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Introduction: Winners Control Their Focus

Most poker writers emphasize processing information such as memorizing the odds and understanding the meaning of various bets and tells. They pay much less attention to acquiring information, but it’s at least as important. If you don’t get the right information, what you know or how well you think don’t matter much.

Part 2 discusses the way winners control their focus to get the right information, while part 3 discusses how they process it. This distinction is somewhat blurred. The way winners focus affects the way they process information and vice versa.

Your motives and focus overlap. You naturally focus on what you want. However, if you don’t understand how various factors affect each other or if you lack discipline, you may focus on the wrong subjects. For example, you may want to increase your long-term profits but focus frequently on subjects that reduce it.

Since winners want to maximize their edge, they focus on topics that increase it, and they pay little attention to everything else. Losers don’t control their focus, wasting time and energy on subjects that don’t affect profits.

First and most important, winners focus on long-term results (profits) because they are the way we keep score. They are the primary, almost the only criterion, of success, making them the winners’ central focus. They minimize almost everything else, such as a love of action, a desire to impress people, bad beats, lucky breaks, and winning or losing streaks.

Since their long-term profits will be approximately equal to the total EV of their decisions, they focus on making good decisions. They will even make short-term sacrifices of chips, time, and comfort to increase their ultimate profits. For example, they invest time and money in developing their skills and deliberately misplay occasional hands to create an image or set a trap.

Despite their long-term focus, they remain firmly grounded in the present. Instead of worrying about the past or dreaming of the future, they focus on the here and now. They constantly ask themselves, To maximize my EV, what must I do now?

Because poker is a power-oriented, predatory game, winners focus on power and minimize luck, justice, fairness, and personal relationships. They are constantly assessing everyone’s power, trying to get more of it, and deferring actions until the power balance favors them.

Since power is always relative, winners naturally focus on other people. They constantly compare their opponents’ cards, skills, and styles to their own. They also try to understand their opponents’ motives, thoughts, and attitudes. Why are they acting this way? What do they want? How do they think? How can I get them to do what I want?

Because trying to focus on so many subjects is confusing, losers often oversimplify poker. They want a simple formula or a short list of do’s and don’ts. Winners reject such simplifications and consider complexities. They know that there are no simple formulas and that the right strategy depends on the situation. They ignore the attractively simplistic world of the losers and consider poker’s complex realities.