It’s easy to see the results of top online tournament players and marvel at their consistency. It seems that Ari, Bax, gbmantis, BeL0WaB0Ve and many others are making final tables and winning tournaments on a daily basis. My natural reaction to their amazing success mirrors that of many others: “What do they have that I don’t have?”

It’s easy to write it off as simply a numbers game. I don’t have time to play 15 tournaments a day. I have a job, a family, obligations that prevent me from being a true full-time poker player. It’s also easy to flatly say that they’re better at poker than I am. <READMORE>

But what part of poker, exactly? My ITM/ROI/etc., as well as my ego, tells me that I’m a pretty good player. My reads are always improving. I’m learning how to get away from hands when I need to, how to extract maximum value when I have the nuts, when to change gears, when to run the big bluff, when to steal blinds and antes. My gut instinct told me that it’s something else, a part of the game we don’t talk about very much. Fortunately, I was out staining my fence a couple weekends ago, so I had the time to form a theory, as simple as it turned out to be.

When I first started playing poker, it was purely a single-table effort. On the rare occasions that I tried to play two tables, it was an exercise in panic and futility. I just couldn’t maintain focus on that much action for more than a few hands. In my 30s, it isn’t easy to change how I pay attention and absorb information. I can keep up with Centipede, but modern video games just make my head hurt. That’s what 2-tabling was to me for a long time. I forced myself to keep trying, because I understood the overall benefit to my bankroll, and after two years, have reached a point where I wasn’t seeing a significant drop in results anymore when 2-tabling, or even 3-tabling. Since I don’t have a huge monitor or fancy playing setup, doing any more than that is out of the question, but I’m pleased with my progress.

Playing a lot of longer sessions requires the same change as what I went through learning how to multi-table. My first experiment in this process was my participation in a Bodog TLB bet back in January 2006…maybe it was December or February. I don’t know for sure without going back and checking my play statistics. The month when Rusostreet won the TLB; that’s the one I’m talking about. Having finally gotten a grasp on multi-tabling, I was revved up and ready to go to see how I could compete in a new challenge. The first week or so, playing three or four tournaments a night went fairly smoothly. I had some good results, made a few final tables, and felt comfortable with my play even in the tournaments where I got knocked out early. People who had won monthly TLBs didn’t seem so tough to me.

Fast-forward to a mere 7 days later, when I gave up the chase. I was stuck in poker’s version of the La Brea Tar Pits. I was the little lizard and there were all of these big pterodactyls circling me. I played like dead money every time I sat down. Every move I made was a step slow. I felt like Willie Mays playing the outfield for the Mets. I was poker’s equivalent of a 45-rpm single being played on 33-speed. The fact that half of the people I was playing against don’t get the last couple of sentences only emphasizes my point even more. I felt old; I just didn’t have the stamina to play that much poker. Ten to fifteen years ago, I could play pool all night, but the constant mental grind of a poker game was a whole different beast altogether. I ended up taking almost two full weeks off from NL Hold’em, which was easily the longest break I’ve had since I discovered the game in the first place. I learned some Omaha 8/b, some Razz, and read a few books. But I didn’t play SNGs or tournaments at all. It was time to take my game off the fire for awhile.

Over the few months since then, I’ve made a decision to try and improve that aspect of my game, in the same way that I improved my multi-tabling skills: just force yourself to do it, a little better and a little longer than you did the last time. I’m not going to go through the motions, just because I know I’m going to bed when this last game is completed. I won’t settle for making the money instead of pushing through to a final table, just because it’s 1 AM and I’ve got to get up for work in five hours…my success in the tournament will pay for a case of Mountain Dew if I need it. I won’t let myself get lazy with a hand and miss an opportunity to pick up a critical pot before the blinds go up again, just because I’ve already seen 600 hands tonight.

I’m also a realist in this effort, however. Some people are just born with the gift of stamina. Johnny Moss was playing 2- and 3-day marathon sessions at the age where most men are taking afternoon naps and hitting the Early Bird dinner special so they could be in bed by 8 o’clock. Many of the old road warriors could play all night, drive all day to the next town, play again, drive again, day after day after day. Traveling between L.A. and Vegas, many of today’s pros maintain a similar pace. Most of the PocketFives’ Ranked Players are doing the same thing, in the virtual world of Internet poker, and it’s truly awe-inspiring. The next time you think you or your buddy should be ranked because you’ve made some money and won a couple of tournaments this month, understand how special the gift is, and be honest about how you compare. These players are being honored because they can do what they do not only for a day, a week, a month…but for the long haul. Poker is about so much more than the cards in front of you. To ignore that is to not only shortchange your potential to excel, but to cheapen the accomplishments of those who achieve the highest levels.
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