Confidence Breeds Confidence

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I suspect that the title isn't all that shocking to anyone. When you are confident in what you are doing and you are doing it well, you continue to feel good about doing it. Something that I have noticed particularly about my game is that when I am feeling comfortable and solid I can sit down at a table and play well. Beats don't seem to affect me, I can recover my stack, I am in the zone and focused and the results just happen. When I'm shaken, bad things happen. Bricks fall faster than a crumbling building when my confidence is shaken. So it begs the question, how do you build your confidence and keep it rolling given the variance of the game? Not sure. Wish I knew. Any help appreciated 🙂 I guess it isn't totally true that I don't know what to do, I have a pretty good idea. I have learned something very important about me and how I play and develop recently that seems to have a big link to my confidence. When I stick to my fundamental style and work on learning about tweaks and holes inside of that style I am comfortable. I am relaxed, focused and comfortable. It is a very powerful feeling knowing that you are happy with your style and just working on improving it. When I attempt to break down my game and rebuild pillars of it is when bad things happen. When I am trying to reconstruct the basis of how I am approaching my game and the overall flow of tournaments I tend to be pensive and uncomfortable (bad way to play). So what is the important learning here, don't combat your own style. At some point in the last year or so Tom Dwan had filmed a commercial for Full Tilt Poker which I thought was pretty profound and has stuck with me. The commercial was that when he started he tried to emulate others, then his hero's and at the end of it all he realized he just had to be himself at the table. That is a huge thing to realize. Think about how comfortable and tuned into the game and table you are when you aren't worried about your own fundamentals and just playing a fluid game. So moral of the story here for me I guess is that what I am learning from TPE and every experience I have at the poker table is to understand how to add new tools and weapons to my arsenal. I have come to grips with the fact that I am a LAGgy player. I am never going to play super tight, it just isn't going to happen and I am not comfortable being a TAG player. So find you. Understand you. When you discover how you play and are comfortable, then you are in the zone. Look at the vids and plays you see to understand why they work or don't so you can add tools to your arsenal, but be wary of emulation, it can be a confidence destroying thing and remember confidence breeds confidence and broken confidence bleeds money. This is the Gman signing out!