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Sets and Sessions
By Chips_Middle | April 8, 2008
A while back there I put up a post listing the books I was planning to read next. Well it took me a while to get round to ordering them. It took Amazon an age to get round to delivering them. Then I devoured all 3 of them (and 2 DVDs) in about 5 days. Then it took me a while to post about them.
One of the books was Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker. Now this isn’t going to be a book review. Elements of Poker is a great book. Loads of stuff worth the price in there. I pretty much already knew that before I read it though.
This post is about one suggestion from Elements that I’ve found particularly useful. That is the notion of sets and sessions. A session is pretty much what you would think but Angelo suggests breaking your sessions into sets. A set is the gap between sitting down and standing up. There may be 1 or many sets in a session. He describes a set as typically an hour in length. Less is fine. More might be fine too but not more than 2 hours.
The point here is to take breaks in your session. Even if they are short breaks. In those breaks you remove yourself physically, but also mentally, from the game. You need to stop the poker thinking during your break, even if it is only briefly.
Back when I was studying for my exams, I remember reading that I should study in blocks just less than an hour and take breaks. I vaguely remember graphs of my attention span curving sharply downward somewhere around the hour mark.
Anyway. Elements of Poker is all (or at least mostly) about maximising your A-game and minimising the amount of time you are playing your C-game. This one suggestion of breaking sessions up into sets has improved my ability to focus and maintain my decision making throughout a whole session.
Many of the mistakes I make, and I would guess others are the same, come when I am losing focus or getting a bit tired. Dealing with bad beats or a cold run of cards is very different when you are at your best and at your worst. What I would shrug off in one state as unimportant and simply part of the game, starts to play on my mind when I am tired.
Going downstairs, making a cup of tea and forcing myself to think about something else has, I am pretty sure, saved me from a number of tilting incidents in the last few weeks.Â
Picture this:
One of my opponents has sucked out on me in a big pot I was a favourite to win, then all my bluffs have run into hands and then I’ve gone 45 minutes without seeing a hand I could take to the river. The chances are I’ll be starting to get a little tense. Everything will be slightly out of focus. I will want to get into hands. As time goes by, my standards for what to play may go down. My standards for what I’m willing to shove with on the flop may go down. All I need is to double up after all and I’m right back in it. All the other donkeys are winning huge pots with weak hands, why shouldn’t I?
Nah. Have a cup of tea, take a break and come back with a clear head. Re-set the clock on the tilt thinking. Come back to the game with a clear head and at least I am less likely to do something stupid. Often I can spot something I’d been missing in my previous state and find a way to start getting back in the game.
Topics: Journal |
