4 Ways to Destroy Your Poker Career

28 Jul 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

Let’s be real — most poker careers don’t end in a blaze of glory. They just kinda fade out. A few bad habits creep in, players stop improving, and next thing you know, they’re stuck, frustrated, or walking away from the game for good.

Today we’re talking about four of the biggest ways people wreck their own poker careers. These are mistakes that don’t just cost you a few buy-ins — they slowly kill your progress, confidence, and motivation. The scary part? Most players don’t even realize they’re doing it until it’s too late. If you care about long-term success, this stuff matters. Let’s break it down!

There are four major pitfalls that can destroy your poker career before it even gets off the ground. These aren’t technical leaks — they’re practical, lifestyle-level decisions that slowly sabotage your progress. You can study hard and build solid skills, but if you fall into these traps, you’re still likely to fall way short of your goals.

The first one? Constantly checking your results. Now, of course, tracking results is normal. We’re human — we’re wired to monitor resources and gauge our standing. But when you start checking how much you're up or down in the middle of a session, over and over again, that habit conditions your brain to care too much about short-term variance. You’re training yourself to emotionally react to temporary fluctuations — which is the exact opposite of what long-term success in poker requires.

I've seen students hit refresh on their PokerStars tracker after every big pot, or check their GGPoker balance every 15 minutes. They do it obsessively, like a ritual. The problem is, this builds a feedback loop around meaningless noise. You’re anchoring your mindset to whatever graph spike or dip happened most recently — and that’s incredibly destructive.

Let’s get real: big wins, small wins, break-even days, and even painful losses — they’re all inevitable. The daily ups and downs are part of the deal. If you’re down three buy-ins today, it doesn’t mean anything in the bigger picture. You probably don’t even remember what happened during your session on October 15th, 2022. And if you do, ask yourself — does it actually matter now?

So here’s what I want you to do next time you feel the urge to check your balance mid-session: just pause for a second, and say to yourself, “I won’t care in five days”. That’s it. Because you won’t. You’ll care tonight, maybe tomorrow. But after that? The session will fade into the blur of a thousand others. And the sooner you can let go of those short-term results, the sooner you can actually focus on what counts.

The Dopamine Trap

There’s another serious danger with constantly checking your results — it rewires your dopamine system. You start getting a hit just from seeing an extra hundred bucks in your cashier. That instant gratification? It's a catnip for the human brain. And every time you give in to the urge to “just check” whether you're down two buy-ins instead of four, you're reinforcing a habit that’s toxic to long-term poker success.

Think about how this shows up in everyday life. You’re cooking, mid-cut with garlic on your hands, and suddenly you're grabbing your phone to send a gift to a friend because the idea just popped into your head. You wanted that tiny dopamine buzz — even though now your phone smells like garlic and you’ve interrupted your flow. It’s absurd… but familiar, right?

This addiction to small, reliable dopamine hits is everywhere. Researchers like Jonathan Haidt are studying how mobile tech and instant gratification are reshaping our brains. For many of us who grew up just as smartphones exploded, we didn’t know the risks — we just suddenly had access to everything, all the time. And poker? It feeds into that same loop. You can check your results instantly, and if you do it long enough, not caring becomes almost impossible.

If you've only been doing this for a month or two, stop now. Seriously. It trains your brain to care about the wrong thing and distracts you from what really matters — your decision quality. This habit ruins poker careers. Don’t let it ruin yours.

The second thing that can absolutely wreck your poker career (and your life) is alcohol. Now, I’m not here to preach. I grew up in the west of Scotland in the 2000s, where getting wasted every weekend wasn’t just common — it was expected. If you didn’t binge drink, people thought something was wrong with you. Being shitfaced was just the norm.

I didn’t have the easiest childhood. My parents divorced when I was young, and my time living with my mum was often chaotic, unstable — sometimes even scary. By my early teens, anxiety started creeping in. Around age 16, I found alcohol… and like so many others, it felt like a solution. Suddenly I could socialize. Things felt easier. That became the default coping mechanism.

