’re involved in a hand, consider your focus to be in 5th gear. When you’re not in a hand, you can shift into 3rd gear to save energy since you don’t need to be picking up on every single detail at the table. As long as you remain in the flow of the action, unconscious data is constantly accumulating and can be used to inform your decisions the next time you’re involved in a hand.

Listen to music. When attempting to optimize their focus, players often wonder whether or not they should listen to music while playing. The answer is, it depends. There are no hard rules around listening to music. A player might benefit from it when they’re slightly unfocused, but that same player might find it distracting while playing their A-game or when they’re feeling tired. The best thing to do is experiment to find out if and when music can be beneficial, and if it is, what type of music works best for you.

Meditate. Many players are skeptical about meditation, but recent research has shown that it can increase a person’s ability to discern fine detail and allow them to sustain focus for longer periods of time.²

Minimize distractions. Before you start to play, there are a number of easy ways to improve your focus, or at least prevent major focus issues. They are predominantly environmental: closing down Skype and web browsers, putting your phone on silent, and getting food before you play. Often the biggest focus killers are the easiest ones to preempt and manage before playing a hand.

Exercise. Many poker players have quite a sedentary lifestyle. Recent research has shown low-intensity exercise can increase energy levels in sedentary young adults by up to 20%. If you’re lacking enough energy to sustain long periods of focus, consider adding exercise to your regular routine.³

Increase mental endurance. Mental endurance is trained the same way as physical endurance—by pushing yourself. When you fight to maintain focus at times you would typically lose it, you increase mental endurance. This is similar to training your body to run faster or farther. As you do this consistently, your mind is able to sustain higher levels of focus for longer periods of time. This topic is covered in more detail in Chapter 8.

Set and adjust goals. The most focused poker players tend to be the ones with clear and precise goals. One of the simplest ways to improve focus, without having to constantly be thinking about it, is to set better goals or fix conflicting goals. This will get your attention pointed in the right direction and increase your level of concentration. This topic is covered in more detail in Chapter 6.

Distractibility

There is a shocking level of distractibility among both online and live players. With the Internet constantly at their fingertips, online players routinely engage in social media, watch movies, and randomly surf the web while multi-tabling. Live players are just as bad. They tweet, text, watch sports on TV, listen to music, and even play online poker while playing live. This multitasking trend isn’t just a problem in poker. Every single day we are confronted with a constant stream of media, email, text messages, and phone calls that assault our ability to focus. Research is helping people wake up to how harmful this can be by proving the damaging effects of distractibility. One study found that automobile drivers distracted by text messages and phone calls showed greater impairment than drunk drivers.⁴ What’s more troubling is that people often don’t believe such distractions have any effect on them.

Many poker players have yet to realize just how damaging constant divided attention is to their game. Here’s a quick way to show you what happens when the mind attempts to do two things simultaneously. While reading the next several lines, focus on the sensation of your legs against your chair or the feeling of your feet on the ground. Force yourself to feel that sensation and also be paying close attention to what you’re reading. See if you can notice the shift that your mind makes between reading and sensing your legs. Do you notice how each time your attention switches, you lose information from the other point of focus? Your eyes may be continuing to scan the page, but you’re no longer picking up every word and you may even have to reread it. Every time you try to focus only on reading, you lose awareness of the sensation in your legs. Now, imagine this happening at the poker table. Every time you start to focus on something outside of poker, you lose information about the game and start picking it up from whatever is dividing your attention. By focusing on Facebook, a text message, or a movie, you’re gathering data that is completely irrelevant to your poker decisions, and you’re also failing to pick up relevant poker data. This means your working memory is saturated with irrelevant data and lacking poker data. As a result, your decisions are worse, and you are prevented from gathering knowledge and data that could be utilized in future hands.

Now that you understand the problems associated with distraction, you can begin taking the necessary actions to limit their frequency and intensity. Within your mental game journal, take the following steps:

1.   List all of the distractions that you typically face when playing live or online. Here are some of the most common:

Previous mistakes that you can’t stop thinking about

The Internet, phone calls, and social media

Negative thoughts

The cashier or your stack size

Personal issues outside of poker

Thoughts of the past and future

2.   Rank the intensity of your distractions: Are they small, nagging feelings or do they feel overwhelming?

3.   Determine when they tend to arise: Are they more present at the beginning, middle, or end of a session?

4.   Identify the triggers: Are they more likely to surface after winning several hands, after your opponent plays in a way that confuses you, when you become tired, or when you’re bored?

5.   Track their frequency: Are they constant, intermittent, or pretty rare?

6.   Come up with solutions: Use the mental hand history to resolve the conflicting goals or interests that are at the root of the distractions.

In the short term, you can use injecting logic, goals, or inspiration to suppress these distractions. Keep in mind that blocking out a distraction in this way requires mental energy. If you think of focus like a pie chart, 60% of your focus might be on poker, while 40% is aimed at Twitter. By blocking out the distraction, you can change this ratio to 75% on poker, 10% on Twitter, and 15% on injecting logic, goals, or inspiration. However, even if this technique is successful and you’re able to minimize the distraction and refocus, the urge to engage in the distraction will often continue. It may build until the urge is so strong that you just have to give in to it. This is why a solution like injecting logic is only short-term: It doesn’t truly address the root of the problem. To effectively eliminate it and minimize distractions over the long term, you’ll need to address whatever is feeding them.

Keep in mind that distractions expose your hidden motives. For example, when you’re checking Facebook and playing poker, you are genuinely interested in doing both things. To truly decrease the urge to be on Facebook when you should be focused only on playing poker, you need to uncover the reason why you have an incessant need to check it. Once you get to the root issue, you can address it appropriately and minimize its ability to become a distraction. So if you discover that Facebook alleviates some of the isolation you feel as an online player, take steps to integrate planned time for socializing into your daily routine. That way, you’ll diminish the urge to socialize when you really should be playing. It is possible, however, that small doses of connectivity while playing actually help to keep your energy and motivation levels high. You can then make the conscious decision to sacrifice a little focus in order to maintain a high level of play.

Boredom

Boredom typically sets in when you stop feeling challenged and there is nothing new or interesting to learn. Like a computer that hasn’t been used recently, your mind is left idling just waiting to be activated. Players often feel bored when they’re card dead, waiting for action online, playing less tables than usual, or playing against competition that they could beat with just their C-game. As the flow channel showed back in Chapter 2, boredom is the result of a perceived lack of challenge. When just showing up is enough to have an edge, it’s easy to slip into your B- or C-game.

It makes sense that poker could start to feel like a monotonous grind—you’re dealt the same hands all the time. By now, you’ve been dealt AK suited enough to consider it standard and potentially boring. However, the players who remain passionate and motivated about seeing the nuances and unique details of how to play each hand are never bored. They see physical tells, timing tells, metagame, combinatorics, balancing ranges, G-bucks, prior action, table image, and many other small details that most players don’t consider. The dynamics in poker are varied and constantly changing, so while the same hand can be dealt over and over, each hand will play out in a unique way. There are always new areas in which to develop an edge; the game is always evolving and there is always more to learn.

An easy way to stave off boredom is to make sure there’s always something you’re interested in learning. Are there parts of the game that you’ve wanted to work on, but you just keep putting it off? Focusing on these areas could boost your interest. What are some ways you can stay challenged against weak opponents? Create a game within the game, such as seeing how quickly and accurately you can assess their game. What information would be useful to gather while you’re card dead? Assume you’re going to find something about another player that will help you exploit them in future hands and your challenge is to find it. If you have trouble finding enough interesting things to learn or focus on, revising your goals may do the trick.

BARRY’S TAKE

Online Arrogance

The typical online player is technically superior to the typical live player. The sheer number of hands that can be played on the Internet allows online players to accumulate a lifetime of experience in just a year. However, online players tend to underestimate the skills of their live counterparts, as well as greatly overestimate how much their online skills translate to live poker. Though many elite online players have a solid live game, I have still seen plenty of highly successful online players who look comparatively weak when they play live. They have a hard time adapting to the table and they sometimes miss a lot of the action.

Online players sometimes treat a live game as though they’re playing one table online. They have this huge surplus of focus, so to them it makes no sense why they can’t tweet, play games on their iPad, read a book, or even play poker on a mobile app. They don’t realize how much of the action they miss because they are distracted, nor do they realize that there are some nuances of the live game that they are missing completely. (They are Unconsciously Incompetent about some of the finer details of live play.) The obvious detail would be physical tells, but it goes much deeper than that. For example, when playing live, you can tell a player’s level of experience by how they handle their chips, get an insight into their psyche by listening to their conversations, and even see how much of the action they miss when distracted by their smart phones. Even if your online C-game is good enough to beat the live game, don’t forget that there may be other good online players at your table. If for no other reason, gaining an edge on these players might be enough to justify digging deep and working hard to avoid boredom.

Burnout

Burnout is a result of intense levels of focus that have been sustained for long periods of time. It is equivalent to what happens to an athlete when they over-train—their strength, speed, and stamina suffer. When a poker player burns out, they experience these symptoms:

Trouble reaching the zone

Difficulty sustaining their standard level of focus

Decreased interest in poker

Trouble getting out of bed and constantly feeling tired

Increased levels of distractibility and tilt, and a lack of motivation

The problem is that many players don’t know how to distinguish burnout from other focus or mental game issues, such as laziness. Mental exhaustion can be tough to pinpoint for players with a strong work ethic. They don’t want to make excuses, especially when they don’t know exactly why they’re having so much trouble focusing. These questions will help you to begin recognizing when you’re burned out:

What is your mind like when it’s less sharp than usual? Is it slower? Do important thoughts get lost while making a decision? Do obvious pieces of information get overlooked? When players are burned out, their mind is sluggish and less receptive to details of the action.

Are you having trouble falling asleep? Extreme fatigue can make it hard for the mind to digest all the data that accumulated from playing. So, even though you feel exhausted and are desperate for sleep, your mind can’t stop working.

Have you recently been working harder than normal? Often players with a strong work ethic have a hard time recognizing when their workload increases. The chances that you’re burned out are higher if you recently have been playing more, studying harder, or avoiding a day off.

