Bloggers / Matthew Pitt / 11 August 2009 / Leave a comment

If you regularly play a substantial amount of poker or have been in the game for a significant length of time, you may have started to find your love for poker waning a little and it starting to become a grind.

Once boredom and complacency start to find themselves in your game, a number of things will start to happen. Your concentration levels will drop, you will start to notice bad beats more and be more likely to be tilted by them and your win rate will drop. This causes a vicious circle as you can probably see because as your win rate becomes lower, your enjoyment for the game will lessen and the cycle starts again.

The human brain loves a challenge, it wants to continually learn, be tested and kept on its toes, so to speak. In order to satisfy your brain's urges and keep your love for poker strong you need to, from time to time, do something completely different in order to refresh your game.

One suggestion is to enter a tournament and keep a post-it note over your hole cards so that you cannot see them. Annette Obrestad famously did this and won a $4.40 MTT with 180 entrants, only peeking at her hole cards once. Doing this will force you to concentrate on your opponents, make solid reads and instil into you the importance of position.

Another way to keep your game fresh is to learn another discipline or type of poker. Most players try to specialise in one form of poker, be it cash games, SNG or MTT. Rather than doing this you should try your arm at one of the disciplines that you are not as comfortable at playing. For example, if you a primarily a cash game player, try playing a couple of session of SNG and vice versa. The skills needed to beat the different games will come in very handy in certain situations you will find in your usual game.

Playing live can also rejuvenate your game as the change of pace, the atmosphere and the social aspect of poker really comes to life when you play in a casino rather than online. If you are beating small to mid-stakes game online, then you should find the games at your local casino a total fish tank as the standard of live play is so much poorer than at the virtual tables.

Finally, one sure fire way of keeping yourself focused is to set some realistic goals for you to achieve. It may be something as simple as making a certain amount of money in a set period of time or something like making sure you have at least one solid note on each play at your table. Make sure the goals are realistic otherwise they can actually hinder your game.

Join the Betfair Pros on Facebook

John Tabatabai
Sorel Mizzi
Annette Obrestad
Peter Jepsen

Play SNG's against the Pros in A Unique August Promotion