All through my twenties, I didn’t even question it. Weekend drinking sessions that started at 5 p.m. and ended at 6 a.m. were just a part of life. But the older I got, the worse it became. My mental health declined, and I could no longer bounce back from those nights out like I used to. By my thirties, I realized something had to change. The cultural conditioning — that heavy drinking was just “what you do” — was clearly not working anymore.

Then came the research: long-term damage, sleep disruption, increased risk of serious illness. Even a couple of drinks wreck your sleep for the night. And by 2020, my mental health was in pieces again. It became painfully clear — alcohol wasn't helping me cope. It was dragging me down.

During lockdown, I was drinking a lot — most of a bottle of wine some nights, sometimes whiskey too, just for the hell of it. I'd wake up the next day with seven coaching sessions lined up, feeling like I couldn’t breathe. I’d have to pace the room just to avoid a panic attack. It was only after I hit a real crisis point and got proper therapy that I finally saw it clearly: the thing I’d grown up thinking was “normal” was actually poisoning me.

These days, I still drink occasionally — socially — but I often go months without touching a drop. Right now, I’m about seven weeks into one of those dry stretches. And when I do drink, it’s usually for a specific occasion or two, not a habit. I’ve found that my emotional stability, motivation, clarity — all of it improves drastically when I’m not hungover.

And by hungover, I don’t just mean the day after a night out. For me, the worst day was always Tuesday if I’d been drinking Saturday. The physical symptoms might fade, but mentally, I’d be foggy, anxious, and playing my worst poker. I’d stream and feel like I couldn’t think. Viewers would call me out — “This guy’s trash” — and honestly, they weren’t wrong.

But then comes the trap: you drink again to feel like you can cope, and the cycle continues. Alcohol Explained is a great book that breaks this down in depth. But as it applies to poker — that creeping paranoia, the sense everyone’s out to get you, like everyone’s bluffing you — it’s a terrible state to play from.

I used to think that people in chat were out to get me — like actual enemies I needed to fight off. Someone would write something mildly toxic like: “Haha, you don’t even beat the stakes you play, bro” on a stream or YouTube comment, and I’d take it personally. It felt like they hated me. I’d spiral.

Now? I just don’t believe what they’re saying. And more importantly, I don’t care. I don’t even feel the need to respond most of the time. Occasionally I will, because it’s cathartic. Like recently, someone replied to my newsletter mocking the phrase “esteemed theoretician,” which I’d used on my website years ago. I just messaged him directly and said: “Why are you doing this? Do you want to be on the email list, or are you just trying to be hurtful?”. He didn’t reply, of course.

But today, when I respond, it’s not from a place of insecurity — it’s more about calling things out that are just weird or unnecessary. Back then, though, I was fragile. I took everything personally. I’d feel attacked, hurt, anxious — and that would bleed into my poker game, my poker coaching, my decision-making. I wasn’t operating at anything close to my best.

And there was more: I was overweight too. Alcohol played a big role in that. It’s full of empty calories, sure, but it also screws up your hunger signals. You eat more than you need to, because your body thinks it needs recovery fuel.

If you’re trying to take poker seriously — and you’re using alcohol to cope with the stress of a losing day — you’re setting yourself up for a downward spiral. You’ll sleep poorly, feel worse the next day, become more anxious and paranoid, and less able to handle pressure. And when poker hits you again with another tough session, it becomes way too easy to keep reaching for another drink.

It lowers your inhibitions, sure, and in the short term, it can make a good moment feel even better. But that’s a dangerous illusion. Take poker: have a couple beers, fire up a session, and in the beginning you might feel like you’re actually playing better. You're looser, more relaxed, maybe even a bit sharper... for about 30 minutes.