The best time to do research on your pattern of burnout is after each occurrence. Sometimes it’s not until you’re back playing well again that hindsight enables you to clearly see the signs that you had been burned out. Take good notes, so the next time around, you’re prepared to spot them early on. There will certainly be times when burnout is impossible to avoid, such as going for Supernova Elite and competing in a rake race or prop bet. Being aware of how this issue affects you is critical—you don’t want to expect too much of yourself. If you’re burned out and still have to play, lower your expectations and work hard to at least play your B-game. When it’s time to recover from burnout, keep in mind that the more severe it is, the longer it will take for you to get back to peak mental functioning. So, make sure to give yourself enough time and space to rest.

CLIENT’S STORY

Roy “GodlikeRoy” Bhasin

Mid- and Highstakes PLO
POKERSTARS TEAM ONLINE

“Towards the end of last year, I was forced to play a ton in order to get Supernova Elite. I had made Supernova Elite before, but this time I had struggled to stay ahead of pace throughout the year. I knew mental and physical energy were important, but I couldn’t clearly see when I was burning out. There were times when I kind of knew I was, but I just thought it was my style to go through phases where I would play a ton of poker and then not play at all. I wanted to play, but would look for excuses not to. Poker felt like a chore, and I was constantly looking for something else to do. Eventually, my mind would reset and I’d be fired up to play a ton, only to repeat the cycle again later on.

I was never really opposed to a schedule previously, but I also never sat down and planned my day; I just played a lot. With no schedule, I felt like I always had to be playing. I would play seven days a week, several months in a row—which is where the burnout came from. Recognizing that I was in fact burned out, as opposed to just saying that I couldn’t play anymore, really helped me to come up with a much healthier plan. Now I take breaks on a regular basis—I play six days, then take one off, with more breaks within each day. After paying closer attention to my focus, I also found that my play deteriorates a little around 90 minutes into a session. Now, I take a short break every 90 minutes and come back refreshed.

One thing that proved to be really helpful was seeing the difference between being burned out and feeling drained from a downswing. The difference for me was clear once I looked at it more closely: When poker feels like a chore, I’m burned out. I never feel that way when I’m just running bad. When I am running bad, I might make excuses not to play and look for other things to do, but I always remain super motivated to work on my game and work through it. So now, as soon as I start to feel like poker has become a chore, I know it’s time to take a break. Knowing this distinction has made it really easy to make decisions about when to grind away and when to take a break.

I wasn’t able to get to Supernova Elite in the end. I just got too far behind and made an overall life EV decision to stop trying for it a few weeks before the end of the year. But, this new approach has really helped my overall grinding ability. Before, in my downtime I wanted nothing to do with poker. Now, with proper breaks, I am more excited about playing and learning, and this has reignited my passion for the game. I didn’t realize just how much the excessive volume was stifling my growth as a player. With the new schedule, the amount of volume is the same as before, but now I’m playing with a clearer head, feeling excited to play, and consistently working on my game. My previous approach to getting Supernova Elite was like cramming for a test. Had I not been in this cycle of cramming and burning out, I probably would have gotten it again. Still, I’m happy with my decision and with my newfound schedule and approach to grinding.”

Here are a few ideas from TMGP on how to avoid burning out:

During times when you’re intensely motivated, ease off the throttle just a bit. When emotion—even motivation—is too high, it can cause you to play sub-optimally and slow down the learning process.

Take at least one day off per week and five days off per month. On your days off, think about and do other things besides poker.

Have a hobby other than poker that you enjoy doing and don’t take too seriously.

For online players, make sure to take some time away from all electronics each day.

Evaluate your game at the end of each day that you play. This helps you to mentally put poker down and allows your mind to relax.

_________________________

¹ Cohen, B. (Producer), & Dahl, J. (Director). (1998). Rounders. [Motion Picture]. United States: Miramax Films. Spanky Pictures.

² Maclean, K.A., et al. 2010. Intensive meditation training improves perceptual discrimination and sustained attention. Psychological Science. 21(6): 829-839.

³ Puetz, T.W., Flowers, S.S., & O’Connor, P.J. 2008. A randomized controlled trail of the effects of aerobic exercise training on feelings of energy and fatigue in sedentary young adults with persistent fatigue. Psychotherapy and Psychomatics. 77: 167-174.

⁴ Strayer, D.L., Drews, F.A., & Crouch, D.J. 2003. Fatal distraction? A comparison of the cell-phone driver and the drunk drive. In D.V. McGehee, J.D. Lee, & M. Rizzo (Eds.) Driving Assessment 2003: International Symposium on Human Factors in Driver Assessment, Training, and Vehicle Design. (pp. 25-30). Public Policy Center, University of Iowa.

6

GOALS

GOALS PROVIDE A path and a destination for all that you do at and away from the table. The stronger your goals, the more intense your energy will be toward optimizing each aspect of your game. When goals are met, new goals can be made. This keeps the game fresh, your energy level and motivation high, and allows you to celebrate your successes, even when you’re not the number-one poker player in the world.

Here are some other benefits of setting goals:

Goals give you a benchmark to evaluate your performance and they also provide a framework for feedback. This is especially important while navigating through the short term in poker. Sometimes variance makes it hard to know whether you’re moving forwards or backwards. The road to poker success is not clearly defined, but goals can give you a way of knowing how you are doing. When you have no way of evaluating yourself, you’re susceptible to the chaos that is variance.

Goals make your intentions conscious so you can ensure that you are always advancing towards them with the choices that you make. They narrow down your options and prevent you from feeling pulled in several different directions.

Many poker players, even professionals, make simple mistakes when it comes to setting and achieving their goals. Players aren’t familiar with the technique behind setting goals and don’t fully grasp the importance of them, and that ultimately limits their success. Many players set goals that are too numerous, far out of reach, and broad. They decide what they want to achieve only when they’re feeling optimistic about their game, and don’t consider the potential roadblocks that might stand in their way. They’re overconfident about their potential and give up too easily. Even though having goals seems like a pretty simple concept, these errors can lead to chaos, excess emotion, and failure.

The subject of goals can fill an entire book. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide an all-encompassing examination of goals and the process of achieving them. Instead, it outlines a straightforward process and a collection of practical advice that’s helped many poker players attain success.

Results and Process Goals

There is a common misconception among players that setting results-oriented goals is not a good idea. Since variance is such a big part of the game, they believe that it’s a mistake to set goals for things they can’t completely predict or control, such as winning a specific amount of money or tournament. However, it’s illogical to not set goals around the amount of money you make or titles you win, if that is how you define your success. Players who think it’s bad to set results-oriented goals are really attempting—whether consciously or not—to avoid failure.

Since results and process goals work together, players are ideally setting them both. Results goals determine the end point, while process goals establish how you’ll get there. When you determine how much money you want to make, how many titles you want to win, or the stakes you want to play, you’re setting a clear direction for your game. The next step is to define the process goals that are necessary to get you there, such as specific tactical improvements, reduction of tilt, and improved game selection. These process goals can become even more specific and broken down as you determine how to achieve each one. For example, to reduce tilt, you could set goals to work daily on your tilt profile, focus on spotting signs of tilt when you play, and inject logic at the first sign of tilt. Ultimately, the energy you put into achieving your process goals is fueled by your strong desire to reach your results goals. And the stronger your desire to achieve your results goals, the harder you’ll work on your process goals.

Potential

Many poker players believe they have great potential. They envision themselves winning major titles, playing in Bobby’s room, or supporting their families through poker. However, since players never know exactly what they will achieve, potential is really just a prediction based on personal opinion. Too often, players’ flawed opinions of their game throw off their perception and general understanding of their potential. This influences the goals they set and their ability to actually fulfill their potential. Here are the most common flaws:

Over- or underestimating ability.

Viewing potential as static or unchanging.

Living in the dream of potential.

Over- or underestimating ability. Potential is based on insight into your own capability, which you can over- or underestimate. For example, poker players often set goals and envision their potential when they are running well. This of course leads to disappointment when they realize that winning at 9BB/100 cannot be sustained. When the inevitable bad run of cards hits, it can crush their unrealistic visions. This often causes players to lose confidence and motivation, doubt their potential, and abandon their goals. Accurately assessing your current range of ability and your previous levels of success will ensure that your goals are a realistic reflection of your skill level.

Viewing potential as static or unchanging. Your potential as a player is not fixed—it evolves with your game. As you become a more skilled and advanced player, your potential grows. Potential also rises when you eliminate long-standing mental game issues. Eliminating mental game issues and C-game mistakes allows your inchworm to move forward and enables you to see farther down the road. Realizing that your potential has grown can be a powerful motivator. Interestingly, many players also become motivated when they realize they’re not as mentally or tactically strong as they previously thought. Realizing this gives them an explanation for why they had been unable to reach their potential in the past. It can be frustrating to think you have enough skill to reach a certain potential, yet you continually fail. This wake-up call can refuel a player’s motivation to work toward fulfilling their potential once again.

Living in the dream of potential. Occasionally players want to hold on to the belief that they’ve already met their potential because they’re unwilling to work for it and are afraid of failing. They don’t realize that this belief is actually just a dream that they are content to live in. Players with stable confidence—both personally and in poker—don’t have this issue. If you do have this problem, work to improve your confidence—it will spark your motivation to stop living in the dream and start seeking fulfillment through real accomplishments.

Expectations

The difference between an expectation and a goal is significant. A goal is a target that originates from your perceived potential, but your current capabilities have not yet allowed you to accomplish it. On the other hand, an expectation is a target that you believe will be reached. This implies that you either have the skills to get there already, or you are certain that you can acquire them along the way. The difference between these two concepts may seem subtle, but there is an important point to take away from making this distinction. When you have an expectation that you’ll reach a particular target, you set yourself up to be unprepared for the mistakes, setbacks, and failures that will often stand in your way. You’re expecting to reach your target, so there’s no reason to prepare for them. When you set a goal, you know there is work to be done, and you are expecting and prepared for all of the challenges you might face to get there.

Perhaps the most important difference between an expectation and a goal is how you evaluate the outcome. When you fall short of a goal, you might get upset, but you don’t dwell on it. Instead, you can look objectively at the results: How or why did you fail? What did you not prepare for? Could this have been avoided? In what areas have you succeeded and made progress? What have you learned? What do you need to do next?

The answers to those questions immediately make you better not only at achieving your goals, but at setting goals in the future. When it comes to expectations, your evaluation tends to be black and white. If you fall short, you failed; if you succeed, it doesn’t make sense to celebrate because you just did what was expected. Only when you exceed your expectations do you experience any amount of satisfaction, but it’s still not proportionally as bad as you feel when you fail. It is common for poker players to achieve major milestones, such as winning their first tournament, and shortly afterwards think nothing of it. This failure to give themselves any credit creates a major deficit in their sense of accomplishment, and ultimately wastes an opportunity for them to increase their confidence. Plus, since they’re not getting any positive reinforcement for all of their hard work, they might even grow disillusioned with the game. Expectations have a way of sucking the life out of poker. Setting goals makes recognizing progress an inherent part of the process, and can elicit feelings of self-satisfaction, pride, and renewed passion for the game. And in a sort of cyclical fashion, these feelings can then motivate you to accomplish new and even higher-reaching goals.

If you find yourself not being able to decipher whether something you want is a goal or an expectation, look for the word “should.” If you say, “This shouldn’t bother me” you actually mean, “I expected it not to bother me, but really it does.” If instead you decided to set a goal to not let it bother you, you could then set process-oriented goals to understand, analyze, and correct the reasons why it bothers you. Undoubtedly, the latter scenario is much more productive.

To be clear, expectations are not inherently bad. High expectations have driven many players to great levels of success. However, goals can produce the same outcomes without the negative implications that sometimes accompany expectations.

Conflicting Goals

Some players have hidden goals that they unconsciously carry around with them. Unbeknownst to them, these goals can conflict with and stifle their true ambitions. For example, a player’s goals for poker this year might be to make $50,000, learn to beat $2/$4 online, and improve post-flop play. However, they may also have goals to look good, avoid embarrassment, and have a lot of fun away from the tables. If looking good is important to you, it could cause you to make mistakes post flop because you’re trying too hard to outplay someone. Or, you might not work with a coach to avoid the embarrassment of asking for help. If it’s important to you to have fun, what do you do when friends pester you to go out partying with them when you know that to make $50,000 you have to play most Friday nights? These goals are conflicting and can be roadblocks to your success.

Identifying and resolving conflicting goals helps to redirect your focus and motivation on the goals that are most important to you. Conflicting goals can be hard to spot at first, but they tend to emerge when you’re stressed, tilted, overconfident, or when results are poor. To find them, keep track of all the actions, thoughts, or emotions that go against your primary goals, and try to uncover the motivation behind each of them. Here are some examples of conflicting goals and their potential motivations:

Your stress may be a result of your impatience with the process of achieving your goals. The conflicting goal is that you want success immediately.

Your tilt may be caused by a losing session. The conflicting goal is that you want to show monetary progress every day—you get angry because losing feels like a step backwards.

When your results are poor on a particular day, you may decide to not play at all and instead do something more enjoyable. The conflicting goal here is that you always want to be enjoying your job.

Once you’ve identified the goals that conflict with each other, determine which one is more of a priority to you, and direct all of your efforts there. For example, if partying on a Friday night is truly the priority, then you might want to rethink your goal of making $50,000. The benefit of this is that you will not be disappointed and confused when you don’t reach your goal, since you made a conscious and informed decision. On the other hand, if you decide that making $50,000 is the priority, you’ll be able to remind yourself that saying “no” to your friends is an integral part of achieving your true goal. By going through this process with each of your conflicting goals, you will prevent yourself from directing energy and effort toward a goal that doesn’t reflect your true ambitions. Thus, you maximize your ability to reach the goals that truly matter.

The Starting Line

The players who are most successful at achieving their goals are the ones who understand their “true” starting point. At this stage of your poker career, it’s impossible to start from scratch. You’re always building on the goals you’ve achieved and what you learned in the process of reaching them. When setting new goals, players are often only focused on where they’re headed and don’t incorporate the lessons from their past experiences to help them get there. Below are a few questions to help you understand your starting point. It may be wise to revisit these questions a few times so that a moment of inspiration or negativity doesn’t bias your answers.

What’s your track record in accomplishing your goals?

How skilled are you at setting goals that are attainable?

What are your current strengths and weaknesses?

In the past, have you tended to over- or underestimate your strengths and weaknesses?

What are the things you have been most passionate about in poker? Do they still inspire you?

Do you tend to over- or underestimate the time it will take to achieve your goals?

How accurate have you been in determining your potential?

What has previously caused you to fail?

What conflicting goals have caused problems for you in the past?

Ideally, your starting point includes all of your previous accomplishments and failures. As discussed previously, dissatisfaction can drive players to want to start a new goal “fresh” and do things like delete their Hold’em Manager database to mask previous failure. You cannot wish away previous failures. If you did, you’d be ignoring all that you could possibly learn from those failures and wasting their potential to facilitate future success. If you truly could start from scratch, you would just have to fail again in order to relearn everything that was deleted from your memory.

One of the great things about poker is the sheer variety of possible achievements. You could aim to become a great player, make a lot of money, win bracelets or major tournament titles, and you can do so in a multitude of games, stakes, and formats. The key is to narrow it down to a few things you really want—with so many options available, it’s easy to be pulled in too many directions to actually accomplish anything.

Why You Want It

In the process of setting goals, it’s important not just to know what you want to achieve, but why you want to achieve it. This can help you to:

Determine the benefits of success and the consequences of failure.

Clarify and make your goals stronger. (You may realize that the benefits of a particular goal are not as strong as you originally thought, and you need to reconsider and maybe even revise it.)

Avoid distractions, laziness, and quitting when you encounter a difficult situation.

The most common reason why players want to achieve their goals in poker is, of course, money. But, even when money is the number-one goal, there is always something beyond cash to gain from being successful in poker: being your own boss, proving your parents wrong, feeling like a big winner, or just having a really cool job. Understanding these often-unconscious motives helps you to recognize what else is at stake, and can also provide direction for your goals. If you realize that the reason you play poker is because you are ultra-competitive, set goals and a plan that correspond to that reason, such as regularly taking shots against tough players. If the biggest reward you get from poker is having a cool job, set goals to play live events in interesting places. If poker gives you the opportunity to spend more time with your family, you might decide to play more tables online so you can play the same volume in less time. Aligning your goals with the reasons you want to achieve them will help you to get more out of the game, and may even increase your overall happiness and life EV.

BARRY’S TAKE

What Drives You?

In his bestselling book Drive¹, author Daniel Pink draws on a large body of research to highlight that our preconceptions about what motivates us is flawed. Money, of course, is a big motivator, but only to a small degree. Once someone is earning an amount of money that they can live comfortably on, the lure of more money shows diminishing returns. Beyond money, these are the three traits Pink identifies that really motivate people to achieve goals in their working lives:

Autonomy: A feeling of being in control of one’s work, to not be constrained by it or a boss.

Mastery: A sense of reaching the top of your craft, to be the best at what you do.

Purpose: The sense that your work means something, and that you have contributed to society in some way.

After reading Drive, I naturally thought about how well these three traits fit in with the life of a professional poker player. Autonomy makes perfect sense: The sense of freedom in poker and making your own hours is one of the biggest appeals of the game. Mastery also fits: Even though there’s a popular belief that poker is all about finding the weakest games, the players that tend to do the best in the long term are the ones who maintain enthusiasm for improving and challenging themselves. Purpose is the difficult one. Poker is viewed as a selfish and unproductive job, not only by society, but often by the players themselves, because success comes at someone else’s expense. When you look at purpose in the context of motivation, it makes a lot of sense why some players get disillusioned with the game after a while. It doesn’t have to be this way, however. Poker can fulfill the personal goals you have for yourself, teach you skills that transfer to other aspects of life, and be something that you love to do. You may not be motivated to make $100,000 in a year without knowing how the money could help your family. You may not be driven to beat $3/$6, but devoting time to coaching other players keeps you motivated to improve your game. Think about what poker means to you and find a deeper sense of purpose. Phil Hellmuth isn’t always the first role model I would point out, but his dogged determination to win more bracelets than anyone else gives him a strong sense of purpose. For that reason, he’s worth emulating.

Planning for Obstacles

When you first set a goal, you’re often full of optimism and energy. Dreaming of what you can accomplish feels good, and you’re excited about the road ahead. The problem is that most players don’t consider the obstacles that might stand in the way of their dreams. They imagine the end result without thinking about the day-to-day work required to get there. Consequently, they’re unprepared when setbacks inevitably emerge, and so they overreact by becoming frustrated, anxious, or hopeless. This is a big reason why New Year’s resolutions fail. People imagine what they want, but they don’t develop long-lasting plans that incorporate all of the potential hardships they might face.

The solution to this problem is to anticipate setbacks and obstacles, and to appropriately plan for them. Do your due diligence ahead of time by imagining every possible setback, and then make a plan for how to overcome the ones that are the most likely. If you are trying to move up in stakes, make a plan for how you’ll deal with a downswing, tough regulars, or a big losing day. Not only will this help you to face the problems you’ve planned for, but you’ll also be training and practicing your problem-solving skills so that when unexpected problems arise, you are more skilled at reacting to them.

Here are two additional strategies that will help you break through any obstacle:

    1. Learn your goals. When problems arise—especially unforeseen ones—they often cause stress and negativity. That combination can disconnect you from your goals and your reasons for wanting to achieve them, which ultimately can lead you to feel depressed or unmotivated. This negativity then impedes your ability to overcome the problem and get back on track. To prevent this downward spiral, find ways to reinforce and learn your goals. Write them down and review them regularly, especially at times of heightened stress. The clearer and more solidified your goals are in your mind, the less likely it is that the problems you encounter will have a negative impact.

    2. Plan inspiration. Continuing to make progress during tough times is more challenging when you’re lacking sufficient energy. Players often intuitively go looking for sources of inspiration to give them a much-needed mental boost. However, this process is often random and wastes valuable time. Instead, when you’re setting goals, put together a collection of things that you find inspiring, for example a movie clip, song, picture, memento from a family member, or famous quote. When trouble strikes, you’ll be able to utilize them right away to give you the jolt of energy you need to keep fighting.

