JV'S KILLER POKER:
Sass

BY: John Vorhaus

Those who know me well know this: I have trouble keeping my mind on anything - even poker - for any length of time. I long ago discovered that the one thing I want to do more than anything is more than one thing at once. The mind wanders. Oh how the mind does wander.

The mind, as we know, is a terrible thing to waste, but a mind that wanders at the poker table is at terrible risk for wasting money, and that's a terrible thing indeed. This we know, of course; this we already know. Pundits and luminaries alike remind us constantly to keep our mind on the game. If we're concentrating on our baseball bets or the keno runner's shapely nature, we're thinking about the wrong stuff and our game can only suffer. True. This we know.

Since I have a special gift for reducing complex concepts to trivial one-liners, I've come up with a name for this condition: SASS; Short Attention Span Syndrome. If SASS is a problem you don't have, wonderful; I'm happy for you. But if you think you might be at risk, just read on and see if any of this rings a resonant bell.

You check in to a game determined to bring all your focus to the task at hand - and for a while, you do. You scope out the other players carefully, hunting for tendencies and tells. You fix your laser-like attention on the play of hands you're not in, ghosting along with the active participants as you try to slide inside their minds. You work hard until you have the whole game dialed in. And that - if you're prone to SASS - is exactly when things go wrong.

Once you feel like you have the game dialed in, once you know which players to fear and which players to feast upon, the challenge of the task at hand goes away. You've already determined, say, that seat six loves to steal a blind or two, and that seat nine, the hapless victim of six's attack, has no clue how to play back at the marauding monster. Thus, their confrontation is of no further interest to you. It offers no challenge to your intellect and no new opportunity for learning. So you let your mind off the leash and leave it free to wander� to the overhead TV screens; to the idle chat at the next table; to the prospect of traffic on the drive home; to the fact that your estimated tax payment is due next week (or was due last week!) You are confident that you'll bring your best concentration back to bear on the next hand, when you once again have cards. But you know what? You ain't right. You're wrong.

Once you've let your mind off the leash, it's hard to get it to heel again. It would be far better never to let it go astray in the first place. But how to accomplish this goal? By what means can a carrier of SASS inoculate himself from the very disease he carries?

By going deeper into the game. By never imagining that your understanding of your opponents is complete. By not being content to spot the easy tells but going after the hard ones too, or by seeking repeated confirmation of the ones you already have. By committing yourself to carving out new nuggets of information from the raw ore of the game long after the rich veins have been mined and only the problematic and low yield ones remain.

If you've got SASS, like I do, everything in your life is either a game or it's dull. To prevent boredom, and to keep concentration focused, then, it's necessary to turn everything into a game. Don't let your mind wander. Challenge yourself to go deeper. SASS can cripple any unsuspecting stack; don't let it cripple yours.

(John Vorhaus is author of the KILLER POKER series and News Ambassador for UltimateBet.com.)