Three days before the first event and I'm getting pretty anxious. It's been a few years since I had a plan to grind out a long series of tournaments like this (last one was WCOOP 06 I believe) and I always like to lay out a few ground rules for myself.
No sleeping, no drinking, no fighting.
While I've used a little bit of hyperbole, those three golden rules are key to being in the best mindset during a long tournament series.
No sleeping? Well not literally of course. A problem that I have is that my lifestyle leads itself to snoozing whenever I'd like. Currently I'm going to bed around 7am and waking up around 3pm. This obviously isn't going to work out with tournaments starting every day at 11:30. That problem is easy to fix, I'll just stay up for a while today and tomorrow and by Friday I'll be waking up around 10am (which is ideally when I'd like to wake up every day during the series).
No drinking? The easiest of my rules to follow since I'm not a big drinker as it is. The problem isn't the actual drinking since that would take place in a bar after the tournaments are done for the day, the problem is that going out leads to staying out late and feeling shitty the next day.
No fighting? This is pretty much a catch all for not doing anything that's going to put me in a bad mood. Your mood is a key contributing factor to how well you play. If you are in a sour disposition an hour or so into a tournament, there is no way that you'll be able to stay focused for the entire 14+ hours that it may take to close it out. I'm not saying that people need to be in a euphoric mood all the time to play ideal poker, but not being in a bad mood is key to being able to take the ups and downs of tournament poker in stride.
That out of the way, I can look at the schedule for the first couple of days and get excited. I'm pretty amped to play some of the bigger niche tournaments, like the PL 5 card draw (strategy: play like the tightest nit ever), the 2-7 triple draw (strategy: position is more important in this tourney then in any other tourney), and the 8-game mix (strategy: beat the five other people at the table in games that most of them have never played before). Those, coupled with what I feel is my strongest event (full ring lhe), and a bunch of staples that I've played a ton of times before and am very comfortable with (nlhe, plo), should lead to a great start to the series.
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