Aballinamion
Sleeping with the Dark Lady of the Sith
Loyaler
Hello Redbull199030, good evening. Welcome to the CardsChat community it is really good to see your post here!
Without further duo, you are right, cash game requires a lot of discipline and patience.
The best strategy for cash games is the psychological and social one:
A) Sleep well during the nigh, try to entertain yourself when you are not busy at all or playing, it will make you more calm for decision-making
B) Eat well and balanced during the days you are going to make sessions. The sessions in cash games could be short, something between 45 minutes and 1 hour and a half is a good session (single table or 4-table) Why? Because players forget that we have to think like algorithms or machines and that requires a lot of energy. We don't have infinite mental energy! We cannot concentrate for hours in a subject, unless you are prodigy! Many regular people need to relax between one period of intense mental activity and other.
As long as we play more than 2 hours one session, without no need for so doing (cash is not tournament we can leave the table whenever we want), we are going to get more streessed, more tense, more angry, more tired, more everything bad to our game.
Playing less hours and resting at least one hour between one session and other is paramount.
Try to eat fruits, nuts, fibers and vegetables in a general manner because it changes a lot your game! If you have propensity to get nervous avoid things as soda, too much sugar and coffee. If you tend to be boring to death at cash tables do the contrary, drink coffee, natural juice, tea, etc.
C) Be prepared to be destroyed every session! Players are not going to make your life at the tables easier, EVER! When you enter to play, pray, focus, meditate, whatever you think is fine and be prepared to bad beats, coolers, hard decisions spots, for when they happen you are already mentally strong for facing it. Put in your mind before you start that the game is going to be extreme hard, that everybody in the table wants to take your head off, but also think that you are going to play with calm, patient, waiting for the best spots, thinking about every single spot. Repeat this to yourself everyday before playing, because your body, many times, doesn't know what you are going to do next, so when you prepare your body for hard moments it becomes easier for you in the future to deal with war.
We are going to a war and if we not prepare ourselves physically and mentally we are going to suffer the consequences.
Let's not waste our precious time that we dedicated to learn, tostudy go away just because we have a bad run of cards and decided to continue playing when we know we are out of control and should not be doing it. Or when we elect to play tired, angry, asleep, when we decide to play to show our beautiful girlfriend that we are better than Phil Ivey himself, etc.
D) Make Yoga or light exercises before the session it helps to keep your body connected and balanced with your mind. Practise physical and mental exercises every single day, it will make you harder at the tables. Drink a lot of water! It helps you to keep cool at the tables.
E) If you do all of this, and yet, in the fist session of the day you feel that you are being beat to the bones, that the spots for bluffs are not coming, no good hands to play and you are starting to get bored or angry, just leave the tables for the day and go do something else! Forget about poker sometimes is a hell of a good exercise.
F) If you cannot stop playing, even if you are angry, you gotta look for professional help: responsible gambling is essential for our good life and health. We should not compromisse our lives because we are playing, we gotta be responsible with this awesome work, which is to play poker.
About theory and technique I can talk about it in another post, if you like this one.
I hope it helps you. Have a wonderful day and don't forget: life can be beautiful! Regards;
Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa
Last edited: