Concentrating and reading hands while playing
 

I consider myself a pretty good poker player at the lower limits. I know the basics. I've read multiple books, watched tons of pxf vids, read and post on a regular basis on 2+2. Yet something is missing. I don't get deep very often, I'm still looking for the big score that allows me to play >$20 MTTs regularly.

So I have been reviewing my sessions lately .. thinking about what I'm doing wrong. If I did play the big hands like I was supposed to and so on.

I found out that I have a real problem concentrating while playing. I fire up too many tables, surf the web, chat or eat because I'm bored to hell with folding.

I then find myself in hands where the thinking goes like "I've waited for this hand forever, I'm not going to fold top pair now!". Or I'm faced with a difficult decision at the river and don't even know how I got there and what the range of villain's hands could be. And this is where I usually stack off like a donk. Afterwards I kick myself in the ass for playing the hand the way I did because I should have known better. There are hands that would embarrass me if I had to post them on 2+2.

And this is the thing .. if I'm reading a thread on 2+2, I'm in a vacuum. It doesn't matter to me if the OP folded for 1 hour and is desperate to play the hand to the end. I don't care if he wants to get back at MP2 who sucked out on him 5 hands earlier. I also don't care that he busted the 10 previous MTTs he entered and wants to at least cash one tournament for the day.

It seems like I'm making the right decisions here on the forum but fail to play the same way at the tables.

Do you guys have a similar problem? How do you manage to concentrate while playing? How do you manage to consider the actual hand in an objective manner when you have folded for an hour, or when villain is a huge donk and you wanna show him that YOU are the big shot at the table?

Re: Concentrating and reading hands while playing
 

I play 6 and 12$ buy-in SNGs on Stars and the most tables I play at a time is 3. I hardly ever pay attention in the early levels (I to III) because I'm too busy surfin' the web, eating, watching TV, etc.
However, I find that if I play and listen to music at the same time, a bit of my multitasking crave is addressed and I can be comfy having only my tables open and Windows Media Player. I force myself to not open Exploer and I seem to be quite concentrated...

Re: Concentrating and reading hands while playing
 

if i multitable i usually only play 2 or 3 and im talking on AIM when I am and watching tv but mostly just listening to the tv. pokers pretty boring at the lower level and the play is a lot straight foward so i dont think its that big of a deal that im not concentrating that much.