Mental Game Blog

I'm doing extremely badly on the mental game front right now. Dodgy, you don't know how lucky you are with regards being a natural at this, you really don't. There's a ton of stuff goes through my brain every session that is completely irrelevant to anything important. Some of the stuff I want to eradicate are actual symptoms of underlying mental silliness, while other stuff seems harmless on the surface but actually ends up being the cause of these symptoms.

I need to focus much more on this, regularly, even when I think I'm doing ok, as it takes constant work. With the book now, I have a direction in being able to deal with it.

I'm going to make a list of all my current harmful symptoms, then try to identify the root causes.

In Game Symptoms

• Increasing variance towards end of sessions if I'm down, or down a lot from peak
• Stewing over a bad beat for a minute or two afterwards, during which time I hit autopilot mode and also increase variance.
• Mind drifts sometimes

Well that's enough symtpoms for now. The above are the two most harmful. I'll cover other ones in future.

Let's take the first symptom of increasing variance. It's quite clear to me now that this is caused by undue importance attached to short term results. Jesus none of this is ground breaking stuff obviously, but given that it's so obvious it's just amazing I don't implement all of it given I aspire to be a professional.

Thinking about it now, I'm sure it's enormously beneficial to like never check your results. Maybe once a quarter or something. It has to be a sliding scale, where like checking every week = reasonably harmful, checking every day = very harmful, and checking every session or in practice midway through sessions = extremely harmful..... especially when you suffer from the urge to increase variance when losing as much as I do.

From now on, I'm seeing this $$$ results urge for what it is, a huge mental leak that needs to be ignored.

Moving onto my mind drifting, I have to start seeing this as a major trigger to deterioration in quality of play. Triggers are good, if we do something about them. We don't mind triggers, we can identify triggers, and take appropriate steps to combat them.

In the long term, I have to resolve my underlying mental problems. This can take time however, and is a longer term goal based on my working and re-working through the mental game book. In the short term, there are steps I need to get in the habit (unconscious competence) of taking when I recognise the problems.

So my mind drifting should be a trigger for me to take the following steps:

1) Recognition- hmm my mind is drifting, or I'm thinking about results

2) Deep breath

3) Injecting logic- a phrase or statement to say to myself, possibly out loud, which helps to get my head on straight. 'I need to concentrate, my perceived edge when not fully thinking is only an illusion'

4) Strategic reminder- a few technical keys to my poker game. So at the moment, this will be 'stay solid PF, don't cold call, time on decisions'. I also need a reminder of my thought process in hands, so.......

What is his PF range %? How often does he flat/ fold/ or 4bet? Which option of flat/3bet/ or fold is best for my hand? Postflop, what is his range? What is the board texture? What is my perceived range? What are this opponent's postflop tendencies? How can I appear balanced to this opponent?

5) Repeat as necessary

6) Quitting

Erm, so yeah I'm not posting results any more. In fact I'm not checking them for like ages and ages. Maybe this time next month, maybe. The very urge to check them though is destructive, and if I start needing to check them in 3 weeks time or something this could end up being a huge distraction. Consider the prop altered in case anyone was gonna claim my $!

I'm still posting a review of every session though. Commenting on quality of play is fine. I will be talking about the mental side of the session more often. The dream is to train myself to get happy with a day's work based solely on the quality of my play and my mental quality. This feels a long way off right now, but I know the first step is to concentrate hard on achieving it and then it eventually becomes habit.

I browse forums every day, and quite often feel sort of sorry for people that their technical game is just so bad! Things like people posting mid-month graphs though doesn't jump out at me. I'm sure there are some Buddahs out there feeling sort of sorry for me every time I say I won x y z amount. I want to reach that stage! $$$$$$$ results are bad, ignore them, and concentrate on the result that is the quality of your daily play. (again, ground breaking stuff this). Seriously though, the ground breaking part will actually be implementing it.

Session review to follow, two parts TECHNICAL & MENTAL