Examples of Well-Structured Goals

Here are three fictional examples of how to put the advice in this chapter into practice:

Bob is a 27-year-old professional poker player who plays $1/$2 no limit, takes occasional shots at $2/$4 and $5/$10, and plays an average of 40,000 hands a month online.

Results goal: Make $100,000 in a year, including rakeback.

Process goals:

Over the first three months, steadily increase from 40,000 to 80,000 hands per month.

Work with my coach on how to exploit the regulars at $2/$4 so I can establish myself at that level. Commit to one coaching session per week and study an additional four hours per week on my own.

Eliminate my biggest C-game error: playing too passively out of position. Use the mental hand history to work on both the tactical and mental game side of it.

Why do you want to make $100,000 in a year?

For poker to make sense as a profession, I need to make much more than I was making in my last full-time job. Plus, I feel like I need to prove to myself and to my family that choosing to play poker professionally was the right decision.

What obstacles might stand in your way?

How will you deal with them?

I could go on a big downswing when taking shots, which would be pretty damaging, especially at $5/$10. I’ll deal with this by setting a fixed number of buy-ins to use each time I take shots. At $5/$10, I’ll only play when the games are incredibly good. I could also get demotivated if I’m not making money for several months, or am not able to increase my hands played per month fast enough. I’ll deal with these issues by adding a fourth process goal: to consistently work hard on my mental game. This has never been a big problem, but I’ve never attempted something this big in poker before. Losing motivation could be the thing that destroys my goal, so I’ll take extra precaution from the start to make sure I minimize the potential for harm.

___________________________

Jane is a serious amateur online player who plays single-table tournaments online. On average, she plays two hours a night and four tables at a time. She knows that if she wants to make more money from SNGs, she needs to increase her volume.

Results goal: Increase volume from four tables to six tables while maintaining current ROI.

Process goals:

Start by adding one additional table in the first hour of play and steadily increase the length of time I can maintain it. Only add one more table when five tables feels as comfortable as playing on four does now.

Master bubble calling ranges to the level of Unconscious Competence so I can make crucial decisions quickly. Review hands in SNGWiz at the end of every session.

Develop a consistent warm-up routine that gets me motivated to play at a high level and allows me to build mental endurance.

Why is increasing volume so important?

I enjoy challenging myself and love the feeling of working hard and seeing the reward. Having more money is never a bad thing either.

What obstacles might stand in your way?

How will you deal with them?

Time and energy are my biggest obstacles. Having a full-time job not only takes up a big part of my day, it can also be mentally exhausting. I will deal with this by shortening my sessions on days when I’m really tired. Often, just the thought of having to play for two hours makes me not want to play at all. But, I can always play for just one hour. That way, I can still make progress and not lose my desire to play. I could also lose my edge in the game when adding an additional table. I will deal with this by using my A- to C-game analysis to evaluate my play after each session and to make sure I’m avoiding big mistakes.

___________________________

Tim just graduated from college and wants to spend a year traveling and playing professionally. He’s a profitable player, but tilt can be a big problem that really affects him on and off the table.

Results goal: Significantly reduce tilt within two months. Eliminate it within six months.

Process goals:

Initially, spend at least two hours per week attempting to understand the triggers, signs, and cause(s) of my tilt. Create a logic statement to deal with it while playing.

Regularly evaluate my anger and write about it in my journal. Do a mental hand history when needed, or review existing ones.

Identify the tactical mistakes I typically make while on tilt and create a strategic reminder to make sure that I don’t make these mistakes while playing.

Create a warm-up routine that prepares me to deal with tilt every time I play.

Stay vigilant!

Why is reducing tilt so important?

Normally, to deal with tilt I just wouldn’t play for a few weeks and everything would work itself out. But now, having to pay for traveling doesn’t give me the option to just not play. Plus, tilting and losing a bunch of money can put me in a really bad mood. I want to have an amazing year, and I not only want to enjoy traveling, I don’t want to avoid doing things because I’m titling money away at the poker table.

What obstacles might stand in your way? How will you deal with them?

A bad run of cards early in the trip could really put a lot of pressure on me and that would only make my tilt worse. I’m going to deal with this by waiting an extra month to leave so I can save up some more money.

Tips for Setting and Achieving Goals

“Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” —Mike Tyson, former heavyweight boxing champion

Your goals don’t have to be perfect from the start. If you’re still in the process of learning how to set goals, what’s required to accomplish goals, and how to evaluate progress, it would make sense to feel overwhelmed. The following tips can help make this process more manageable:

Define the end. A goal needs a clearly defined end point—otherwise, how will you know when you have reached it? It’s easy to determine the end points of results goals, such as “win X amount of money,” but how you do you know when you’ve “eliminated tilt” or “developed a good routine”? For process or quality goals such as these, you need to clearly define the end point at the same time that you set the goal. For example, you might determine that tilt will be eliminated when you have either three months of full-time play and/or have played through at least two severe downswings without making any big mistakes caused by anger. You’ll know you’re developing a good routine in poker when you’re consistently playing at a high level and don’t have to force yourself to do your routine before every session. Defining the end point also lets you know when you can pull back on your efforts a bit and feel satisfied by your hard-earned results.

Track progress. When you define a goal in great detail, you make your progress much easier to evaluate. If you have a process-oriented goal, such as “play with more focus,” create a written description of exactly what that means to you. You can then review your focus after each session to see if you made any progress. If you find you have a few common distractions that disrupt your focus, track their frequency in each session.

Set two targets. Since it’s hard to know exactly what you’re capable of achieving, set both a low target and a high target. For example, if you’re setting an hourly goal for the month, you could have a minimum target of 100 hours and a high target of 140. Make the minimum target something you feel confident you can achieve, and the high target something that really pushes you. That way, if you’re ahead of pace, you already have another target to aim for. If you’re behind, you still have another target within reach, which can dissuade you from giving up completely.

Execute. Achieving goals is similar to playing quality poker: You have to make a lot of correct decisions. From start to finish, you are faced with hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions that either lead you towards or away from your end goal. Even though you can’t be perfect in your execution, you must work hard to minimize and efficiently learn from your mistakes. If you’re finding it too hard to consistently make a lot of good decisions, your goal might be too far out of reach or your preparation might not be sufficient. Analyze the reason(s) that you’re struggling to execute and make the necessary adjustments.

Set a time frame. Setting a reasonable time frame for your goals can create a sense of urgency and priority, without adding stress. If your goal is to “beat $2/$4,” but you don’t set a deadline, you’re essentially allowing yourself forever to accomplish it. A timeline adds necessary structure to your goals and helps you to avoid procrastinating and wasting time. However, you don’t want to put excess pressure on yourself or feel overly rushed, especially because of variance. Make a good, reasonable estimate and hold yourself accountable for doing the work required to get there. Just remember, the more challenging and long-term the goal, the harder it is to predict exactly how long it will take. The time period you set when establishing the goal is not set in stone. Make sure to evaluate your progress regularly, so you can make adjustments without getting too far off track.

Set personal goals. Personal goals, such as buying a house, being more confident, or taking vacations, deepen your connection to poker and allow you to see how it fits into your life. When you can connect with poker on that personal level, it will intensify your focus and motivate you to be successful.

Find the right number. If you are struggling to achieve your goals, you may be trying to accomplish too much at once. The mind has a limited mental capacity, and the number of goals you can target at one time is limited as well. So, how many goals is the right number? That answer depends on their size and complexity. The smaller or easier the goal, the more of them you can handle. So, big goals, such as dominating $5/$10 in PLO, may need to be taken on one at a time. The ideal number depends on your own individual capacity. Setting a lot of goals isn’t necessarily a problem, just as long as you realize that progress is likely to be slower. The good thing is that you can always dial up the number if you’re not being pushed enough, or dial back the number if you’re being pushed too much.

Use constructive language. Avoid using negative language, such as “don’t tilt” and “stop making obvious mistakes.” Knowing what you don’t want to do is not the same as knowing what you want to do. Furthermore, stating what you don’t want doesn’t provide an accurate and clear end point. In these examples, you can alter the wording so instead they read, “Learn to control tilt, and eventually eliminate it,” and “Learn why I continue to make terrible mistakes.” These might seem like they say similar things, but the revised wording is more constructive and identifies a clear and concise objective.

Make accurate comparisons. Looking at other players’ accomplishments can sometimes be useful in determining your own goals. However, you should avoid doing this unless you have enough knowledge to make an accurate comparison. Too often, players set goals that they think will be easy for them to achieve because a friend or another poker player was successful in achieving them. What’s easy for them isn’t always as easy for you, and vice versa. Comparisons are best made when you look beyond the results to understand their specific process and what skills were used to get there. Ask them. People often like talking about their successes—you might be surprised by what they’re willing to share. If you don’t get answers from them, try to avoid making the comparison at all.

Finish. When you work so hard at accomplishing a goal, such as winning a major tournament or establishing yourself at a new limit, it’s easy to get ahead of yourself as you near the end. Thoughts of what it would mean to win when you’re chip leader deep in a tournament can be distracting enough that they cause you to lose. Become comfortable too soon at a new limit, and you’ll stop making all the moves that made you profitable up until that point. Sprinters run through the finish line, they don’t stop right at it. So don’t stop working until you have completely seen your goals through to the end.

_________________________

¹ Pink, D. 2009. Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

7

SELF-DISCIPLINE

AT THIS POINT in the book, you’ve been presented with a wealth of strategies and practices that can enable you to optimize both your mental and tactical poker game. Now, how do you implement them? How do they go from words on a page to skills that are practiced, learned, and impactful? Obviously there are a number of things that need to happen, but without some level of self-discipline, it will be very hard to actually accomplish any of them. Many players love the autonomy that poker grants them—but that comes at a cost and with greater responsibility. Nobody else can be held accountable for the quality of your game. Nobody else is going to set your goals, deadlines, and schedule—it is all on you. Being self-disciplined is of the utmost importance in poker, as it is what drives you to be consistent and effective in the work you put into your game. It gives you the greatest chance to fully leverage all the resources out there—including this book—to reach your potential. And as a poker player, you know that if you’re not putting in the work, you’re actively falling behind.

