Alan Longo is a performance psychologist who works with professional poker players on the mental systems behind consistent, high-level play.
Every Monday he sends a practical training protocol to players who want to perform at a high level week after week. Get it here: alanlongo.com/newsletter.
The series schedule comes out and you go through it with a pen.
This one has a soft field. This one has a structure you like. By the time you finish you have registered for more than you planned, and it doesn't feel like a mistake. It feels like skipping them would be leaving money behind.
Then the day arrives. You planned for eight tables. Late registration closes, everything overlaps, and for two hours you are sitting on twelve.
Underneath all of it there is a feeling of 'now or never'. The series is short, the fields are good, and if you skip this one you don't see it again for a year.
That last part has mostly stopped being true. There are more series every year and they run longer. What used to be two or three windows worth planning around is now stacked back to back for months. The urgency is real as a feeling. The scarcity it points at is not.
Your ROI is not a property of the tournament
This is the reasoning error I hear most often, and it slips past because it sounds correct.
Players talk about tournaments as if profitability lived inside them. This one is +EV. This one has a high ROI. As if the number were printed on the event next to the buy-in.
It isn't. That number is you, playing that tournament. And it was built under conditions — a certain number of tables, a certain amount of time per decision, a certain amount of attention left over for the spots that were actually hard.
Change the conditions and the number stops being yours. The event is the same. You aren't.
What actually breaks when you add tables
Three things, and they are not all the same.
The first is the cost of switching.
Switching is what happens every time you move from one table to the next. Each table is a separate frame: who is sitting there, how deep everyone is, what phase the tournament is in, what you worked out about that opponent 40 minutes ago.
To act on a table you need that frame loaded. When you jump, you drop the one you were holding and rebuild the next one, and rebuilding costs you something every time.
You don't notice it, because it is fast and because you do it all day. At eight tables you are paying that cost constantly. At twelve you are paying it more often and with less room to recover in between. Your play doesn't get worse because you forgot how to play. It gets worse because you are paying that cost dozens of times a minute.
The second is which decisions you lose first.
When you saturate, the easy spots keep coming out fine — you still fold the bottom of your range, you still shove the obvious ones. What degrades are the difficult decisions.
The river where your line only makes sense if you tracked what he did two hands earlier. The ICM spot that needs a moment.
And that is exactly where your edge lived. The damage doesn't spread evenly across the session. It concentrates on the reason you registered.
The third is the one that keeps the other two in place: you don't feel it happening.
In the research on fatigue and on body-clock disruption, people know they are tired and still don't rate their own performance as worse. What you feel and how you are performing come apart, and the feeling is the one you have access to. So the correction never arrives on its own.
Profitable for whom?
The value in a field comes from somewhere. Part of it is recreational players. But during a series, a large part of it is regs playing well above the number of tables where they are actually good.
I want to be careful with numbers here, because everyone's number is different and none of this should be read as a rule. What I see in the players I work with is that the overshoot is not small. Someone whose real ceiling sits around eight will be at twelve during peak hours and won't think of it as unusual.
The uncomfortable part: the attitude that makes you open more tables is the same one that hands an edge to the player who opened fewer.
You are not only giving up some of your own ROI — you are part of what makes that event worth playing for someone else.
Decide your ceiling before you look at the schedule
One thing to do, in three parts.
Plan for the peak, not for the registrations. The number that matters is not how many events you enter — it is how many tables are running at the same time, which happens two or three hours in, when late registration closes and everything overlaps.
Most players plan the first number and get ambushed by the second. Before you register, map where that overlap lands.
Set the ceiling cold. Decide it before you open the schedule, not while you are reading a list of events that all look good. Every decision you make in advance is capacity you are not spending in the moment, and the version of you reading the schedule is not the version who has to play it.
Then keep one signal running to check the number is honest. It's this: the moment you act before you have finished deciding. Not a mistake you regret afterwards — the click that goes out with the timer running while you know you hadn't finished thinking.
When that shows up, you have your answer for the day. Play out what you're in, and register nothing new.
How many tournaments you play decides whether the series ends up profitable for you or for someone else at the table.
Not every performance decision gets made during the session. Plenty of them get made before you sit down, and online, this is one of them.
