04.16.10
Playing and Dealing
Back when I used to run a regular home online poker game, many nights I would end up dealing every poker hand myself. We didn’t hire a dealer, and letting each online poker player take turns would often slow the game down so much from all the talking that it’d take all night to get through fifty hands. As a result, I’d be both a player and a dealer, trying to keep the action moving while also handling the cards and betting my own hands. The problem here is that often I would get so focused on the flow of the game that my own game itself would suffer. Though I thought I could easily handle doing both, and that in the minute of a hand I would have total concentration, I would often have much worse results on nights I dealt versus those I didn’t. We sometimes don’t even realize how much mind it takes to be right on in a hand. Though we may feel good at multitasking and the ability to partition focus to multiple events, any suck of time on the player does have its effect. In that I was burdened more than the guy next to me, I was at a slight deficit that over time would add up. Keeping tabs on your attention, and playing with your whole mind, might be more important than you realize, hand to hand.