Discipline is something you are exposed to very early on in life. Your parents, teachers, and other authority figures most likely disciplined you in an effort to teach you right from wrong, form healthy habits, and create structure in your life. When you are young, the necessity for self-discipline is minimal, since the authority figures in your life have the role of imposing the rules and structure that you can’t yet handle. You’re handed deadlines for homework, curfews, and expectations for your future. And then at some point, you’re set free—you become fully responsible for yourself. You need to set goals and create the structure you’re so used to other people establishing for you. To do all of this effectively, you need self-discipline.

Self-discipline for a poker player can sometimes be problematic. Players are often drawn to poker because it is a job where they don’t have a boss, and they love the idea of not having to answer to anyone. The type of player who is attracted to the game for this reason is most likely also a player who doesn’t want to have to set and abide by rules or structure, or answer to anyone—including themselves. This can account for the problems that plague many poker players. Whether it’s breaking a stop-loss, not playing enough, or gambling on blackjack, there are numerous ways in which problems with discipline can manifest. It is undoubtedly a skill that nearly all players believe could be stronger.

As a player, a good way to measure your self-discipline is by looking at the goals you have achieved. No matter the size or complexity of your goals, if you are able to achieve them, you have a good level of discipline. This is important to establish, not just because it can shed light on your lack of discipline, but it can also prevent you from becoming excessively disciplined. If you’re not able to balance your workload with the freedom and fun that being a poker player affords you, many problems—resentment, burnout, exhaustion, among others—could arise.

Players tend to think of self-discipline as something they either have or they don’t. It is important to recognize that this is not the case. Instead, a range exists just like it does in any other skill. There are times when players display a high level of self-discipline, and there are times when they severely lack it. The problem is that players hold themselves to this mythically high standard that’s only attainable on the occasions when they’re highly motivated. On those occasions, they often wonder, “Why can’t I be like this all the time?” The answer is the same for why you can’t play your A-game all the time. When attempting to improve your self-discipline, rather than forcing yourself to fulfill unrealistic expectations, build off of your areas of strength. This way you can make steady progress and not experience major setbacks, disappointment, or extreme highs and lows.

When you start to feel that you are lacking discipline, it doesn’t mean you have completely lost control—the skills that are trained to the level of Unconscious Competence can’t just disappear. For example, even when you are really low on discipline, you still complete a warm-up before you play, never gamble on sports after you lose, and only add more tables online when you can handle them. It is the skills that are still in the process of being learned that disappear when you’re having problems. For this reason, it makes sense to start the process of becoming more disciplined by focusing on your self-discipline C-game. In order to do this, you first have to get a very detailed picture of what that C-game actually looks like. Start by answering these questions:

What are the specific mistakes that you make when your level of self-discipline is at its worst?

What’s the first sign that your level of self-discipline is becoming a problem?

When are you most likely to be lacking self-discipline?

Do problems occur more when you’re winning or losing?

Where do you struggle to maintain self-discipline—at the tables or away from the tables?

Do you tend to forget the important things you need to be doing? If so, do you make excuses for why they don’t get done?

What are the excuses you tell yourself or others?

What specifically improves your level of self-discipline?

As you’ve done with other assessments, regularly take notes about the ways in which you lack self-discipline until you have a solid picture of your self-discipline C-game. Focus especially on taking notes immediately after instances where you’re at your worst. Even though it’s hard to have the self-discipline to take notes, these are the best times to be gathering data. Try injecting goals or inspiration to spark some motivation. Remember, your goals in poker are on the line, and potentially your ability to continue playing. Develop a sense of urgency to create a clear picture of your worst level of self-discipline so you can prevent your game from being derailed.

Occasionally, just going through this assessment process is enough for players to make the necessary changes. Most often, though, they’ll need to dig deeper into their issues surrounding self-discipline and put in some additional time and effort. Breaking down the following five concepts strongly connected to self-discipline can facilitate this process.

Taking responsibility

Following rules

Willpower

Work ethic

Time management

Taking Responsibility

The first step to becoming more self-disciplined is to accept responsibility and acknowledge that your success is entirely on you. You are the only one responsible for your goals, time, and work ethic. If you keep relying on external things or hoping that someone or something else will drive your success, you will never become self-disciplined. Even if you’re getting staked, coached, or sponsored, success is still ultimately in your hands.

Taking on the responsibility of being your own boss can often be harder than it seems. You are the one making all of the important decisions and you are the one to blame if anything goes wrong. You feel less pressure when someone else is running the show because the ultimate responsibility is on them, not on you. Knowing you alone control your fate can feel like a heavy, burdensome weight on your shoulders. Sometimes it just becomes too much to bear and you end up resorting to behavior that can relieve some of this weight.

Deflecting blame onto someone or something else is one way to relieve the pressure. For many players, blame has become such a hardwired reaction that sometimes they aren’t even aware they’re doing it. To begin breaking out of the habit, answer the following questions:

What or who do you tend to blame?

Why are you having a hard time taking responsibility?

In what situations does this tend to happen most?

What steps can you take to accept more responsibility?

Most often, players will blame variance or other players. They say things like, “I didn’t lose because I played badly—it was variance.” By saying this, they make themselves feel better by placing the blame on something out of their control. And while it’s true they’re not responsible nor have control over how the cards come out or how their opponents play, that doesn’t mean they’re helpless. Players always have the responsibility of understanding the realities of variance and knowing their opponents’ games as well as possible. In poker, there’s always some way to accept more responsibility. Work hard to recognize the instances where you’re blaming someone or something else, and redirect the responsibility back on to yourself. When you can accept blame and acknowledge your weaknesses, only then can you start to improve.

Following Rules

Many poker players set rules for themselves in an effort to stay in control of their game. For example, they’ll determine a stop-loss, what stakes to play, how long to play for, and the caliber of player that they’re willing to face. Unfortunately, these rules are often broken as quickly as they’re set. They end up losing more, jumping up in stakes, playing too long, and playing against tougher competition. Players often wonder why it is that they can set rules for themselves and then so easily break them—sometimes just a few hours later. There are two major reasons:

1.   They haven’t truly experienced the benefits of following the rule or the cost of breaking it. So, in the moment when they’re faced with the choice to follow the rule or to break it, they go with whatever seems best at the time, rather than what’s in their best long-term interests. Let’s say you have set a stop-loss of two buyins, but you’re playing in a juicy game and get coolered twice within the first hour. Do you quit as your rule says, or do you keep playing? The answer isn’t so easy. On one hand, you’re giving up a ton of value by quitting. But, if you’re susceptible to tilting and losing control, quitting could be a strong option even if you’re not yet on tilt. Your stop-loss rule needs refining in order for you to maximize value and protect your game from tilt.

For each rule that you consistently break, write out a list of benefits for following it, and a list of consequences for not following it. For example, if you’re continually opting out of doing your warm-up and jumping right into playing, your list of benefits and consequences might look like this:

Benefits of a warm-up:

I play better and make fewer mistakes.

Variance is less likely to bother me.

It makes me feel confident and ready to play.

Consequences of not doing a warm-up:

I’m more likely to tilt.

There are more spots where I get lost.

I get bored more easily, especially when card dead.

When you find yourself itching to play, take a few slow, deep breaths and inject this list of benefits and consequences into your mind. Use them as the rationale for why it’s so important that you do the warm-up. Over time, you’ll reinforce these reasons more and more, until you start following your rules without even having to remind yourself why it’s so important that you do.

2.   You may be rebelling against your own rules just as you did with your parent’s, teacher’s, or coach’s rules when you were younger. If you were an expert at defying authority as a kid, you could actually be doing the same thing to yourself that you did to those authority figures years ago. You’ve learned how to be really good at it and there may be underlying reasons (yet to be resolved) for why you defy authority. Consider how your own personal history may be repeating itself, and use the mental hand history to help you break down and resolve the cause of your defiance. This issue is one that originated well before you started playing poker and likely has emerged as a problem in other areas of your life—it isn’t going to go away instantly. Write a list of the excuses you make to rationalize breaking your rules. Then, inject logic, goals, and inspiration to undermine those excuses and reinforce the importance of sticking to your rules.

Willpower

The energy you use to be self-disciplined is your willpower. Many people think of self-discipline as an unchanging character trait that consistently remains at the same level throughout their lives. However, there is a large body of research that shows how willpower is a finite resource, and how a loss of it in one area of life affects how much of it is left in another area. One study¹ found that students were more likely to smoke, stop taking care of their personal hygiene, and become prone to emotional outbursts, while cramming for finals. The stress of studying for finals lowered their overall willpower and led to lapses of self-discipline in other areas of life. Essentially, the loss of willpower exposed their self-discipline C-game, just as tilt or fatigue can expose your tactical C-game. This research helps to explain the types of difficulties poker players experience regularly. When grinding a lot of poker, both live and online, players often eat poorly, exercise less, are too tired to go out with friends, or drink and party heavily. At the end of a long session, players often become undisciplined tactically and start spewing chips. They may even be unable to resist playing craps or keno before walking out of the casino.

By pushing yourself to be more self-disciplined at times when it doesn’t come easily, you can increase your willpower. This is similar to runners being able to increase their physical endurance by pushing themselves to run farther than what feels easy to them. Here are two other ways to increase willpower:

    1. Develop good habits. Only use your willpower when you need it most. Too often, players lack good habits and they waste willpower in basic areas of their life, such as starting their day, going to the gym, and eating. Habits or routines allow you to flow from these basic daily activities without having to deplete valuable energy. Your habits can preserve willpower even more when you can develop what author Charles Duhigg calls “keystone habits” in his book, The Power of Habit². Keystone habits are habits that create a domino effect and lead to a much wider pattern of good habits. For example, making a healthy breakfast in the morning might lead to studying before you play, being on time to play, and starting in a good frame of mind. Conversely, if you skip breakfast entirely, you might just jump right into playing and be at risk of tilt or playing poorly.

