How to Build Confedence Playing Tournament Poker
Playing with confidence is something all players look to gain in tournament poker and it can lead to you going on the sickest run of your life. If you have confidence playing tournaments you can easily go on the sickest run of your life. Tournament poker is very swingy in general and you could not win a tournament for years, and then all of a sudden win a bunch of them in a row. The main reason for this is confidence and variation in the way you play. You are looking to win the tournament every time you play, and this is branching off from confidence. When you have confidence in tournaments you are doing a lot of things differently and also winning most importantly. When a tournament poker player wins one tournament or comes in 2nd place, you will instantly want to get back in there and come in 1st. When you get hungry to win is when you gleam confidence and you run good as well.
If you are running really well in a short period of time, you will not see sometimes the hands you are winning and the percentages of the hands. This isn’t overly important when you are playing with a lot of confidence. When you have a ton of confidence the worst thing you can do is look at percentages and hand histories, and think well I’m bound to cool off and start running bad. What you should do is keep playing until you take a few bad beats in tournaments and come back down to earth. Some players like Ben Lamb in the 2011 World Series of Poker ran exceptionally well for an extended period of time. This is because he was just looking to do the very best that he could and relying on his skills as opposed to looking at his short term results. When you look at short term results you are doing the wrong thing when thinking of the big picture of a poker career. Tournament poker is a make or break style of game because it is a very long grind and only the most confident and most in-depth thinkers will get to the top.
When you think about tournament poker the main thing that you will think about is luck. If you are running really bad for an extended period of time, and not cashing in tournaments, or winning tournaments, you will look at hand histories and ways to improve. You need to do this here and there to reemphasize to you that you are doing what you need to do. In reality though, when you worry about hands or break down hands, you are not confident in your ability. If you are playing tournament poker with confidence you should look at optimal positions and spots to win pots. Your hands shouldn’t matter, but rather your reading ability should be what matters. If you read players well online or live in tournaments you will have success. The most aggressive players are often the players who bust tournaments early on or they win the tournament. This seems like a fair trade if you ask any tournament player. The wins will often times outweigh the losses if you are confident in your abilities.
When you have confidence anything is possible and almost anything seems very likely. It isn’t until you come down from the constant winning streak that you will realize how well you ran in tournaments and see hands that you played. Hands don’t matter though. What matters is how you play hands in certain situations. If you can steal a pot, then you steal the pot. If you can squeeze value from a passive player, then you should do that. If you can trap an aggressive player to stack off when you have the nuts, then you are doing a good job. When you have confidence, all of these things will happen, and the more they do occur, the more confidence you will gain. The more confidence you gain the more money you make. The important thing that you should always keep in mind however is a bankroll and managing a bankroll. So many players go broke after winning a big tournament or two. The reason is because they instantly jump to a limit way higher than before. If you remain at a limit until you have proven to you that you can beat it then you will be in better shape in the long run of poker tournaments.
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