Playing Poker One Hand at a Time

Life of a serious poker player is a constant struggle between quality and quantity. We want to maximize our hourly win rate by playing more tables or faster poker formats but at the same time, we don't want to sabotage our overall win rate.

We want to get the best deal available, but we don't want to be forced to grind in a player pool infested by regs attracted by a good rakeback deal. We want to learn as much as possible about every poker format and every possible advanced approach, but it's also important to cultivate strong fundamentals.  

It's a delicate balancing act and we often tend to air on the side of excess. We're amazed by the crazy multi-tablers playing 24-50 tables at a time, we admire the endurance of degen players cultivating the "eat, sleep, poker" lifestyle, micro stakesplayers are more concerned with trying out Poker Snowie than with learning how to value bet thinly against loose-passive opponents.

How Long Can You Last (Playing Your A-Game)?

In both poker and sex, people often think that they are better than they actually are and that they can last longer than they actually... well, can. If you ever thought to yourself "I wish I could play these epic 30 hour online sessions" here's a sobering thought for you - depending on which research you believe, on average, human beings are capable of maintaining selective sustained attention (or focused attention, in other words, the level of attention that allows us to produce consistent results over time) for about 20 minutes (with some researchers saying that are actually attention span is approximately 8 seconds).

It is, of course, possible to increase that number, if you enjoy a certain activity or you're a master at it, you can focus on it for longer periods of time but most healthy adults will start to lose focus after 20 minutes even if they had a free choice when it comes to the choice of the activity they are focusing on.

Does it mean that every time you played an hour long session in the past you were effectively wasting 40 minutes of your time? Of course not, our focus is scalable. It's entirely possible that you were playing solid poker in these last 40 minutes. It is however highly unlikely that you were playing your a-game for the entirety of that session.

There's a quick and easy fix for that. Take breaks. Take them often. If you're playing hyper turbo jackpot tournaments, head's up sit and go's or fast poker variants there's absolutely no reason that you couldn't play your sessions in 20-25 minute chunks followed by a 5 minute break (preferably spent on walking, push-ups or brewing a cup of tea instead of browsing social media). If you're an MTT player make the most of that 5-minute break you're getting every hour.

One Hand at a Time

The amount of time that we're able to focus on an activity is not the only thing that we tend to overestimate. According to one interesting study conducted by Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, each and every second our brain receives 11 million 'bits' of information, but it can only process... 40 of them.

We have a very limited amount of processing power to invest and it's hard to consciously direct that precious bit of it in the world that's constantly attacking us with, novelty, suggestive imagery and cat videos. Even if you're disciplined enough to resist the urge of scrolling through Twitter in between the tense 3bet pots the poker table alone provides us with enough stimulation to overload the brain. What should you pay attention to? Your opponents fold to cbet stat, combined with his AF and check/raise?

Maybe you should go back to his preflop stats when figuring out if the cbet is correct? What about the fact that cbetting 87 without a backdoor on a KQ4 board means that you're cbetting well over 90% which is certainly not optimal from the GTO perspective in this spot? Does the GTO angle even matter against a passive recreational? Oh, wait you have a note on him! But it's from 6 months ago, he most likely improved at least a little bit. Besides he lost a big pot 2 orbits ago, maybe he's tilting? And that's just a flop cbet spot.

There are few things you can do to prevent the sensory overload and paralysis by analysis during your poker sessions. First of all, you might want to cut a table or two from the number you're usually playing. Second, of all, you might want to redesign your HUD and shave off a few stats. Or better yet start playing with a modest HUD and add more numbers gradually as you need them.

Revamp your note taking method, use shortcuts instead of complex spot descriptions, delete the old notes that might be outdated and confusing. When you figure out a few leaks present in your game as a result of productive database analysis don't try to plug all of them at once. Instead, focus on eliminating them one by one.

There's Hope!

Look, the truth is that if you're smart enough to choose poker as a brain stimulating hobby or you're a professional using it to pay your bills you're most likely not a babbling idiot with an attention span of Homer Simpson.

The point of this article is to make you realize that we're conditioned to overestimate how much focus we're able to invest in something and how long we're able to stay focused for. It doesn't mean that you have to radically change everything you're doing, but it might be a good idea to course correct slightly, stop rushing both your playing and your poker education.

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