    2. Kill a wish. Players often wish they had more self-discipline. They see other players with this skill and wish they could have it too. Perhaps they see self-discipline as a character trait they just weren’t born with, or they don’t want to put in the work to develop it. Either way, the wish is a passive approach to gaining a skill they’d ultimately like to have. Even worse, the wish deactivates willpower because why would you work hard to achieve something if you believe that you can have it simply by wishing for it? When you kill the wish to have more self-discipline, you give yourself the opportunity to increase your willpower and use it productively.

Work Ethic

Work ethic is the value you place on studying, learning, and developing your game away from the tables. In poker, a relaxed attitude towards work tends to be glorified through images of college students instantly winning millions of dollars. The fantasy of making tons of money with very little work has attracted many players to the game. For many of them, poker is enjoyable and doesn’t feel like work. However, problems arise when players abuse the freedom that poker affords them.

While having a more professional work ethic may not seem fun at first, it’s definitely more fun than failing, going back to a “real” job, and proving your doubters right. Success is a lot of fun and makes the mundane tasks that are necessary to achieve it more enjoyable as well. This doesn’t mean that a Saturday night spent at the casino or putting in extra hours of study is more desirable than going out with friends or spending time with family. But, those decisions take on a different meaning when they give you a greater chance of reaching your goals.

If you’re lacking sufficient work ethic, start by answering the following questions:

Who are the people you respect most in poker? How would you describe their work ethic?

Who do you respect more, people who are smart or people who work hard?

What are your current thoughts about the value of work? Have they changed over the years, and if so, how?

What negative associations do you have towards work? Where did they develop?

Who was your biggest influence—even if negative—in understanding the value of work? What did this person teach you?

As was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, you only need enough self-discipline and work ethic to reach your goals. With the game becoming more competitive and the aftereffects of Black Friday weighing down on the whole poker economy, many of you need to step up this area of your game. Solidifying your beliefs about the value of work through the above questions can help to provide that needed boost. In addition, use the mental hand history to break down and resolve any negative associations you have towards work. This will further free you from any conflicts that are undermining your attempts to improve.

Time Management

In order to be more self-disciplined, you have to be able to effectively manage your time. Making time for what’s most important is easier when you set a plan. As a poker player, you have to decide when to play, study, and take time off. Those of you who get things done randomly are afforded the freedom to do what you want, but ask yourself this: Are you actually able to get done all that you want to do?

Having good time-management skills can dramatically increase your efficiency. Not only does that affect your ability to accomplish your goals, but it also allows you to have more free time. For many players, however, managing their time is an ongoing challenge. They struggle to balance poker and everything else in their lives: a job, friends, family, a significant other, and domestic responsibilities. Often this problem stems from a lack of clear priorities in poker and outside of it.

An adaptive schedule is a solution that offers a balance of structure and flexibility. In an adaptive schedule, you specify certain amounts of play, work off the table, rest, and other things that are important to your game, as well as your life. Rather than having to set exact times during the day for playing, you have the flexibility to choose times based on how you feel, the quality of the games, or the availability of your friends. You are holding yourself accountable for putting in the necessary hours, while also giving yourself the freedom to schedule those hours in ways that are most convenient for you. In the process of developing your adaptive schedule, you may figure out that there are certain times of day when you play or study most effectively. In those cases, flexibility should take a back seat to productivity, and you should make sure to get those activities in at the specific times that you do them best.

One of the biggest challenges poker players face in building an adaptive schedule is finding a way to avoid wasting time. The lack of a normal work schedule often results in hours spent watching TV, surfing the web, and anything that doesn’t involve playing or studying. In reality, the way you decide to spend your time is always based on your goals, which is why identifying conflicting goals is so important. You first need to identify the hidden motives behind whatever it is you’re doing when you feel like you’re wasting time. What value does it have or what purpose does it serve? Avoiding responsibility, procrastination, and instant gratification are a few of the more common motives. The next thing you can do is actually total it up. Every time you realize that you’re wasting time, estimate when it started and keep a running tally for a week or two. Also, note what you could have been doing instead at those times. Then, define the easiest ways to increase productive time or decrease wasted time. For example, you could decide to watch 20 fewer minutes of TV, get out of bed 15 minutes earlier, and check email only when you’re done playing.

The key is to look for the low-hanging fruit—easy, manageable changes that don’t require much effort. By starting with these small changes, you get the ball rolling and can build toward bigger improvements later. Many players fail to decrease the amount of time they waste because they try to do too much at once. After their inspiration fades, they’re back to square one.

CLIENT’S STORY

Darren Kramer

High Stakes Omaha Player

“I previously did not have a very professional attitude towards poker. Things like warming up and cooling down didn’t factor into my game at all. I would see good spots in poker and just play non-stop. If a good cash game got going, I would either play until I was blue in the face or there was absolutely no money left at the table that was value. I was hard-wired to see a bad player and play non-stop until I had all their money. This was really burning me out. I would play 32-hour sessions where I wouldn’t leave my seat, even though I was so tired and couldn’t think straight. I also didn’t realize how much this was costing me over the long term. When I started to look at the bigger picture, I realized that it’s not about making $30,000 in one night. Poker is a long-term game and I needed to figure out how to maximize my profit for the entire year, not just one night.

I mapped out an overall schedule for the year so I could be at my mental peak at the most important times. To help me understand the concept, Jared made a comparison to the professional tennis players who plan their entire year around the Grand Slams. There is probably a tennis tournament somewhere in the world every week. But, Roger Federer can’t play the equivalent of Wimbledon six weeks in a row; it is too demanding. The same thing applies in poker—if I play too much, I become the fish. In tennis, the top players choose their events carefully so they peak for the major tournaments, and I decided the WSOP and Aussie Millions were my majors.

This decision gave me a chance to work hard on certain areas of my mental and tactical game in preparation. I also managed my energy really well before and during each event so I could stay fresh and sharp the whole time. In Vegas, instead of playing just when games were good, I kept to a routine for five weeks straight and didn’t have a losing session of $50/$100 in that time. I was religiously disciplined, knew what my goals were, and had my tournament schedule planned out in advance. I gave myself the flexibility to veer off that schedule if the cash games were amazing, and I also took unexpected breaks when it was clear that my mind was getting a little burned out. Rather than robotically keep churning along and hitting a brick wall so hard that I couldn’t go any more (which I had done at every previous WSOP), I would take a day off. That was enough to get me refreshed and back playing at a high level.

Not only did I create a cycle to get my mind to peak at specific times throughout the year, I also built in mini-cycles during tournaments so I could stay sharp through several long days of grinding. These small warm-ups and cool-downs also helped me to spot mistakes before I was about to make them, which helped to keep me focused and on top of my game. When you play so many hours for so long, you always have a lot weighing on your mind; you always have hands to discuss. It was important for me to get those things off my chest during short breaks, so I was fresh by the time I started again.

My experience with this yearly schedule has really made me realize how much more professional poker is becoming. Anyone can go on 2+2 or watch training videos, but the big thing I have noticed is that I can make a lot of money when other regs go on tilt. That’s challenging me to see just how much longer I can play at my peak compared to them. If I prepare well and can play optimally, I think I’ll win more money over the course of a year than a reg who is 15% better than me tactically, but doesn’t take care of their mental game. This is a hidden thing that isn’t talked about enough. One or two bad days where you are tired or tilted can hurt your win rate so much that it takes months to get back on track. It is so important when you are playing a lot of hours in games with small edges to be on top of your game.”

_________________________

¹ Oaten, M., and Cheng. K. 2005. Academic examinations stress impairs self-control. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. 24: 254-279.

² Duhigg, C. 2012. The power of habit: why we do what we do in life and business. New York, NY: Random House.

8

GRINDING

WHILE SOME POKER players have more natural talent for grinding, with the right approach, anyone can learn to play more hands, longer hours, and across more online tables. One key to increasing your capacity for grinding is to understand that endurance and strength develop in a similar way in the mind as they do in the body. Many players treat the mind differently and don’t think playing that extra hour or adding a couple tables should be an issue. Their goal can’t just be to play longer or more tables, however: They also have to maintain a high level of play. You don’t need skill to be able to play long hours or a ton of hands and be a losing player. Sure, some drop-off in the quality of your play is expected as you increase volume, especially at first—but it’s critical that you minimize that drop-off as much as possible.

Contrary to what some critics might say, highly skilled multi-tablers are not playing a mindless form of poker. Undoubtedly, focusing on only one table allows you to think more deeply about each decision than when you’re playing ten. On the other hand, skilled multi-tablers have automated a large amount of poker knowledge and an incredibly complex decision-making process. They’re making tons of complex in-game decisions instinctually and with very little thinking. With so much of their knowledge trained to the level of Unconscious Competence, or chunked, they have a lot of space within working memory to think deeply about important decisions. It’s not mindless; it’s instinctual.

This chapter fits perfectly at the end of this book because every chapter up to this point increases your ability to grind in some way. Within each section of this chapter are references to the sections of previous chapters so that you can refer back to them if you need a reminder.

Automation

In order to become a successful grinder, a large part of your poker skill must be automated or mastered to the level of Unconscious Competence. Automation is especially important for multi-tabling online because there is a limit to how much a player can think about at any one time. By automating a large amount of their skills, they can autopilot many decisions without wasting valuable mental space or resources. For example, good grinders are able to instantly analyze prior action, bet sizing, hand range, and other details of the hand without thinking. Decisions that require thinking burn a lot more energy than decisions made automatically.

The following are the most important sections of this book that will help you to accomplish this:

Improve Your C-game. Each time you correct mistakes in the back end of your range, you’re essentially training the corrections to the level of Unconscious Competence. See page 80.

Transfer of Skill. When training skills to the level of Unconscious Competence, steadily increase the difficulty of the situation in which you’re performing. Or, adjust your expectations of automation at times when the games are harder than you prepared for. See page 64.

Training Decision Making. You are automating not just your tactical skill, but your decision-making process as well. See page 109 for information on how to do this efficiently.

Increasing Mental Endurance

Many players expect it to be easy to increase their mental endurance. They see other players who can play 12 tables for six hours at a time without a problem, and think they should be able to as well. What they don’t realize is that if they currently can only play six tables for three hours, they’re expecting a 200% increase in their capacity to happen automatically. This is no different from trying to run fifteen miles when they are normally able to run only five. They may be successful in running 200% more on one occasion, but can they do it repeatedly? With each consecutive day, their bodies get a little weaker; and without proper rest, the risk of serious injury increases dramatically.

