So you think that sitting at home all day playing online poker is a licence to print money do you? Well it can be for some but it isn’t for the vast majority of players. The funny thing is that there are countless scores of players who are actually good enough to make money playing online poker but are not doing so for numerous different reasons.

Being technically sound with your all round poker game isn’t of much use if you don’t have the discipline to apply what you know during actual play. What this means is that it isn’t much use having knowledge if you either don’t utilise that knowledge or the knowledge was poor to begin with.

But the failure to utilise knowledge is one of the most common and widespread problems that an online poker player has to face. Most of us know what we have to do but we are guilty of not always doing it, this doesn’t just apply to poker but also to life. Strange as this may seem, it is far easier to lose concentration and focus whilst playing online poker for say an hour than it would be to play in a live cardroom for three hours.

You have a chronic lack of visual stimulation with online poker and your poker environment is basically nothing more than a representation of poker on a tiny screen a few inches away from your face. Also you are seated in a room where everything else that is going off around you is totally non poker unlike in a live cardroom.

What does all this actually mean? Well for a start it indicates that the ability to focus and to concentrate will be one of your primary weapons in your poker arsenal and possibly even your biggest weapon. Being able to concentrate intently doesn’t come natural to most people and it certainly doesn’t to me.

I think that perhaps modern living and all of the labour saving technology that comes with it may have inadvertently softened us up in areas that we may not be immediately aware of. It is for this very reason why I don’t play poker tournaments, I simply don’t like being tied into playing poker for a strict designated period of time.

I much prefer the flexibility of cash games where I can drift in and drift out again whenever I like and always play fresh and when I am mentally at my best. So I keep my playing sessions short and sweet and doing this enables me to be able to make money far easier as I am never reaching the stage where my concentration levels are dropping below the minimum required standard.

If you find that you are struggling to make online poker pay despite the fact that you are reading all of the books, joining poker coaching sites and everything else then the fault may just lay with your levels of concentration. This is an area that is so important that to neglect this may just rival having a poor technical game and being prone to tilt. Quite often the secret to being a successful poker player is not in how much you know or in how many books you have read but in how well you can remain focused and disciplined at the table.

Maintaining concentration and focus for whatever period of time that you want to play may well just be the holy grail that you are seeking with regards transforming your bottom line from one that is in the negative to one that is positive.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson