Have you ever found that sometimes you start tournaments well and in others you just can't get 'tuned in'? Sometimes you make finals but when the money counts you make mistakes and have difficulty focusing? What should you do about it?

We all know the expression fish by now: the fish, the sucker, your own personal ATM. I keep a word document on my PC, which serves as my fish list – a comprehensive list of all the very poor and very profitable players I have encountered, and who I want to meet again. I will type all the names into whichever site I am playing at the time before I start a cash game to see who is around, and join their table whenever possible.

Very few players succeed in both tournaments and cash games. Generally, you find players who are specialists. Maybe they travel the tournament trail around the country, playing the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Tournament Circuit events. Maybe they play sit-and-go tournaments on the Internet all of the time. Maybe they specialize in small-stakes no-limit hold'em cash games. Or, maybe they specialize in online multitable tournaments. Generally, most poker players are specialists.

This is the second of a two-part article on schooling. The first part can be found here.

Schooling is a controversial poker concept describing the behavior of groups of weak players, typically in low-limit games. The theory suggests that a large number of loose players in a limit hold’em game help each other out by pooling outs and giving each other better pot odds. In fact, some say that games with too many players are actually harder to beat than games with only a few loose players.