Focus and Preparation

This article is written by The Hendon Mob and originally appeared on www.thehendonmob.com

Have you ever found that sometimes you start tournaments well and in others you just can't get 'tuned in'? Sometimes you make finals but when the money counts you make mistakes and have difficulty focusing? What should you do about it?

Let us consider a trained athlete just before he/she runs in the 100 metre final at the Olympics. What do they do? Are they in the bar having a beer or chatting to their friends in the crowd? Not usually. They can be seen 'blocking out' all outside interferences. They may be sat with their heads in their hands or standing with their heads bowed. What do they think about? Winning! Having that gold medal placed around their necks!

How do they achieve the 'focus' that everyone talks about? They probably go through races in their heads that they've won. They 'pump themselves up' by going through past victories in their minds.

Applying it to poker

First though, go through all the hands that you've played badly (some people will take longer than others ;-). Think about hands that you've played that have knocked you out of tournaments at crucial stages. The time that you played AQ (or even that lousy AJ) against a good player's pre-flop raise, hit the Ace on the flop and decimated your stack of chips. The time that you called a raise for ALL your chips with pocket sevens or the time that you made an early position raise with pocket nines, fell in love with them and refused to pass for a re-raise on your left!

Now that that's out of the way, think about hands you've played well; the 'perfect' reads that you've put on opponents because everything seemed so transparent, the finals that you've made and the tournaments that you've won. Can you remember the way you played through those victorious finals, how quickly the time seemed to pass and how confident you felt? This is how you can gain the 'poker focus' that you need and slip straight into your 'A' game at the start of the next tournament that you play.

Mike Caro once said that when you join a poker game say to yourself, 'I am a GREAT poker player; a powerful winning force surrounds me.' He had a point!

www.thehendonmob.com is the home of the original and industry leading poker player tournament results database. It also houses an archive of articles containing poker tips and strategy written by many well known professional players, a very lively poker forum, and, for those just starting out, the best beginners poker guide on the ‘net.

23 November 2006

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