The paper reviews the previous Garching Belt Pinch experiments. According to these pulsed, tokamak-type experiments with elongated plasma cross-section, a significant improvement of the maximum beta in a tokamak configuration seems possible. The basic conditions are: increased vertical plasma elongation (e.g. b/a > 1.5) in combination with D-shaping, increased central q-values (e.g. qo ⪆ 1.5 – 2), a rather flat toroidal current distribution and operation at high poloidal beta (e.g. βpol ⪆ A/2)