Day 2 of a $55 regular. You’re sitting on 40bb at a 6-handed table, facing an open from a reg you know is opening 32% from the CO. You defend the BB with KJo. Flop comes J-8-4 rainbow. Check-call. Turn 2. Check-call. River 5. He bets 75% pot. You call. He shows AA.
It’s not the call that hurts. It’s the fact that you’ve played this exact line about 15 times over the last three months. You even know you’re doing it. In the moment, something inside you ignores what the technical part of your brain is screaming.
That’s the territory Jared Tendler lives in. And it’s probably why you’re here.
We see a lot of $11–$109 players who read The Mental Game of Poker, found it interesting, highlighted a few lines, and six months later are in exactly the same spot. It’s not that the book is bad. It’s that nobody clearly explains what to apply first, what’s genuinely Tendler’s and what he just borrowed, or how to translate any of it into the real grind of online MTTs in 2026.
This article fixes that. You’ll leave with the concepts that matter, the ones that are overrated, and a plan to turn theory into better decisions on next Sunday’s Day 2.
Who is Jared Tendler and why does he matter for MTT players
Tendler is a licensed sports psychologist. Before poker, he worked with professional golfers on the PGA Tour and its developmental circuit. That background matters: golf and poker share the same core performance problem — individual execution under high, prolonged variance.
He wrote two books with Barry Carter as editorial co-author. The Mental Game of Poker (2011) covers tilt, confidence, fear, and motivation. MGP2 (2013) focuses on The Zone, arousal management, and deliberate practice applied to poker. Together, they form the backbone of what has become the mental game canon in Western poker.
There’s a recurring problem, though. A lot of people credit Tendler for things that aren’t his. Four Stages of Competence belongs to Noel Burch. Yerkes-Dodson Law is from 1908. A/B/C-game is Angelo’s. We’ll separate original authorship from application — because that distinction changes what you read next to fill the gaps.
If you’re still mapping the full landscape of mental game concepts, it’s worth reading the definitive mental game guide before coming back here.
The concepts that ARE Tendler’s (and that you need to know)
Injecting Logic — the 4-step protocol for cutting tilt in real time
This is probably Tendler’s most practical contribution for online players. The protocol has four steps and works right at the table:
- Recognize: notice the physical or mental signal that tilt is arriving — jaw tight, grip on the mouse, urge to 3-bet something marginal.
- Deep breath: one slow breath to break the automatic response.
- Injecting Logic statement: a pre-written sentence, specific to your leak, that you fire into your head.
- Strategic reminder: a tactical reminder of your plan for the next few hands.
Real scenario. You just took a suckout down to 12bb in a $109, late stage, 35 minutes from the bubble. No protocol: the next spot, you call a 22bb 3-bet with A9s in the CO because “whatever, I’m done anyway.” With the protocol: you recognize it, breathe, fire the statement (“short-term variance doesn’t change my 12bb strategy”), and hit the strategic reminder (“12bb in the CO is push/fold — A9s shoves, AJo folds”). Three hands, not three sessions.
The reason “just take a deep breath” doesn’t work on its own is simple. Breathing lowers physiological arousal, but it doesn’t inject cognition. Without the pre-written logic sentence, your overheated brain rewrites reality on its own.
Mental Hand History (MHH) — the 5-step process
Mental Hand History is the emotional equivalent of the technical hand history you already do. Five steps:
- What is the problem?
- Why is it a problem?
- Why does it make sense that I have this problem?
- What is the correction?
- What is the Injecting Logic statement that captures this?
Example: “I played nit poker on a $22 bubble last Sunday.” Problem: I folded A5s from the BTN with 18bb against a 2.2bb open from a reg with a 24% opening range. Why it’s a problem: I’m burning obvious EV out of fear of busting. Why it makes sense: $22 is above my average buy-in and I’m unconsciously treating it as a “big tournament.” Correction: pre-session, review shove/reshove ranges by stack depth near the bubble. Statement: “my survival is worth less than my accumulated EV — I’m here to maximize chips, not to last 10 more minutes.”
Inchworm Concept — why your A-game rises with your C-game
The metaphor is an inchworm. The front end pulls, the back end pushes, and the whole body moves forward together. If the back stays still, the front can’t go anywhere without tearing the creature apart.
Applied to the grind: you don’t move up by improving your A-game. You move up by cutting your C-game. The ceiling rises when the floor rises. The $33 player who fantasizes about winning a $109 off one great day is staring at the front of the worm. The real work is mapping and reducing your worst decisions — which is exactly what C-game in poker unlocks once you understand how it operates.
Honest implication: your weekly performance average is the mean between your best and your worst. Improving your worst moves the average more than improving your best.