Grinding a lot of poker is similar to running long distances day after day: You need to increase your mental endurance in order to consistently grind that extra distance. Steadily add tables and time while maintaining quality decision making just as you would increase weight and duration while maintaining proper form in a physical workout. Here are a few ideas for how to effectively increase mental endurance:

Make a realistic assessment. This step is extremely important. Spend some time looking through your poker database or thinking about the amount of volume you’ve put in over the past six to twelve months. Specifically, determine how many tables you play on average and how long you can play that number of tables while maintaining at least your B-game. If you’ve been dealing with tilt or other mental game problems, you must account for them in your calculation. When you increase volume, you’re increasing the frequency of triggers that can induce mental game problems. This makes you susceptible to having these problems accumulate, carry over to future sessions, and become even more problematic. Underestimating the impact of increased mental game triggers is a major reason that players fail to consistently grind more poker.

Increase steadily. Trying to immediately increase your mental endurance by 100% is clearly a mistake, so what is a percentage that makes sense? It’s hard to say exactly, but a reasonable increase is much closer to 10% than 100%. Working from the average number of tables and hours you’re capable of playing, make a plan to gradually increase that number. If you can play four tables, adding a fifth is a 25% increase. That large increase may mean you need to decrease the amount of time that you play, or play lower stakes, until playing the fifth table becomes as comfortable as playing four. Going this slowly may seem ridiculous, but if you push too hard, you can burn out and inevitably slow down or jeopardize the overall process.

Sample workouts. Create a schedule that plans out your attempt to increase your mental endurance. Here are a couple of sample workouts:

(These numbers are based on a player who is currently averaging two-hour sessions on six tables.)

Light Workout

Day 1: Increase by 15 minutes

Day 2: Increase by one table

Day 3: Increase by 15 minutes

Day 4: Increase by one table

Day 5: Increase by 15 minutes and one table

Day 6: Increase by 30 minutes or two tables

Day 7: Day off

Heavy Workout

Day 1: Increase by 30 minutes

Day 2: Increase by two tables and decrease by 15 minutes

Day 3: Increase by 45 minutes or two tables

Day 4: Day off or a small session that’s 50% less than average

Day 5: Increase by 15 minutes and one table

Day 6: Increase by 30 minutes and one table or 15 minutes and two tables

Day 7: Day off

Push yourself. The hardest part of increasing the distance of a run is the part beyond what currently feels easy to you. Playing an extra table for a longer period of time puts added strain on your mind. You have to fight for every inch of progress. If you only do what comes easily, you won’t be increasing your endurance. You need to continually push yourself past the point where you are comfortable, and then follow it up with rest so your mind can recover well enough to push again.

Track your progress. After each session, keep track of how long you played, the intensity of the session overall, and the volume you were able to add while pushing yourself. Note any improvements—was it easier to push longer, did you play better than normal, etc. Also, keep track of any factors that influence the relative difficulty of a session, such as sleep, the severity of good and bad variance, or exercise. That way you can get a more accurate reading of your progress.

Rest and Recovery

Rest is essential to the recovery of your mind and body. As you’ve already learned, you don’t have an infinite supply of energy. Just like you have to fill up the gas tank in your car, your mind and body need to refuel. Knowing how much to rest, when to do it, and how best to do it, takes some experimenting. There’s no one-size-fits-all method. Here are a few ways you can get proper rest:

Cool down. Athletes ice and stretch their muscles after playing to help their bodies recover more quickly. Poker players who grind a lot of poker need to help their minds recover after long sessions by taking notes after they finish playing. Writing out their experiences at the table frees their mind from having to grind on poker long after they’re done playing. See page 34.

Step away from the computer. Spending time away from the computer and away from poker is essential to helping your mind rest. Hang out with friends (but don’t talk about poker), go to the gym, watch a movie, or do anything else you find enjoyable. Poker players generally know they should be getting away from their computers, but they often have trouble breaking out of the habit. This takes self-discipline. Review Chapter 7 for more on how to create better habits.

Take time off. Don’t expect to be able to play poker every day. Sure, you can go stretches of time, maybe a month playing every day, but at some point your mind will start to break down. Take, on average, one day off per week, five days off per month, and five days in a row off per quarter.

Sleep. Good sleep is of paramount importance. You might be able to get away with a few days of less than optimal sleep, but eventually it’ll catch up to you. Lacking sleep is like a car running on empty. With too little energy in the tank, how can you expect to consistently grind a lot of hands and play them well? The amount of sleep each person needs to be at their best varies. Find the amount that works best for you by relating the amount of quality sleep you get each night to your endurance levels the following day. Keep in mind that for some people, sleeping too much can be as problematic as sleeping too little.

Take a vacation. Poker players often don’t like taking vacations because of how rusty their game tends to be when they return. Enjoying some extended time off from poker is important, so go to page 98 for how to address this problem.

Schedule days off. Rather than only resting when you get burned out, plan days off ahead of time. This gives you something to look forward to while you’re grinding. See page 160.

Extreme Grinding

This section is devoted to helping you achieve some of the more extreme grinding goals, such as Supernova Elite, a rake race, or prop bet. In general, players are overconfident about their ability to be successful because they can’t envision anything going wrong. Inspired by visions of victory, they dive in head first and only peek their heads back out when trouble strikes. Not everyone who does this fails. But, for those who have failed and want a different outcome, here are some additional things to think about:

Planning. Review the sections starting on page 139, and spend some time thinking about your starting point, reasons for attempting your goal, and any potential obstacles. Make sure to plan periods of rest. Too often, players think about the average number of hands they need to play over an artificially low measure. For example, when going for Supernova Elite, players are often planning to make around 2,800 VPPs per day for the entire year. This is ridiculous. Attempting to play every day—even if just for a short amount of time—is a recipe for failure. Instead, if you plan to take a more reasonable 80 days off throughout the year, the average VPPs needed per playing day changes to around 3,500.

Minimizing distractions. As you read about in Chapter 5 on focus, distractions can drain your energy. Make sure the people in your life understand what you’re undertaking so you can be as free as possible from potential distractions. You can then be more proactive about planning to spend time with them when you know you’ll be resting. That way, your rest time will be more productive and you won’t have to rely on making plans when you’re exhausted.

Setting short-term goals. After the initial inspiration wears off, the challenge of playing a ton of poker may eventually feel like an incredible grind. At that time, it’s important to set short-term goals that keep you focused on targets that feel manageable. When you’re tired, the last thing you want to do is focus on how much you have left to get done. Instead, focus on getting through the next hour, or playing the next 100 hands. Define these short-term goals ahead of time so you can use them as soon as they become necessary.

Warm-up and cool-down. The importance of a warm-up and cool-down cannot be overstated. See page 31.

Minimizing active learning. Keep the amount of active learning away from the table to a minimum, because you need to focus most of your energy on playing. Your main focus should be to improve the areas that you already know well. This will make it easier for you to make high-quality decisions without having to fill your mind with new concepts. New concepts can be distracting, require more energy to think about, and may cause you to forget about other, more important parts of your game. When learning away from the table, find the method that makes it easiest for you to learn. For example, if you find it helpful to talk about hands, then in your cool-down, identify a few key hands to review with a coach or friend. Whatever method you choose, make sure to have a solid A- to C-game analysis done before you begin your extreme grind. Then, focus your efforts mainly on improving your C-game. If you can do this, when your grind is complete, you’ll have solidified a higher low point for your game. You’ll also have created space to elevate your A-game, should you choose to focus more on learning than grinding.

CONCLUSION

DO THE WORK

TAKE WHAT YOU’VE learned from this book and turn it into something that can truly benefit your game. The only way to play in the zone more consistently, learn more effectively, make better decisions, set properly aligned goals, and increase focus, discipline, and mental endurance, is to put in the work. If you can’t think of where to start, do the following:

Start working on your A- to C-game analysis. Go to page 40.

Build your game from the ground up and begin correcting your biggest mental and tactical C-game mistakes. Go to page 80.

Set one results-oriented goal for this week and determine three process-oriented goals that will help you achieve it. Go to pages 134 and 139.

If you have any hesitation or thoughts of delaying, think of the simplest task that will get the ball rolling. You’re not going to achieve your goals from the sideline, and there’s no time like right now to get started. Here are a few good quotes about the value of work if you need some inspiration:

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

—Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb

“If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”

—Michelangelo

“There is no traffic on the extra mile.”

—Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker

Remember, go to: http://jaredtendlerpoker.com/worksheets to download the packet of Word documents and Excel files to help you gather notes, break down areas of your game, and track your progress. Return to the book often and reference sections that are most important to your game. You can’t absorb everything in here after reading it once. If you ever have questions, come find me on Twitter @JaredTendler or at Facebook.com/jaredtendlerpoker. I’m happy to answer them.

RECOMMENDED READING

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, by Matthew Syed

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck

Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell

Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, by Geoff Colvin

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, by Josh Waitzkin

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, by Antonio Damasio

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change, by Charles Duhigg

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How, by Daniel Coyle

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, by Tony Schwartz

APPENDIX I

KEY CONCEPTS FROM TMGP

TMGP IS NOT required reading for you to get the most out of this book. That said, there are two very important concepts from the first book that you should be familiar with.

1. The Adult Learning Model. When learning a particular skill, the process is predictable and has a distinct start and finish. While players differ in the unique aspects of learning—such as how quickly they learn, what comes easily to them, and where they get stuck—the overall process is exactly the same. The “Adult Learning Model” (ALM) is a straightforward theory that defines the four distinct levels of the learning process. The four levels are:

Level 1: Unconscious Incompetence. You don’t even know what you don’t know. In other words, you’re blind to the ways that you lack skill. Right now, there are aspects of your game that are weak, but you don’t know them yet. Not to worry, this happens all the time. As you learn more about poker, you find new areas that you previously didn’t realize were weak, and you become aware of new concepts. For example, when you first started playing, it’s likely you had no idea about the concept of pot odds. So you were unaware of the concept and how to calculate them.