But after that? The crash hits. Not only does your level of play fall off a cliff, but your awareness of how badly you're playing also goes with it. That’s the real kicker. You don’t have to be an alcoholic to experience withdrawal — your body does it anyway. And you’re borrowing that artificial high from tomorrow’s performance. You’ll wake up cloudy, anxious, and way behind on focus, motivation, and emotional stability — all the things that good poker demands.

The main reason I’m talking about alcohol here isn’t even the catastrophic, blackout-binge nights where someone loses 16 buy-ins — although those definitely happen. I’ve done that. You’ve probably done that too. But the real problem is far more subtle and long-term: it’s the consistent, quiet presence of alcohol in your life that chips away at your game little by little. It erodes performance, clarity, and confidence. If poker’s important to you, it’s just not worth it. Find another way to unwind.

There’s something deeply emotional — almost primal — about the idea of getting bluffed. It can feel like you’re being scammed, bullied, taken advantage of. Like there’s this clever, shrewd opponent sitting across from you who sees right through you — and your ego wants to scream like: “No way. Not happening”. We’re wired to resist that. It’s not just about the chips; it’s about pride.

So here’s a challenge for your next few sessions: when you’re in a hand against a reg — especially one who clearly studies, uses overbets, understands sizing — ask yourself: “How am I viewing this person? Are you seeing them as some terrifying, unstoppable threat? Or can you see them for what they are — just another opponent you need to play well against?”.

Because the healthy move is to fall back on what you’ve studied. That’s not waving the white flag — it’s anchoring in your base strategy. It’s saying: “I don’t need to guess here. I’ve got a solid foundation”. You don’t need to out-level yourself. Sometimes the hand is just a fold in theory. Maybe it blocks too many bluffs, unblocks value. Let it go. Or maybe it’s close and you roll a call. That’s fine too.

I usually tell students not to roll in big river spots — especially when bluff-catching — because that’s where the EV comes from: making reads and adjusting. But if you’re up against someone better and you don’t have a clear sense of their bluffing frequency, it’s absolutely okay to fall back on your base game. That’s way better than going to war just because your ego can’t tolerate being bluffed. That’s the leak right there — and it’s one of the most common.

There’s another thing I’ve noticed with some students, especially from the East Coast of the U.S. — you know, places with lots of money, ambition, and that rat-race culture where it’s all about getting ahead and being tough. A lot of these players are incredibly rigid and stuck in the pot when facing aggressive opponents. They just lose it whenever someone isn’t passive, and they end up projecting that frustration onto nearly every opponent.

This is one side of ego — it comes from experiences of having to fight bullies or feeling persecuted. That feeling is scary, and poker becomes this battleground where people are trying to take your chips, so your brain flips into a “victim fight” mode. When that happens, you get rigid, blind, and unable to fold honestly and openly. You stop playing poker and start playing “I will never be bluffed”.

If you get run over or if someone’s over-bluffing and you fold, that’s fine—even if you don’t know it’s happening for sure. You have to go through a kind of ego death, where you feel vulnerable and maybe even terrible for folding, thinking “God, this guy could be exploiting me”. But keep reminding yourself: it’s okay to be bluffed, to be run over, and to lose pots by folding the best hand. It’s part of the game.

Feel that initial pain, work through it, and eventually it won’t hurt as much. You’ll realize you’re okay with folding. Over time, you can even build a sense of satisfaction in it. On Carrot Corner, we always talk about the “fold of a lion.” At first, you won’t be able to do it without feeling bad, but you should try. Live through those emotions—journal about them, talk to your poker friends about what it was like to fold when you’d usually call.

For many students I’ve coached, this was the key difference between being a winning player and never quite making it: learning to fold when your ego screams “call”. Many of those players could have been winners, but they weren’t — they couldn’t break through, and eventually, they quit. Unfortunately, that’s a very common and tragic story.

Just recently, I was coaching a young, really enthusiastic player — let’s call him Pete. He told me: “I get angry and refuse to fold against people in my pool. I just think they’re bluffing me all the time”. I said, “That’s totally normal. When you first enter a competitive arena where you’re playing a game of skill for resources, that’s the natural default for any human being”.

