[Pudge714]

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Today I wrote a midterm in Linear Algebra and Probabilty. It is a fairly easy first year math course and all of the students taking it a Management Students so there are no super-Asians or computer nerds in the class, also there a lots of kids who like business and suck at math in the class. I have always had an aptitude for math so I should be in the top percent of the class. I needed to do a little catching up because of the PCA and I went to most of the classes and although I didn’t do much studying for the exam until this morning and afternoon, the exam was at six. When I fell asleep yesterday I felt prepared for everything except perhaps a couple tricky questions, which I would review tomorrow. When I started studying for the test something weird happened, I kept getting practice questions wrong. These questions weren’t wrong because I didn’t know what I was looking for or because I didn’t know how to mechanically answer the questions or because I didn’t study, they were wrong because I would drop negative signs or make arithmetical errors or being unable to read my hand writing. When I came up with a wrong answer I would look down at the printer paper with pen scribbled randomly across the page and thought two things; One, that was a stupid mistake and two, I’m not going to redo the whole question just because I dropped a negative sign. Come 5:00 I felt somewhat ready for the exam, but I wasn’t positive as there is always some uneasiness before a test. I sat down was calm had a mechanical pencil had lined piece of paper in a booklet. I opened up my paper read over the questions set them up properly, checked my answers, reread my answers, wrote legibly the end product is an exam where I’m confident I got perfect.

For those counting at home that was 324 words before I even touched on the subject of poker. What does this have to do with poker? It is easy to have the aptitude to play poker well, know when to call, when to raise when to shove, it is a lot harder to know how to play well and always play well. When I wrote this test even for the most mundane, basic questions I double checked my addition and subtraction, when I’m playing SnGs my mind is something like this. Push, fold, call, fold, fold, fold, raise, check, push, push, fold and so on. In reality my mind should be going at a much slower rate while there are tons of slam dunk pushes and calls and folds there are tons of hands in between and when faced with any borderline decision if you just stopped for five seconds looked at the hand and focused your game would improve a lot. When playing a million tables people are under the impression they need to act as quickly as possible, however if you are incapable to stop and think in tough spots I seriously suggest you reduce the amount of tables you are playing. I have always had a mathematical aptitude and I’ve always thought I was a winning poker player, even when I was playing lower than microstakes, yet without focusing my aptitude in any discipline disintegrates. Unfortunately it is much harder to learn how to focus than to learn proper push/call ranges, however if you really want to succeed in poker I suggest you learn to focus and always play your best.