As many people are now turning to online poker, it is important to remember that the most vital aspect of being successful is your mental game. In order to illustrate this point, we can focus on the roles played by patience, concentration, discipline, stamina, and emotional control in online poker tournaments. Of course, having a correct strategy and set of tactics is also essential, but what is often ignored is how essential these psychological aspects can be. In fact, if one does not manage one’s own psychology correctly, there is little chance of doing well.
When playing any type of tournament, it is always necessary to be patient and not try to force things. This means that one may have to endure long periods of not playing any hands as one watches one’s stack decrease. Too many players get anxious and start playing hands they should not be playing. They simply do not have the patience to wait for better spots, and their fear of blinding out pushes them to make bad decisions.
Tournaments also require a sustained level of attention and concentration, and this mental state can be difficult to maintain over a long period of time. Since many poker players crave action and excitement, they not only lose their patience, but they are unable stay focused on factors like stack depths, hand reading, implied odds, and other important factors. It simply takes a high level of mental energy to play these long games, and one mistake caused by a lack of attention can cause one to lose everything.
Not only does one have to maintain discipline over a long period of time, but one also has to manage extreme losses and wins. People know that they should not go on tilt and get too low or too high, but this is easier said than done. It is therefore necessary to learn how to monitor and control your own emotions in an honest and rational way. Instead of trying to protect one’s self-image, one has to directly admit one’s mistakes and the true state of one’s standing in a particular tournament. Since many extreme situations are created by the ability of people to go all-in at any moment, one has to be prepared for extreme events while keeping one’s cool.
One of the most important ways to control one’s mental reaction to the high level of variance in no-limit tournaments is to make sure that one practices proper bankroll management. Many players ignore this aspect of poker because they do not see it as a core part of the game, but if one is worried about how much money one can lose, one will start making bad decisions. By carefully selecting the right tournaments with the right buy-in amounts, one can reduce the stress that one will feel when making big decisions. In fact, players should be prepared to re-enter at least once so that they can take early shots to massively increase their chances. Since other players are prepared to re-enter, you should also be comfortable with paying for more than one entry. It is often a good practice to decide before the tournament on how many bullets you are going to fire, and then you have to stick to the commitment you have made with yourself. Of course, some players make the opposite mistake of re-entering too many times, which can make them take too many risks and play without any discipline.
Online
All of these essential aspects of the mental game for tournaments are challenged by the online environment. Since many people now play at home, they are often multi-tasking and are prone to many distractions. It therefore becomes necessary to learn how to focus and concentrate by creating the right environment. While it may be tempting to watch a movie or game when one is in a long tournament, we know from research that people can only really do one activity at a time in an effective manner. Of course, this need for focus becomes difficult if one is playing at home with other people around you, and so it is necessary to clearly communicate to others some ground rules about not being interrupted.
Another issue with online tournaments is that it very easy to bust out of one tournament and then jump into another one. While this easy access to other tournaments can be a good thing, it also can become a problem if one deals with losses by quickly trying to replace them with wins. By jumping from one tournament to another, one may eliminate the time to think about what worked and what went wrong. One may also start a new tournament on tilt, and this can push one to make bad decisions from the start. I suggest always writing down and analyzing how one busted out of a tournament before one enters a new one.
Online gaming can also prevent people from monitoring and controlling their own emotions because one does not have to deal with the reactions of other people. When we do not have someone who is present and who can see us, we often lose our inhibitions and act on our impulses and emotions. This lack of social cues can result in an increase in irrational decision making, and so it is important to constantly think about one’s own mental state. Since we often feel more free and uninhibited when we are doing things online, we are more prone to take extreme risks and act in an irresponsible way.
A related problem with playing online tournaments is that it can be bad for both your mental and physical health to spend hours staring into a screen. One possible solution is to make sure that you get up and walk around during breaks; in fact, you can stand up and play and even do some exercise while playing. Since it is important to keep one’s blood flowing to maintain enough energy to sustain attention, one has to fight the temptation to just sit and stare at a screen for hours at a time.
Finally, while some players have the ability to play multiple tables at a time, many people cannot focus and sustain attention when they are encountering multiple sources of information. Although it may be tempting to increase your volume and stimulation by multi-tabling tournaments, you have to honestly assess if you have the mental ability to play this way.
