In my last few years of high school I became very passionate about something. It became my major at college/university and my whole life was geared toward it for a number of years, until finally I became saturated. My previously-thought-to-be-insatiable desire to learn more and immerse myself deeper was filled, like a sponge that finally becomes so full of water that it no longer needs any more.

During those infatuation/study years I learnt a number of things that are relevant to other aspects of my current life. One aspect of my studies was that there was a performance requirement. I had no plans to be a performer but I was required to achieve a required minimum competence relative to my level of seniority so it was something that I worked on and experienced to varying degrees every day of my life during that period.

So I had various warmups, technical exercises, and ongoing projects that were a part of my daily routine. I became aware of a lot of the things that are important to ongoing development such as routines, diligence/grinding effort, review/critique, outside review/critique, outside searching and learning for new perspectives and techniques. These are important, whether you are hoping to become a competitive skier, stock trader or poker player, though I guess warmups are more for those physically connected activities than for purely mental ones.

But anyone who has been, or aspired to, competitive level performance of any kind learns that any individual performance is affected by a number of other factors. The level and performance of your competition, for example. Even a 100m runner can be affected by tough or easy competition, and the affect can enhance the performance or decrease it, even though the competitors are not running into or directly against each other like we do at a poker table. And similar situations may not have the same positive or negative affect in different instances. For example a 100m runner may run exceptionally well against tough competition, but the next time may not run as well against similarly tough competitors, much like when we take stabs at a higher buy in level and do well once, but not so well the next time.

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So there are other factors affecting our performance. In poker, the cards that we are dealt, our position at the table, and the playing styles and abilities of our table mates are obvious factors. But also important is our mental situation.

The reason that that became apparent to me again was while I was playing low level buy in MTTs while watching football games yesterday. I know that I play freerolls better when I don’t pay attention. I have been taking that and playing low level buy in tournaments while watching football where I can use zero and first level thinking, but yesterday I didn’t cash in any and decided to quit for the day. I became aware that I didn’t have the right mental attitude, didn’t have the patience. At certain points I felt that cusp or edge where I had a decision to make and went with the aggressive/uncaring/impatient one (raised JJ UTG, smaller stack shove, BB shove, could have folded but convinced myself that they might be doing so with big cards. Small stack had AA, BB had TT and rivered a T to triple up and leave me crippled. Another I have AQs raised from early, small stack shoves, one of the blinds raise me all in, I call and get sucked out by JT and AT, J is the only one that pairs the board. I was ahead but AQ doesn’t do well multiway and I didn’t have to call, especially against this level where the more opportunities I have, the more chances for me to outplay these players.)

So I quit for the day because I was aware that my attitude wasn’t quite right. At these stakes I could have kept playing because it doesn’t cost me much, but I was getting too frustrated with not winning and with the loss of control over my aggression, and to continue would have been more costly than the monetary losses.

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