It can be done.

Following my last post, I decided to try a smaller tourney. I settled on a 45 player SNG (NL Holdem) on Stars.

Sure enough, I was able to keep my focus up for most of the tourney, taking 4th place before losing my chips with A-4 versus the other guy's A-9. I made the final table, I made the money, and that was good enough for me.

I still need to work on my tournament stamina. After an hour and a half or two hours, I get restless and a bit bored and do stupid things that eventually get me knocked out. Unfortunately, the way to work on this would seem to be to play more tournaments with larger and larger fields until I can play a consistently good game for 3, 4, 5 hours or more.

I dread this. I really do. I'm going to have to do this one step at a time, slowly increasing the size of the fields and the buyin so I can try playing for longer periods of time for possible payoffs that are large enough to actually keep my attention for that time. If I have to play serious poker for 5 hours to make $80, well, it's just not going to appeal to me.

I'm not going to the WSOP anytime soon, so I'll just build up slowly.