Level 2: Conscious Incompetence. Here you’ve become conscious of what you didn’t know. That doesn’t make you skilled though, it just means you know which skills need to improve. You become conscious either from your own insight or from advice that’s given to you by someone else. You know what pot odds are, but don’t yet know how or when to calculate them.

Level 3: Conscious Competence. If you’ve reached this level, it means you’ve done some work off the table and/or have gained some skill through playing. The only catch is that in order to be skilled, you need to think about what you’ve learned—otherwise you’ll return to being incompetent. You’ve read articles on pot odds and can make basic calculations at the table, but sometimes you forget how to do it, or to do it at all.

Level 4: Unconscious Competence. At this level, you’ve learned something so well that it is now totally automatic and requires no thinking. Unconscious Competence is the Holy Grail of learning. Now, even under intense pressure or while tilting, you can instinctually calculate the pot odds needed to make the right decisions.

2. Inchworm. This is a concept with a strange name that helps to make the process of improving over time easier to understand. The concept of inchworm starts by looking more closely at the natural range that exists in the quality of your poker or mental game. Think for a moment about the quality of your poker decisions when playing your absolute best and when playing at your worst. To illustrate the point, let’s say you rated the quality of every decision you made at the poker table (your best, worst, and everything in between) over the last 6 to 12 months on a scale of 1 (worst) to 100 (best), and plotted them on a graph. What you’d see on that graph is a bell curve.

A-game represents the very best of your current capabilities. B-game is when you’re playing solidly, but making some minor mistakes. C-game represents the worst you can play.

This bell curve shows the natural range that exists in your game and the game of every poker player on the planet—even shortstackers (although theirs is the narrowest). As long as you’re playing poker, you’ll always have aspects of your game that represent the peak of your ability, and the flip side, your worst. Always. Perfect poker isn’t possible over a large number of hands. The concept of inchworm comes in when you look at how the range in your poker game or mental game improves over time. A bell curve is a snapshot of a given sample, while improvement is the movement of a bell curve over time—something an actual inchworm illustrates perfectly in the way it moves.

An inchworm looks like a bell curve.

If you’ve never seen the way an inchworm moves, it starts by stretching its body straight, anchors the front “foot,” then lifts up from the back end, bends at the middle to bring the two ends closer together, anchors the back foot, and then stretches its body straight again, and takes another “step” forward. The inchworm concept illustrates how consistent improvement happens by taking one step forward from the front of your bell curve followed by another step forward from the back of it. The implications of this concept are that:

Improvement happens from two sides: improving weakness and improving your best.

Playing your best is a moving target, because it’s always relative to the current range in your game.

You create the potential for an even greater A-game when you eliminate your mental and poker C-games, because mental space is freed up to learn new things. (Yes, the quality of your mental peak or zone can actually improve as well.)

APPENDIX II

PROFILES

PROPERLY ASSESSING YOUR game is vital. To make that process easy for you, all of the various profiles that were provided in their respective chapters have been listed below. Here is a quick reminder of the best way to complete and use them:

Write out your answers either as a list or in paragraph form. Work on each profile until you feel confident that you’ve created a solid description. Try and gather the best information you can find, but don’t get obsessed with thinking each profile has to be perfect from the start.

These profiles should not be done once and never referred to again. They become living documents that first serve as a baseline, and then become a tool that tracks and measures progress.

Be sure to update your profiles after each time you find new information, so they remain up to date.

Zone Profile

What is it like to play in the zone?

How is the quality of your focus?

What is your decision-making process like?

What is your energy level? Do you feel calm, fired up, or somewhere in between?

What contributes to an ideal level of energy for you?

Does your sense of time speed up or slow down?

In what percentage of your sessions or tournaments are you able to reach the zone? How long does it typically last?

What is different about your warm-up, sleep, or level of physical activity on days when you are able to play in the zone?

Are you more likely to get in the zone when playing at higher stakes or at lower stakes?

What causes you to fall out of the zone?

What is the first sign that indicates you’re no longer in the zone?

Do you raise your game when playing in certain events or against certain players?

A- to C-game Analysis

Brainstorm and gather notes about each level that your game has reached over the last three to six months (or another sample size that gives you an accurate snapshot of your current range). Think back to previous hands, sessions, and tournaments that you’ve played. What is your mental game like, and what are the obvious mistakes you make when at your absolute worst? What mistakes do you make when you’re playing decently? How do you experience tilt when it’s manageable and not overwhelming? What is the first tactical mistake or mental issue that indicates you’ve fallen out of the zone? Even if they’re basic, include all the things you do tactically and mentally at all levels of play.

If you are struggling to determine your greatest weaknesses, get a friend or coach to help you identify them. Also, make sure that your true C-game isn’t being concealed by quitting, a stop-loss, being staked, or simply not playing. This is not suggesting that you put yourself in spots where you could lose a lot of money just for the sake of evaluating your game. Instead, try and predict the mistakes that would be made if you tilted really badly, lost more buy-ins than you’d like, were playing with your own bankroll, or played on a day when you felt less than perfect.

Categorize your notes from the first step using your zone profile as a starting point. The level of detail you recorded determines the number of categories. If you found a lot of detail, consider using a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the zone and 1 is your absolute worst. If you found less detail, consider using the common A- to C-game scale. You may find it easier to define the outer extremes of your range—best and worst—and then work your way in. If you’re struggling to categorize the variations in your game, keep at it. Completing this A- to C-game analysis is similar to the zone profile, and may take you several weeks or even longer to complete.

Define your tactical and mental game range together so you can see how they relate. If you have two or more mental game issues, consider doing separate analyses for each issue. That way, you can see the effect that each mental game issue has on your tactical decision making.

Study your range as you would any poker concept that you were trying to master.

Review your range during your warm-up so it’s fresh in your mind. This makes finding new details easier.

Review your range during your cool-down and add new details as you notice progress.

Learning Profile

What does your approach to learning look like when you’re highly motivated to work on your game?

What does your approach to learning look like when at your very worst?

What are your biggest learning strengths and weaknesses?

Do you benefit from talking with other players about hands?

How often does a mistake distract you while playing? Does a mistake ever get stuck in your mind long after you’re done playing?

Do you avoid working on your game off the table, and instead learn mainly by playing?

While watching a video or reading a book, do you have specific areas of your game in mind? Are you actively trying to understand the material and looking for information that can benefit your game?

Are you a visual learner, or do you learn better by experiencing or hearing something?

Do you learn better by working on your game independently, or by talking with other players?

If you study or talk over hands with other players, why is it valuable to you? What does it provide that you can’t get by working alone?

Thinking back to when you were in school, what were the most enjoyable and effective ways that you studied or learned?

What bad habits did you develop in school that are still a problem today?

Decision Making Process

What factors do you consider in a hand?

What questions do you ask yourself in a hand?

Do you consider these factors or ask these questions in the same order every time, or are they in an order that fits the hand?

What factors do you fail to consider when your mind isn’t as sharp?

What are the most common ways your decision making breaks down?

Focus Profile

What are the factors that lead to your ideal level of focus?

How long does that ideal level of focus last and what’s the first sign that you’ve lost it?

What causes you to lose focus?

How frequently do you lose focus during a session?

How long does it take for you to notice that you’ve lost focus, and once you do, how long does it take to get refocused?

When is your focus typically at its worst?

When distracted by thoughts, what are you typically thinking about?

Do you tend to have poorer focus at the beginning, middle, or end of a session?

How well do you handle being card dead?

How do sleep, diet, and exercise affect the quality of your focus?

Goal Setting

What’s your track record in accomplishing your goals?

How skilled are you at setting goals that are attainable?

What are your current strengths and weaknesses?

In the past, have you tended to over- or underestimate your strengths and weaknesses?

What are the things you have been most passionate about in poker? Do they still inspire you?

Do you tend to over- or underestimate the time it will take to achieve your goals?

How accurate have you been in determining your potential?

What has previously caused you to fail?

What conflicting goals have caused problems for you in the past?

What are your short- and long-term goals?

What are the reasons why you want to achieve your goals?

What are the obstacles that are most likely to stand in your way?

Self-Discipline Profile

What are the specific mistakes that you make when your level of self-discipline is at its worst?

What’s the first sign that your level of self-discipline is becoming a problem?

When are you most likely to be lacking self-discipline?

Do problems occur more when you’re winning or losing?

Where do you struggle to maintain self-discipline—at the tables or away from the tables?

Do you tend to forget the important things you need to be doing? If so, do you make excuses for why they don’t get done?

What are the excuses you tell yourself or others?

What specifically improves your level of self-discipline?

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jared Tendler, M.S., LMHC, was a mental game coach for golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours before he became the leading mental game expert in poker. He now coaches more than 250 poker professionals, including some of the top players in the world. Jared’s groundbreaking methods have also helped thousands more through his training videos, articles, and forum Q&As. Jared earned a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from Northeastern University, and became a licensed mental health counselor prior to becoming a mental game coach in 2005. For more information about Jared’s coaching, or to check out his latest podcast, article, and blog go to: www.jaredtendlerpoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter: @JaredTendler or at Facebook.com/jaredtendlerpoker

Barry’s photo courtesy of Mickey May and BoylePoker.

Barry Carter is a poker player and the news editor at Poker Strategy.com. He would like to make it known that his role in this book was primarily to provide a poker player’s voice to Jared’s work—he didn’t create the theories themselves. He lives in Sheffield, England, with his wife Gina and their dog Charlie. You can find out more at: www.pokermediapro.com. And follow him @Barry_Carter on Twitter.

ALSO FROM JARED TENDLER

The mental game may be more important in poker than in any other form of competition. It’s one of the only games in the world where you can play perfectly and lose—again and again. Thousands of poker players have turned to mental game coach Jared Tendler’s revolutionary approach to help them play their best, no matter how badly they’re running. In this book, you’ll find simple, step-by-step instructions and proven techniques to permanently fix problems such as tilt, handling variance, emotional control, confidence, fear, and motivation. With the games getting tougher, now is the time to take these problems head on.

Discover the most definitive work on tilt ever released.

Read stories from eight players who made major improvements using Jared’s techniques.

Get motivated with methods used by Supernova Elites.