/ Matthew Pitt / 28 April 2011 / Leave a Comment 
The inchworm is a type of caterpillar that belongs to the Geometridae family of moths. The Geometridae moths have over 1,200 species in North America alone and are sometimes known as spanworms, loopers or cankerworms and get the name inchworm from the fact they inch along by lifting their back end towards their head then stretching out their front half. When they have lifted their back end they look like a "bell curve" as seen in the picture that accompanies this post.
So has Yorkshire Pudding completely lost the plot or has he given up poker and become a biologist? Whilst I may be a little nuts I'm not completely gaga just yet and I love biology but I'm far from a biologist but believe it or not the little inchworm could be the single one thing that propels me and my inability to progress as I want to in the world of playing poker!
I have been fortunate enough to be given a copy of "The Mental Game of Poker" to read through and then review and it could quite possibly be the only poker book you ever need. I am only 55 pages into it so far but one of the first chapters is entitled Foundation and covers a number of subjects including The Inchworm. I mentioned that the inchworm looks like a bell curve when it is moving and you can apply this to your poker playing. At the very back is when you play your worst or C-game, the majority is the middle where your solid B-game is and the front is when you play your very best A-game.
How the inchworm moves is similar to how humans learn and become better at something, especially poker players. Moving forward, ie learning new plays and theories, can only happen if the back end, ie your mistakes and weaknesses, move forward with it. If you continue to learn and improve but fail to work on your weaknesses all that happens is the range between your C-game and A-game becomes wider and wider and your range flatter and flatter.
This is exactly my problem, I am always learning new approaches to the game but I do spend enough time trying to sort out my demons and my weaknesses, either because I am too lazy to do so, do not think I have that many weaknesses or just hope they will disappear as I learn new skills. Some consequences of this include not playing your best that often because it takes too much effort to do (because your inchworm is stretched so far that the gap between your C-game and A-game is huge), you make mistakes, often very basic ones, that just appear from nowhere and you can feel like your game has plateaued.
That last problem is me all over and that one in particular can lead you to become disillusioned with the game and demotivated so that you play less often or less volume. For a long time many of the people I spoke to said I should be playing much higher than I do but even they've stopped saying that because I have plateaued. I know 100% that I am 10 times the player I was just two or three years ago but I still toss it off at micro-stakes games because my own personal inchworm is probably the longest, most-stretched out in the entire poker world. This is something I am going to work on massively in the coming weeks, that is after I have finished reading this book, only another 190 pages to go!
Until next time, thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables!
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