How am I doing this?

I said in a recent post that I'm good at analyzing my strengths and weakness.  What's happened in the past week is giving me pause.

My caregiver duty schedule was changed, at the request of my sister-in-law, who is the other primary caregiver for my mother-in-law.  She wanted to do something with some friends, and the days she wanted me to cover lined up perfectly for me able to play poker every day of the week (I wound up missing one day.)

The continuity of playing almost every day helped me a lot.  It's hard to stay focused and have my mind in the right place when I'm constantly jumping in and out of poker mode.  There are weeks where I'm not even home for more than three days, and one of them is often lost to catching up on my sleep.

The other factor that makes it tough for me to stay in poker mode is the difference in caregiving and poker schedules.  As a caregiver, I have to be up in the morning to make breakfast.  As a poker player, I want to sleep so that I'm ready for tournaments that start at 6 P.M. and sometimes go past midnight.

The thing that I'm confused by is how well I'm doing.  In the live tournaments that I've played in the last week, I had a $310 cash ($230 net after expenses) and two tournaments where I missed cashing by one or two spots.  I made the final table almost every time.

I know that I'm getting better, this isn't just short-term variance.  People regard me differently.  I'm getting a lot more respect, and even a little fear from time to time.  But it doesn't make sense.

I know the background of some of the regulars that I play against in my main poker room.  One worked with a poker coach/backer every day for a year.  The coach was paid with a percentage of her winnings.  Other players have played on the Heartland Poker Tour, or gone to Chicago to play a big tournament there.'

I don't have any of those advantages.  I've never played at a high level, or satellited into a major tournament.  I haven't played in a casino, and given the combination of the nearest casino that deals poker being 100 miles away, my caregiver duty and my wife and I sharing one car, that's not going to change soon.

The other problem I have is that, to put it simply, the top players in my local room know things that I don't.  They can look at two hands and know, within half a percent, what the chances are that each hand will win the pot.  Some of them can read tells well.  I could list about 10 things that those people can do, but I can't.

I've read enough poker books to know what all those thing are, and that I have to learn them.  I also know myself well enough to know that I learn best in very small chuncks.  When I watch for tells, I pick one person to watch.  I can't handle more than that because I'm just starting to get good at keeping track of the pot size as the hand evolves.  Keeping track of the pot size is the one thing that I've really concentrated on in my last 10 or 15 tournaments, and I'm getting pretty good at it.

That's fine as far as it goes, but I've only been working on keeping track of the pot size, to the exclusion of almost all else.  But now I'll be back to 3-4 tournaments a month, and most of the things I need to learn will be put on hold, probably until sometime in 2016.

So here I am, trying to make something out of poker.  I know less than a lot of the good players. I have less experience, I play less often.  I don't study as much.  I'm not a big winner.  I'm old (half of the top players in the world are under 30.)

Yet, I'm getting better.  I just don't know why or how, and that bothers me.