Zen Focus

If you are following along with this blog, one theme that you will see bubbling up more frequently is the idea that my poker results are now almost always the direct result of my focus. The more focused I am at the game, the better I play and the better my results. On certain rare occasions, I have been keenly focused and it has felt as if the game was flowing through me -- I could tell exactly where I was in each hand, and it is like a sixth sense had developed that was telling me what to do with incredible precision.

From poker, I am better able to "read" people in everyday life. Its not poker, per se, put a skill that I have developed from playing poker. I am frequently telling my wife that I can almost feel or 'hear' what another person is thinking. (There have been a few times where I was 'reading' the other person so well, it scared me. I haven't really told anyone about this in any detail.) This happens when I am focused on the moment, and not thinking about the past or the future. The nature of my profession requires a lot of planning and thinking about the next meeting, activity, due date, etc., but I am best able to communicate with, and sometimes 'read', other people when I am completely in the moment.

I encountered two things today that drive this point home:

1. On some poker show that I caught today (the 2004 WSOP Tournament of Champions, I think) Howard Lederer was talking about his effort at Zen focus. He said that he was concentrating more on being 100% in the moment at the poker table. Not thinking about the past, the future, or anything surrounding the poker table, but instead focusing his energy 100% within the confines of the poker table. When I saw this, I said out loud to no one, "Yes, that's exactly it."

2. The following is copied directly from Shaniac's blog, posted on March 6, 2007, and is a perfect summary of what I think it takes to play great poker:

"As cliché as it sounds, maintaining a good mental balance is the one true key to performing consistently well in tournaments. There are hundreds of excellent tournament players out there, and most of them are familiar with a similar range of strategic poker concepts. But I think it's a level of Zen-like focus, a real inner calm, that allows the best players (like JC Tran, Nam Le, the Grinder, and, recently, Paul Wasicka) to put up incredible results over and over. That psychological fortitude is much harder to achieve than, say, a basic grasp of Game Theory, and that is why tournaments, while challenging and rooted in luck, are still profitable and fun: in any given event, some percentage of the expert players simply aren't "in the zone" and therefore aren't giving themselves the necessary edge to win."