Playing your best game, warmup and update!

For me this was the single most important thing to learn. Playing your A-game, your so called best-game, as often as possible.
The first half of my playtime was basically a pure waste of time as I just thought, putting in the hours and grinding 6-8 hours a day would make me go up in stakes. But that was pretty far from the truth. What happened was that I kept playing on autopilot for the most part. I made decision after decision and skipped all the marginal ones as it was told in most of the coaching videos/books that are out there.

In my opinion this is the worst thing you can do. You dont improve your game, you train yourself habits that you will have to untrain later on and you dont play with your full attention.

Only since October I went back to fully concentrate on my gameplay and the results have been tremendous. Moneywise aswell as my game strenght.
You get more conscious about what you are doing and what you are doing wrong. Where you can improve and what gives you troubles. While playing 12 tables or more, a lot of those aspects get lost in the amount of decisions you have to make per timeframe. Atleast that was what happened to me.

Now why is it important to get into our A-Game?

Lets take this common but simple example:
You open with AJ and get called by a big loose passive station. He plays about 70% of hands and has never raised anything so far. Thats why you open for 4bb's this time.

The flop comes As Ts 5d. You can feel yourself drooling for all his chips.
You make a potsized bet for 9,5bb, he calls. The turncard comes a Kc. (Pot = 28,5bb)
You make your potsized bet but this time, he min raises to 57bb. Ohh man you know what is coming. You learned this a long time ago, you know whats the right decision but you hesitate to fold because you just see the money that you could win. Maybe he has a flushdraw? Maybe he just has a worse ace? You call the other 28,5bb. River card doesnt change the board and now he goes All-in.
Lets assume you do now recognize that you should fold and do so. Atleast you prevented yourself from this last mistake. But the turn call did cost you 28,5bb already. Calculated that over to your winrate (in my situation it is ~7bb/100) and you see how big of an impact it has.
I will have to grind about 400 hands now to make up for that single mistake if I play my best game (which is questionable, because I wasnt playing it 400 hands ago. Why should that have changed?).
That single mistake (which would have been easy to prevent) cost me 14% of my winrate for the next 2850 hands just because I made a mistake I normally would not do because I was tired, distracted or anything that put me off my game.

So how do we increase the odds to play our A-Game? Well at first we have to minimize the chance of playing our C-Game (our worst game). Get enough sleep! Calm down if you are stressed. Dont eat big meals before you play. Get hydrated! Warm-up!!!

Warm-up:
The goal of the warm-up is to set up your brain ready to work efficiently right from the start of your session. If you have no warm-up routine, the first couple of hands in your session are your warm-up.
The brain needs a little bit of time to accustom to the task it has to do. So if you prepare it prior to that, you will have a higher chance to play at your best.

My personal Pregame Warm-up:

1. Preparation: Remove distractions, get water + snack, toilet

Close skype, close all unnecessary programms

2. Calm down: Play the piano/guitar, meditate

3. Review your Longterm Goal: I wrote my longterm goals down and like to remind myself, why I am doing this and what I am trying to accomplish.
4. Review new knowledge: What are you currently working on? What have you learned in videos/books in the last couple of days?
5. Review leaks to focus on: Find them while reviewing a session and then focus on them the next time you play. Give them no chance to occur again!
6. Make some range analysis: This is to get you ready to think about ranges. Open your last session and just look over one or two hands and try to think about the range villain could have, how you could adjust to that. Dont extend this too much as you dont want your warm-up to be too long.

The routine should be tailored for you and since you are the only person that knows what calms you down, you are the one that has to design one.