MentalForge - Track your Mental Game before and after sessions
Hey everyone,
My friend and I are building Mentalforge because we felt that poker players had plenty of tools for strategy, but almost nothing to help them work on the mental side of their game in a structured way. Now we’re lookin for other players helping to improve it.
Our claim: The improvement infrastructure around poker is well developed on the technical side — solvers, hand history review, coaching, training sites. The mental side has basically nothing equivalent. You might consume content, maybe see a coach, but there's no consistent practice structure the way there is for technical work.
The gap we kept coming back to: most players know roughly when they're playing their best and worst, but almost nobody has data on *why*.
- What their sleep was like.
- Whether they were carrying stress into the session.
- How strong the loss-recovery urge was before they sat down.
- Which tilt patterns show up consistently across weeks of play.
That's exactly why we built MentalForge — it’s a short check-in before you play, a short review after, and over time a database of your own mental game you can actually visualize metrics and learn from.
A few things that drove the design: the questionnaire isn't just data collection — answering honestly before a session is itself a form of preparation. There's solid research behind this and we've built around it rather than just slapping a slider on "how tilted are you 1-10." Things we track:
- cognitive clarity
- emotional stability
- pressure to recover losses
- variance resilience
- A/B/C game split
- And more
The pre-session check-in takes 2 minutes. The post-session review takes 3-5. The value compounds as you log more sessions.
We're opening beta this week to a small group. We want players who will actually use it and tell us what's wrong — not people looking for a finished product.
If you're interested: Mentalforge.io
Happy to answer questions here — what the tool looks like, how the data is structured, the psychology behind the questions.
9 Replies
This is interesting. I personally keep track of mood and how I play every session. And make a little note of the things I thought I did good and what I could do better.
These notes often become the areas I study away from the tables.
As far as sleep, fitness, diet, I feel I have those areas pretty nailed. No caffeine after 2pm, workout 4 days a week cardio 1-2, rarely eat bad, have a good sleep routine.
It would be interesting to see an app make recommendations to the player if they find things that correlated with their play.
Eg, if they’re drinking caffeine late, which gives them poor sleep quality. Maybe even have it work with Apple Health and something like Sleep Cycle to tie it all together.
This is interesting. I personally keep track of mood and how I play every session. And make a little note of the things I thought I did good and what I could do better. These notes often become the areas I study away from the tables. As far as sleep, fitness, diet, I feel I have those areas pretty nailed. No caffeine after 2pm, workout 4 days a week cardio 1-2, rarely eat bad,
Thank you for the input, seems like you are already doing some similiar stuff to what our app provides. Would be interesting to hear more, maybe you have some potential future features which we could implement. if you're willing to share, this is our discord https://discord.com/invite/4WWxXRxXTP
You hit the nail on the head, by tracking all these different metrics we are already providing the framework for players to visualize their own data and see the correlations. We will also be collecting data to be able to give more specialized feedback depending on how players are scoring.
Things like bad sleep=bad focus, more stress=more tilt are pretty straightforward for most people, but 1. it hits different if there's data in front of you which is showing specifically that your bad sleeping habits is making you loose some EV etc. 2. just honestly finding the discipline and consistency to measure these metrics and otherwise reflect on the session is a tool for improvement itself.
And yes, implementation of Apple Health, Fitbit, Oura Rings and basically all sleep/heart rate/fitness trackers are coming soon into Mentalforge. This will give strong data points to connect to some of the metrics we are already tracking. 😀
I think the only drawback I see is demand. This subforum is basically dead and kinda always has been. Theres a ton of EV to unlock in the mental game, and 99.9% of players will avoid it.
They want mantras or hypnosis. Ie, something external and easy to do the heavy lifting.
GL
I find the tough part of studying this kinda of stuff and even trying to apply it is that I'm just so damn unlucky lol.
I can do the meditations and practice all this stuff so that I should in theory be playing my best during my sessions.
But then I take sick beats in key spots that I hardly ever dish out to other players, and its like luck is far more important
than all of this.
I could give countless examples of me playing tournaments and just having sick luck late in tournaments and taking bad
beats while so rarely putting those same beats on my opponents. So its hard to be motived for this type of stuff.
Maybe if that stuff would balance out some.
That post is part of why the Psych forum isn’t really very good.
A guy makes a post explaining he can’t work on his mental game because he runs bad.
When really, that’s an embarrassingly lame excuse
That post is part of why the Psych forum isn’t really very good.
A guy makes a post explaining he can’t work on his mental game because he runs bad.
When really, that’s an embarrassingly lame excuse
You don't run like me bro. Most regs run like gods. So be grateful.
I've seen regs do things in 1 tournament that literally takes me years.
I wish you could play as me for a few weeks, then well see.
Yes, whine about how unlucky you are. All regs and pros just sunrun. Why try. That’s a pretty sad way to go through life.
During my “unluckiest” runs, I’ve stuck with studying because you can still work on making your adjusted EV higher. Once your downswing ends, you’ll be making more.
Or, come on 2+2 and solicit pity for yourself and how unlucky you are.
I find the tough part of studying this kinda of stuff and even trying to apply it is that I'm just so damn unlucky lol.I can do the meditations and practice all this stuff so that I should in theory be playing my best during my sessions.But then I take sick beats in key spots that I hardly ever dish out to other players, and its like luck is far more importantthan all of this.I
Managing emotions during sessions where you take sick beats is a lot of times the difference between being EV+ OR EV-. You should give tracking your mental performance an honest chance, it only takes a few minutes anyways so nothing is lost if it doesn't work for you. https://mentalforge.io
https://discord.com/invite/4WWxXRxXTP This is our discord incase you want some help getting started. I've worked with quite a few people with similiar claims, but the truth is bad variance and sick runs affect everyone equally. Profitable players are able to setup themselves that despite running like ****, they are able to power through without playing C game and therefore get through the storms quicker without having burnt their bankroll.
I agree—the mental game is an underrated part of poker, even though it’s the biggest reason why players lose money.
But for me, there’s one major issue that causes a lot of struggle: overthinking. Paying attention to every small detail, tracking everything, being hyper-aware of every change in your mental state—it consumes a huge amount of energy. Sometimes, less is more. Caring too much is a sure way to burn out.
Poker is already complex enough. For me, adding more “tools” just creates more things to worry about and get anxious over. I’d rather have resources that make poker simpler.
Thanks.
