Staying Focused: Maximizing Volume with Your A-Game

In my opinion, poker is the most mentally demanding game there is. You have to stay level-headed at all times, or you'll never stand a chance.

-Phil Ivey

Welcome to the last installment of our poker course, grinders! We’ve covered theory and strategy, and now it's time to wrap up with a focus on the mental game. This will help you perform at your best and avoid poker tilt.

We’re going to ensure you’re firing on all cylinders while in-game at the tables. If you're ready to learn how to feel and play your best while grinding, keep reading!

Poker tilt is an unpleasant feeling caused by a loss. Anybody who’s played cards experienced it at some point. It might be losing a pot because of negative variance or missing potential gains by forgoing a value bet. Sometimes it’s over an error, like a misclick.

Tilt is an undesirable psychological state in which a player’s emotions interfere with decision making.

- Upswing Poker

Either way, once the mind begins to ruminate on that undesirable outcome, a player loses presence and begins to play worse.

As we've mentioned before, every player will face moments of being thrown off their game. Accepting that poker tilt is inevitable helps reduce its impact.

Instead of dwelling on ways to avoid it, let’s shift to a positive mindset and focus on strategies to stay present and maintain your A-game. This means, focused on the current hand, aware of your opponent’s flaws, tracking pot odds and action histories, and executing a clear plan.

The A-game is a state where everything clicks: your reads are accurate, you make heroic folds and calls, your bluffs succeed, and you extract maximum value from strong hands. Even when facing coolers or suck-outs, you stay optimistic, letting the pain fade quickly as you focus on the next hand.

So, how can we cultivate our A-game?

Enter each session with a clear purpose. While winning is always the ultimate goal, the key to maintaining presence is focusing on a specific strategy. Consider tailoring your focus to your experience level:

• Beginners: Start with basics like preflop mechanics, such as 3-betting.
• Intermediate Players: Refine strategies like c-betting, focusing on timing and bet sizing.
• Professionals: Dive into advanced concepts, such as river overbets.

Whatever your focus, you can reduce poker tilt and enhance presence by starting with a warm-up. Review the strategy you aim to practice, and stay committed to applying it as opportunities arise during the session.

Professionals always have database and multi-table software running to ensure they’re on their A-game. All hand-history trackers have customizable note tags players use to mark hands as they happen in session for them to review later.

Set up customized tags in your database software to mark hands for the specific focus area of each session. Each use of the tag will remind you that you have a purpose, which will help reduce poker tilt by keeping you grounded in the moment.

Most importantly, offload the mechanical tasks of grinding onto your multi-table software. Nothing does more to prevent error tilt than a multi-tabling tool.

With a tool like Jurojin, you’ll always see the right pot-odds and the MDF you’re getting. You’ll never have to calculate 33% of the pot, or 150% when betting. Every time you’re facing a tough river decision, you’ll see the action history that led you there.

👉 Notice the player below has bet-sizes and pot-odds calculated by Jurojin. We also see action histories for players in a hand.

Handling small tasks yourself drains the mental energy needed to read opponents and find the best strategies, especially when multitabling.

And remember, even with a solid pre-session warm-up and focus-enhancing software, you’ll still get thrown off your A-game at times. So, what’s the plan then?

Have a plan in place to get you back on track from poker tilt. Keep it simple, like this three-step example:

• Inject logic: Acknowledge the tilt and explain the logical conflict between your emotion and your A-game mindset.
• Focus on Strategy: You’ll feel like a winner knowing you know what you’re doing.
• Take a break: If tilt persists, come back in five, ten, or even sixty minutes. Somedays, you might need to stop completely.

Here are some examples of injecting logic for different types of tilt:

Above all, keep in mind that everyone experiences tilt. Want to learn how to take advantage of it?

When others play worse, we profit. Have no shame in tilting others. Most online platforms allow for some sort of communication between players.

Now, there’s no need to always be a jerk, but a well timed “nice hand” comment could really throw someone off assuming they get the sarcasm. Maybe you get Kings against Aces all-in preflop and win. Sending a smiley emoji in the chat might knock someone off their A-game.

It’s best to do this against regs, fish already play bad and we want them in the games.

No human can avoid poker tilt. The emotion will flood us at one point or another. Rather than stressing over the inevitable, winning players focus on playing their A-game as much as possible.

Before each session, we prepare by selecting a strategic focus to guide our play. Hand-history trackers help by letting us tag key hands for later review.

Multi-table tools keep us strategy-focused by handling poker mechanics like pot odds, bet sizes, and action history. With these tasks offloaded, we can concentrate on executing our winning strategy across multiple tables.

Furthermore, The more we focus on the tables, the easier it is to spot when a solid player is on tilt. This will allow us to adjust and exploit their reduced mental state for our profit!

👉 Thank you for reading through this beginner's course! We hope the strategies and insights shared help you sharpen your skills and approach the game with confidence. Best of luck at the tables, and keep honing your A-game!

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The following links are recommended resources related to this section’s theme. Don’t stay in doubt--dive in! 🔔

• Tilt: Learn how to avoid tilt in poker.
• Psychology: Discover strategies for success.
• Database tracking software: You may want to check PokerTracker 4 and Holdem Manager 3.
• Focus Management: Learn what Jurojin provides professionals seeking to improve poker concentration.
• Discord Community: Join the coolest poker community, don’t be shy! Use it to ask questions and interact with other poker enthusiasts and professionals.
• Try Jurojin Poker for free: Test the Full Access package for half a month by linking your account to Discord and joining the #trial-request channel.