Poker Strategy This Spiritual Teacher Will Transform Your Poker Game URL has been copied successfully! I recently heard author Eckhart Tolle speaking on the topic of meditation and one thing he said struck me as applicable not just to meditation, but to all walks of life — poker included. Tolle was discussing how when most people begin meditating, they try to sit in meditation for far too long. When you’re an inexperienced meditator 10 minutes of presence can feel like an eternity, and many people attempt to meditate for much longer than that even. People see an Instagram post or a TikTok saying that the optimal meditation time is 40 minutes per day and instantly make it their benchmark. Inevitably, when the realities of committing a sizable chunk of time to stillness rears its ugly head — usually in the form of boredom or a busy schedule — these people claim “meditation just doesn’t work for me” and spend another year (or ten) lost in inner chatter before starting the cycle again. Instead, says Eckhart, the focus should be on “not long, but often.” Instead of (or in addition to) committing to a dedicated meditation time, Tolle recommends that we practice coming into the moment as often as we can throughout the day and taking just a couple of short moments — no more than a few breaths — to come back to presence and remind ourselves of the sacredness of the “nowness” in which we find ourselves in.Not long, but often.Hearing that got me thinking about how empowering it can be to deconstruct things that we usually over-complicate — like meditation, or poker — and break them down into their most fundamental parts.More specifically, it had me wondering how we could apply this same logic — not long, but often — to a poker act that is similar to meditation in that it is obviously beneficial but often resisted or ignored due to appearing overly complicated: poker study. Studying poker hands is something that every poker player knows they should do, but in reality, only a very small percentage make it a meaningful part of their poker experience. Perhaps it’s because, like with meditation, poker study appears to require hours upon hours of dedicated focus and attention. But what if we took Eckhart’s advice? What if after every poker session we reviewed just one hand? What if, as we played, we kept an eye out for one interesting hand, or one spot we felt confused in, or one hand that felt particularly tilting, and marked it for study? What if we boiled things down to their most basic components — hand selection from the small blind, 3 betting a cutoff open from the button, facing a flop check-raise on a monotone board — and found just one hand that fit into that category to analyze? What would happen if we took our non-existent or heavily sporadic poker study sessions and transformed them into consistent practices of micro improvement?The key isn’t to dive into a rabbit hole for hours; it’s to make poker study a habit. A few minutes of reflection, consistently, can be much more beneficial than a rare marathon session that leaves you more overwhelmed than enlightened. It’s an incremental but powerful way to build a solid foundation of poker knowledge and skills. It’s about being present in your learning, just as you are present at the table. Most importantly, it’s about continuous, mindful engagement with the game that does more than just feed you endorphins, it sets you up on a path of meaningful growth and progress.Not long, but often.