Lately I’ve been on a rant about keeping focused at the poker table. Today is no different. Last night I had a decent session going, had almost tripled up my stack within about 30 – 40 minutes of loose aggressive play. Then take a wild guess what happened. I took off my poker face and my plan all started to fall apart.

Just as with any area of your life you can become complacent with what’s going on around you. In this case I went from playing loose aggressive poker to tight passive. Why the sudden change? The chips were coming too easily to me and I started to lose interest. Yep, that’s when you start losing chips is when you stop paying attention to what’s going on at the table. The truth is once you understand how to play loose aggressive poker you can pick off your opponents almost at will. Bluff tight passives out of pots you really have no business being in in the first place. And once you bluff off a couple pots you’ll have the ammunition you need to start firing when you have something strong.

So I followed that strategy for a little bit and started to do real well. Then I took off my poker face and started looking through Hulu for something to watch while I played. There went my focus, which is a requirement to play perfect loose aggressive play. Once I became focused on my new task of finding something to watch, well, another player took over my play. Suddenly I didn’t know what to do, and froze up like a deer in headlights. I couldn’t get a read on him, and a portion of my stack slowly shifted over to him.

I escaped the table with a little more than a double up, so I was still positive EV for the night, but the second I started wandering off, I should have left the table. Loose aggressive pays quite well in cash games, if you know when to execute. Tight aggressive pays better for Sit N Go’s and short tournaments with rapidly increasing blinds.

The point I’m trying to make here is this: if you sit down to play poker then just play poker. Hulu and Instant Movie Netflix have to be the two worst enemies of the online poker player (unless you start something BEFORE you start playing so you don’t interrupt your mental flow.) Once your in the zone, keep playing. If you shift out of that zone, quit the table you’re at. You’ll be escaping with your chips. When you’re ready to play again, sit back down at either the same table or a new one. This is how you keep your poker face on.