The State of Wait Awhile - Setting a Routine

I guess the first blog/column is always the most difficult. It’s trying to introduce people to who you are, why you are relevant and then let them decide if they want to stick around. I have read some of the other articles on the Mistress Poker website and am definitely looking forward to some more of the wisdom and insights from other players and friends.

In case you haven't checked to see who wrote this article, my name is Brett Kay. My brother Garth is the National Operations Manager for Full House Group/888PL, earlier this year I had one of the easiest yet most difficult decisions I ever had to make. I could move to Western Australia to work for a liquor company that I truly did admire, or stick around and continue working for a company that I loved working for.  I hope to talk about this and poker in future columns. Today though, I just want to talk about Routine.

Routines apply to everything that we do. Think of the routines that you have in work, life, poker and fun. Setting a routine is probably the easiest thing in the world to do. Sticking to a routine is one of the hardest things to do. We try and justify jumping steps to get through the routine quicker. Rather than trudging through the steps one at a time, we might rush through them and miss a step that could end up affecting us later, in work we get in trouble because we missed a report, in life we could forget to pick up milk, in poker it could cost us money, in fun well everybody has done a bad mix of drinks (beer before liquor, never sicker, liquor before beer, never fear).

Everybody has different routines throughout their lives. At work, you might show up 5 minutes early, have a coffee, and chat about last night’s TV show, then sit down at your desk. Food - you might leave the meat til last and go alphabetical through everything else. In poker, being the emotional game that it is, having a routine means we can try and make an informed decision without our emotions clouding our judgement. Over time we can get quicker going through the routine until its second nature to us. The best example is always the hand after the bad beat (how could he have called with that?????). We have all been there. We still have some chips left we can either just chuck them all in to the pot on the next hand, and if we bust we can go fume, tell our friends the story, get their commiserations and move on. If we win, we have more chips do we go again or do we settle down and try and claw our way back into the game?

A lot of the time, the bad beats might happen, but if you have your routine as you go through the hand, you can avoid a lot of the tilt and get back to clawing your way back into the chip counts. A simple routine to get your mind focused on the game as the hand plays through is; what was the action preflop? What did he do with the flop? How did he play the turn? From previous hands what can I assign to his range? You might get the maths wrong, you might make a bad call, but that is the joy of poker. You are still learning at every level. Players, Techniques, and styles change, but the basics will always be there. From these fundamentals no matter how much the game changes, we can go back to the basics and build from there to get back to being a solid player. A lot of the time people do lose sight of these fundamental processes.

The simple process of tweaking your game, going through the routines, readjusting your game to improve your overall performance are always important in your quest as a poker player.