Process Model and Stable Confidence
Confidence grounded in process, not results. The logic is that MTT outcomes are incredibly noisy — you can play A-game for 8 straight hours and bust outside the money, or punt half of Day 1 and still finish top 20. If your confidence depends on results, your confidence is random.
Stable Confidence is the mature version of this: you trust that you executed your process, regardless of the outcome. For MTT players, that’s the difference between sustaining 40 tournaments a week and quitting after two bad weeks.
The 7 tilt types (canonical — not one more)
Tendler identifies seven types in MGP1. That list is closed. If you see an article attributing “pressure tilt” or “winner’s tilt” to Tendler, it’s made up.
- Running Bad Tilt: accumulated negative variance. Three deep runs with no final table and you start playing with cold anger.
- Injustice Tilt: the feeling that the game “owes” you something. Lethal after a bad beat in the money.
- Hate-Losing Tilt: disproportionate aversion to losing hands, not to losing EV.
- Mistake Tilt: you punish yourself for a technical error and play the next hand to compensate. Spiral.
- Entitlement Tilt: the Hellmuth archetype. “How dare this fish call me?” Common among $55 regs playing against $22 recreationals.
- Revenge Tilt: a specific target. You want to bust that player, not win the tournament.
- Desperation Tilt: critical on a short stack in late reg or whenever you think you need a deep run right now.
Counterintuitive take: for $11–$109 players, Desperation Tilt is more expensive than Hate-Losing Tilt. Hate-Losing costs you some chips on a marginal hand. Desperation makes you fire an impulsive re-entry in a $109 after busting three $33s in the same night. The math doesn’t work.
If you want to go deep on each type, there’s a dedicated article on tilt types in poker and how to fix each one.
What Tendler did NOT invent (but applied well)
This is where a lot of coaching content gets embarrassed.
Four Stages of Competence (unconscious incompetence → conscious incompetence → conscious competence → unconscious competence) comes from Noel Burch at Gordon Training International in the 1970s. Tendler applies it to poker learning. He didn’t discover it.
Yerkes-Dodson Law — that there’s an optimal arousal level for performance, neither too low nor too high — dates to 1908, from Robert Yerkes and John Dodson. Tendler uses it to explain why you play better under a little pressure and worse under too much.
A/B/C-game framework is Tommy Angelo’s, from Elements of Poker (2007). Tendler popularized it for a wider audience but didn’t create it. Angelo is also the originator of Reciprocality, Mum Poker, Tiltless, and Lopping Off the C-Game.
Why this matters: if you’re paying a mental game coach and they attribute A/B/C-game to Tendler, that coach hasn’t read Angelo. You want someone who’s read both.
How to apply this to your $11–$109 grind
Practical setup, no fluff:
Digital MHH notebook. A Notion or Google Doc with a fixed five-step template. Each entry is a complete Mental Hand History, dated, with the tournament and stack depth where the leak appeared.
Weekly routine. Sunday morning, before the day’s main event, write one MHH about the most expensive leak from the previous week. Not five. One. How to study poker efficiently in 2026 covers why high-volume study without focus is worse than focused study done sparingly.
5-minute pre-session ritual. Open your Injecting Logic statements document, read the 2–3 active ones aloud that week, breathe, then open your tables. This connects directly to the broader idea in the perfect routine of a professional poker player and in 10 mindset techniques every poker player should use.
Measure progress via Inchworm. The metric isn’t your best Sunday. It’s your worst decision of the week. Tracking your worst feels strange at first — the ego pushes back. But it’s the only measure that reflects a real level-up. If your worst decision in March is better than your worst decision in January, you’ve improved. Full stop.
The limits of Tendler’s work
Honest take: MGP1 and MGP2 were written before the solver era. The game has changed. The $55 online field in 2013 isn’t the same as in 2026. What hasn’t changed is the emotional architecture of the player — and that’s what Tendler covers.
Another limit: Tendler does individual mental game coaching. He doesn’t cover modern multi-way ICM pressure dynamics, ranges, or bankroll building. If your leak is purely technical — you don’t know 15bb shove ranges near the bubble — Tendler won’t fix it. He’s a mental game coach, not a technical one.
Useful complements we recommend after MGP1/MGP2: Angelo for Reciprocality and Mum Poker, Elliot Roe for A.G.A.M.E. Pre-Session Protocol, Ericsson for Deliberate Practice applied to spot study. Each one covers a blind spot Tendler leaves open.
Tendler’s frameworks click when applied daily. Poker Playbook ships with an Inchworm tracker plus automatic classification of the 7 tilt types in Tendler style. Get started free at pokerplaybook.pro.