Maintaining your motivation to play poker is an important part of being successful.

Testing Yourself and Staying Motivated for Poker

One of the most common issues suffered by players who reach a certain point in their poker career is a fluctuation in motivation or passion for the game. Poker can be a cruel game from time to time, and we all experience periods where variance hits us a little too hard and we have to take a break. But maintaining a stable motivation for the game is a crucial part of long-term success, so it’s important that we take steps to avoid falling out of love with poker if we want to achieve our full potential.

Part of this process is continually putting your abilities to the test – being able to play against better players and put yourself under pressure from time to time is arguably just as important as being able to exploit weaker players and keep your confidence high by playing against players who won’t cause you too much trouble. Here are a few ways to ensure your hunger for the game remains at a high level over the long term.

Understanding your motivations

If you’re not sure why you’re playing poker in the first place, you’ll find it hard to keep your motivation up. Some people play poker for sheer enjoyment or love of the game, some play it for the opportunity to make money, some enjoy the competition, and for some it’s a mixture of different influences.

But without the ability to understand how the competitive element of the game fits in with your original motivations for playing, it will always be difficult to put your own abilities in context and establish the benefits of testing yourself.

For example, if you’re someone who plays purely for the love of the game on a recreational basis, you might find that making money is much less important to you, in which case you will probably find a great deal of enjoyment in testing yourself against better players.

Conversely, if you’re playing the game for a living and you’re mostly in it for the money, you’ll probably find that there’s very little advantage to playing against better players, since it’s a negative EV proposition by nature.

The role of ego and confidence

Despite these factors, there are some advantages to putting yourself to the test even if you do instinctively shy away from negative EV situations. It can make you aware of how far you have left to go, and give you a proverbial kick in the backside if you feel like you’re getting ‘owned’ by your opponents, or it can boost your confidence if you can hold your own against players you consider to be better than yourself.

However, it’s important to recognise that in many instances the reasons why people ‘test themselves’ or take shots at higher games are purely associated with a desire to prove themselves at higher levels, without any real consideration of the EV of the situation.

Sometimes this desire leads people to make extremely bad bankroll management decisions, or to make plays in-game that are mostly grounded in a desire to simply win the pot, rather than making the best play available.

With this in mind, we need to strike a balance between giving ourselves opportunities to test our abilities against better players, and preventing ourselves from getting wrapped up in ‘ego battles’ against players who might have the edge over us.

We need to remove any attachment to the results of our forays into higher stakes or tougher games, and evaluate our performance in itself – a habit that we should be striving to develop on a regular basis regardless, but which can be even more difficult to maintain when our attachment to results is more significant.

Take your shots in a calculated way

The best way to manage the process of testing yourself without damaging your long-term EV or confidence is to ensure you do your research before playing a tournament or cash game outside your usual limits. It’s not good enough to simply hop into a higher-stakes game on a whim without knowing what you expect the field to be like, especially if you haven’t looked at the field size (if it’s a tournament) or the position of the available seats (if it’s a cash game).

If you’re going to take a shot at a higher stakes game, make sure it’s at a time when the presence of better players will at least be offset by a greater number of weaker players – for example, if you’re a low-stakes player looking to take a shot at a $215 online tournament, it’s a mistake to choose anything that doesn’t happen on a Sunday. The Sunday Million is the biggest field available at those stakes so it’s hardly ideal, but it’s also very soft.

On the other hand, you also may want to focus on tournaments without such big fields (the Million notwithstanding) or deeper-stacked cash games, to neutralise a little bit of variance and give yourself a better chance at achieving a positive result.

Ideally if you’re playing tournaments, your shot-taking should occur in soft and relatively small fields, which are tough to find. The same goes for cash games – you’ll want to play in softer, deep-stacked games, and those are thin on the ground. This is why researching a game before you hop in is imperative – scope it out, check the lobby if you’re online, or look around the poker room to see if you can spot any regulars or pros.

The bottom line is that like everything else, maintaining your motivation requires balance – a balance of lower-stakes, softer games to maintain your confidence and keep bringing in the money, with occasional shots at higher games to give yourself a chance at a big score and continue putting your learning into context. If you can strike the right balance, you’ll avoid burnout and stay hungry for poker success well into the future.