Fedor Holz puts a lot of effort into preparing to play poker – maybe you should too (WPT photo)

No matter the context of your poker involvement – whether it’s as a recreational player, a ‘serious amateur’ or semi-professional, or a professional poker player making your living by grinding your way through the games, there’s a process attached to the way you play the game.

This process is a series of behaviors, thought patterns and habits that contribute to a specific mindset or approach you adopt when playing. How successful you are in the game in the long term will have a great deal to do with the processes you put into place to prepare yourself for the activity of playing poker.

If you want to generate peak performance from yourself – even if you’re a beginner-level or novice player – then optimizing your process is a must. You won’t be able to turn yourself into Phil Ivey or Phil Galfond overnight, but you’ll get closer to playing at your full potential, whatever that potential may be.

Becoming aware of your current process

The first step to making concrete improvements in your process is to be aware of your current one. For many people, their process is as simple as picking up their laptop, opening a poker client and playing, or walking into a casino, sitting down at a table and looking at their cards. This, however, is not enough.

For the most successful players among us, preparation is a big part of that success. Most top-level pros use mental game coaches to great effect (witness the huge tear Fedor Holz has been on since he started working with ‘poker hypnotherapist’ Elliot Roe), and many schedule sessions with their coaches right before important tournaments.

Many pros including the likes of Isaac Haxton employ meditation techniques, while others prefer making a journal of their thoughts and feelings before and after every session. Each of these strategies has its benefits, and depending on your personality type, you may find some of them are more effective than others in your case.

But in order to bring any of these habits into your game, they need to be absent in the first place. If they’re absent, that means your process is probably a more simplistic one, and if you’re operating by a more simplistic process and not getting results, then it might be time to step it up a notch.

Next time you play, make a note of the things you do before and after your session. Did you prepare in a specific way, like looking at hands from the day before or meditating? Did you get some exercise that day? Did you play a session after being at work all day? Were you hungry? Tired? Angry about an argument with a co-worker? All these things can affect your mindset and your play, but if you’re lacking awareness of them, you’ll never be able to counter those effects.

Evaluating the effectiveness of your process

Once you have a good idea of what your most common habits are in preparation for your session, you can start thinking about what the impact of those habits might actually be. Do you find yourself feeling intensely focused during your sessions, or are you frequently distracted? Are you happy with the quality of your play overall?

In many cases there can be direct links between behaviors you exhibit in preparation for your sessions, and behaviors you exhibit during them. If you frequently find yourself lacking in the right preparation – you just “show up and play” without much thought – then you might find it easy to draw a straight line between this habit and a tendency to be distracted by browsing the Internet or looking frequently at your smartphone while playing.

On the other hand, if you do have a well-developed preparation process already, you may have noticed improvements right away. If you began meditating and immediately noticed yourself responding more calmly to bad beats and coolers, recognize that this is something that works for you and needs to become a fundamental part of your game.

One habit that tends to positively benefit almost everyone who adopts it is exercise – in many cases, players who adopt a pre-session workout as a prerequisite for playing poker (i.e. they don’t play poker if they haven’t worked out that day) find that it becomes impossible for them to truly get into the right frame of mind without it. If you’re not sure which habit you should adopt first, regular exercise before your sessions should probably be the first thing on your list.

Making simple, specific changes to your habits

The final step in the process of improving your habits – after becoming aware of the flaws you’re trying to correct – is to actually implement the changes and allow them to take effect. An important aspect of this action is not to try to change everything at once, since many people have fallen victim to this weakness in the past.

Changing everything at once and expecting those new habits to stick is simply unfeasible – no more feasible than trying to lose eighty pounds, retrain in a new career, find a new relationship and learn to play the guitar all at once. You’ll have much better results picking one thing, getting it right, and moving onto the next thing.

Most people approach these changes from the wrong direction – they think the solution to playing better is simply to make better decisions at the table, so they focus purely on improving their strategic understanding of the game. However, this approach ignores the reasons why many mistakes are made in the first place.

If you’re trying to pick one thing to focus on first, focus on the thing which will have the biggest impact – as I mentioned before, this will probably be exercise for many people. If you already exercise regularly, it will probably be meditation.

Whatever your current situation, if you have wildly fluctuating processes for preparing to play poker and your mental and physical condition is different every time you play, you can expect wildly fluctuating quality of performance to be the result. If you want results that are even somewhat consistent, you need consistent peak performance, and if you want consistent peak performance, you need to be consistently optimizing your poker process.