I read an interesting post on a forum the other day. The topic of the thread was bad beats and one female player, whom I know is a decent but not yet a great player and has played for some time, made the comment that when she gets bad beats, her “feeling are hurt by [...]

Are you free? Or maybe the question should be, how free are you? To what degree can you say that you chose to work every day, at the job that you work at? Or school, or family situation? Sometimes I wonder about people who commit crimes or commit suicide or suffer mental breakdowns or stress [...]

Sometimes I just feel like playing a game of poker. Not necessarily 4 tables, not necessarily pressuring the hands either by playing higher stake single tables. It almost makes me long for the days when I played play money; the casualness of the sitting down at a table, hoping to win but not feeling pressured [...]

I can’t remember the last time I did this, so it’s probably time to do so again. I want to list what I feel are my weaknesses, the things that I would most like to remedy or that I think the elimination of which would improve my game the most. I’ll try to put them [...]

Here’s an equation that I have problems with. Trying not to outlevel myself (playing at too much of a higher level than my opponent, trying not to assume that my opponent has as much background or knows as much about poker as I do) = putting my opponent on a much wider range of hands [...]

In my quest to improve my “meditative” or “Zen” state of mind while playing poker I’ve run across various things that happen to me, and a few ways of dealing with them. One of the things that I notice is when my breathing gets tight. Often this is connected with tension in my body, particularly [...]

Sometimes you hear little voices in your head when you do or say something. Maybe it’s a repeat of something your mother told you. I remember my mother telling me when I was about 10 years old after I had picked on one of my sisters, “don’t do anything to girls because they’ll tattle on [...]

Playing “automatic” poker or playing poker on autopilot generally is a bad thing. If you multitable too much, get bored or tired, watch TV while playing poker or read a book while playing you can start to just “play your cards”. A little better player will play their cards plus their position and chip stacks. [...]