You are studying hard. You are playing hard. Results are not coming. Something is off with this process, isn’t it? If you are (truly) committing yourself in understanding poker strategy, but there’s a lack of good results (both in placements and money won), likely there are veiled issues that keeps you anchored to the ground. Wanna sky rocket up? Let’s avoid the following mistakes.

Lack of focus

If you set up your grinding station correctly, half of the work is done. What many players do make wrong is set their minds in the right attitude. The most common mistake is lacking focus when playing. It comes in many forms such as:

  • listening to the wrong music or podcasts or online videos
  • chatting with friends or family
  • watching movies or tv shows
  • surf the web

If you are distracted by any of the above, plus any other element in your personal life who could interfere with your focus, from lack of sleep to your sentimental life, then you are not playing poker in the right way. The silver lining of this consists in the fact that the vast majority of the people playing poker are lacking focus, so if you fix this aspect, your winrate will just naturally boost.

Playing for too long

Assuming you already have read the article about how to manage your sessions, it can be summarized in simple points:

  1. if you play too many hands at the same time, on many tables, your focus is split and your mind cannot keep up with all the actions happening here and there
  2. in you play for too long, your focus will just drop; it’s typically human and there’s no shame about it, but the average time of focus is around 20 mins. Obviously you should not set up sprints based on 20 minutes timeframes, but whenever you can take pauses, breathe, drink water or just chill your eyes for some minutes. It will help to recover your brightness and be easier on your stamina.

Getting involved in too many hands

Either if you are playing on several tables or just one, playing several spots hardly will help you to build big stacks. Part of the truth about poker is that it’s a game of waiting and analysis; if you feel yourself bored by the action of a multi table tournament, then it should raise some questions about your abilities to analyze the situations. You have to learn how to wait, because playing small hands just for the thrills of the flop, is not the way for the success in your poker adventure!

Bad table selection

A guy opens his favourite indian poker client and enrolls into a sit and go. Is that you? No, it is not. You are wiser and take at least a close look to the players already in the tournament and make sure they are not all regulars.

Poker is a game of tiny edges and playing the hard game with other pro-wannabe is not going to pay off your bills. There’s plenty of fish around, go hunting them rather than start a fight between lions with another guy like you!

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