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The 2 Minute Drill -
I have never been one to place a lot of stock in pre-game rituals. Even when I played basketball in high school the most pre-game ritual I had was listening to music while I stretched before a game. When I play golf I rarely hit balls before I get out on the course and if I do it’s hardly more than 5 or 10. I take this approach to playing poker, I don’t really believe in having an elaborate or time consuming pre-game ritual or big mental game I play with myself. The closest thing I have to a pre-game ritual is finding my reading glasses, because I have an eye condition and looking at the cards for hours on end hurts and gives me a headache. I will also take a minute or 2 to think about who is playing and how I want to play against them, after that I am ready to go. I have 2 big problems with pre-game habits, one is that they can either greatly over-hype your brain. I ran into this big time in basketball; I would hype myself up so much that I would overshoot everything for the first 5 minutes before I would calm my head and play my game. This happens in poker too you’ll be so ready to play that you can’t calm down and then you can’t play your normal game and you end up losing a lot more money than you should. Either that or, you don’t get to go through your normal ritual or you have to go through it faster than normal. Then you don’t feel comfortable the entire night. When this happens you’ll normally have the thought that you are going to be unlucky because you didn’t get to go through your normal processes, and this puts your brain in a funk. Granted, there are some things that I don’t like doing before sitting down to play, but I do not feel as though I have to avoid these things at all costs because I can have my mind ready to go pretty much no matter what. I think this gives me an advantage over the people who feel like they need something before a game. While many will say that it’s just something that they do to make them feel comfortable and it gets them in the right frame of mind to play poker, but if you’re not able to get your mind in the right state quickly should you even be playing at all? By eliminating or reducing the amount of things or time it takes you to get ready to play it will help reduce the amount of variance you have in your mental stability. Let’s say your friends are throwing a really juicy game together and you have 5 minutes to get over there but you usually take 30 minutes to get ready to play, you’re going to be feeling awkward all night because you couldn’t get your favorite card protector or didn’t get a chance to put on your favorite perfume. Whatever
your deal is if you miss it you have brought down the bad mojo
in your head because you haven’t done the things that
help you get “lucky.” Anything that distracts your mind
from poker is a bad thing, even if it is something that is meant
to help you out. Try and eliminate everything down to a “2-minute
drill” to where you can have your head ready to go in 120 seconds,
this will greatly help your mental toughness if you are relying only
on yourself to get ready to play poker. -Jacob Ingalls
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