One of the biggest problems you'll face as a poker player is maintaining concentration.

As a successful poker player, you have to analyse situations and assess your opponents. All this requires you to stay focused often for hours at a time!

Factors that sap concentration

Boredom - When you're bored, your attention drifts more quickly than usual. If you're getting a bad run of cards or you're playing tight due to the number of maniacs at your table, you won't be playing many hands, and very soon you may not be paying as close attention to your opponents as you should be.

Distractions - Distractions in your poker-playing environment pull your attention away from the task at hand. These can include kids, email and the internet when playing online, or noise, passers-by or even a mouthy opponent in a cardroom.

Feeling ill - If you eat a big meal before playing, your digestive system will divert resources away from your brain to aid digestion. Not sleeping well, feeling ill, or not being as physically fit as you should be, may also contribute to a deficit in your concentration levels.

Mental state - Make sure you're in the right frame of mind to play. If you're not mentally focused, lacking the motivation to play, or not feeling good about yourself, then it's probably best not to play. All these factors can lead to low self-esteem and low self-confidence, and this in turn is likely to lead to poor concentration.

The good news is that it's possible to improve your powers of concentration.

Your concentration is like a muscle – it needs to be exercised to build strength, and this will take time and effort. Here are three effective ways to do this -

Make notes - This is a sure way to stay focused on the task in hand and it's easy to do on the internet where most major sites have note-taking facilities. Make a record of things like your opponents' starting hands and where they play them from; whether they limp in a lot or always come in with a raise and, if so, the size of the raise. This will stop you being distracted by emails and the internet, as one activity is incompatible with the other.

Narrow your focus of attention - It's difficult when you're starting out to focus on all of your opponents at the table – such information overload will probably leave your head in a spin, and be more likely to lessen your concentration skills. Instead, reduce the number of things you focus on. Start off by concentrating on two players: the person who's on the button to your big blind, and the person who will be the big blind when you're on the button. Do they always raise you, or do they vigourously defend their blind? Once this becomes an automatic process, add another factor to your focus of attention – but not until then. It will take time to achieve this, but if you work at it your concentration will improve and you'll eventually be able to process enough information about all of your opponents to make you a winning poker player.

Self-talk - Silently talk to yourself after every hand. Analyse the hand you've just seen or played. Tell yourself what was good and bad about it. Mentally reward yourself when you've done something good (like spotting a 'tell'). The principles of behavioural psychology tell us that a reward is the surest way to get someone (yourself) to repeat a behaviour – you want to get into the habit of doing good things at the poker table.