He was surprised and said: “Oh, so other people feel that way too?”. I replied like: “It would actually be strange if you didn’t feel that way. But now, your mission — your epic journey — is to overcome that problem. Everyone has this ego issue. I’m not on some pedestal saying I’m immune. I struggle with it all the time”.

Even now, you’ll feel that creeping thought: “That guy’s coming for me, maybe he’s bluffing”. And of course, bluff-catching and being right feels amazing — it’s one of the best parts of poker. But you have to be brutally honest with yourself about which spots are under-bluffed. Learn to recognize those spots technically and then actually fold when it’s right. And allow yourself to sit with the uncomfortable feelings that come with folding.

Final point: This one covers a lot but boils down to practical game stuff — like where, when, how, and with what mindset you choose to play poker. It also ties directly into your lifestyle as a serious player.

And the final huge problem is playing for too long (and in the wrong place). First of all, long sessions, getting addicted to the rush of playing poker, and then not being able to stop — that’s a major issue that can destroy your game and your life.

Honestly, I’ve been there myself. When I was in my 20s, I definitely had a habit of playing too much roulette after a night out — just chasing the highs and lows. With poker, though, it feels different for me. It’s more of a skill game, less like pure gambling. But I know plenty of people who end up playing marathon four-hour sessions because they’re addicted to the rollercoaster of winning and losing — obsessively tracking the money they want to make. That’s a gambler’s mindset, plain and simple. We even talked about it in an article a while back.

Another big reason people play for too long is that they’re like gaming addicts. They just love the fast-paced, quick decision-making aspect of online poker. You could get lost in games like League of Legends for hours, or Hearthstone, or Team Fight Tactics. I’ve spent my fair share of time on those, too — typical millennial stuff. It’s totally normal for people my age to both drink and obsessively game.

But with poker, you need to think of it more like exercise — like going for a run, playing a basketball game, or training jiu-jitsu. You wouldn’t go for a five-hour run unless you’re some sort of David Goggins, right? So you should treat poker the same way. Have a healthy session length that lets you warm up, get fully engaged, cool down a bit, and then stop when your concentration starts to fade.

Once you go beyond an hour and a half, your ability to accurately gauge how well you’re playing and maintain your skill level both start to drop off at the same time. After that, you might think you’re playing okay — but you’re actually not.

This can drag on for hours, and then later you’ll review the session — maybe send me your hands — and wonder, What was I even doing? I’ll look at them and say, Wow, that’s really bad. You’ll say, I don’t remember that hand, and I’ll say, Exactly — how did this happen? If we don’t figure out why it happened, it’ll just keep happening and tank your poker career. You’re investing in coaching to improve, and playing while tired or unfocused defeats that purpose.

Eventually, the student usually realizes, Oh, I was playing for four hours straight last night. I played too long, and it was late. That’s not a small mistake — that’s a serious lifestyle problem. It’s like going into work exhausted, or like a surgeon showing up for surgery after only a couple hours of sleep. It’s not quite as ethically critical, but it’s the same level of failing at your job.

As a poker player, you need to play when you’re functioning at your best. Imagine a soccer player going for a four-hour run before a match — you’d think, Why is he so slow today? or Why isn’t he moving? and you’d want to sub him out. That run was supposed to be prep, but it actually destroyed his performance.

So why are you playing four-and-a-half-hour poker sessions straight? If you’re a live player, you have breaks, and it’s less draining. But if you’re playing online, four-tabling fast fold for four hours straight is brutal on your brain. You end up a zombie on autopilot, building bad habits.

If you lose focus or can’t handle losing, take a break — even if it’s a month off to study or recharge. Don’t freeze up and play just a few thousand hands a month because you’re scared of losing. You have to get back in the game, even during tough stretches. Long breaks can seriously harm your poker career.

Also, be mindful of your environment. Playing poker while your family is having a conversation, or while a repair guy is fitting a new fridge, or juggling chit-chat in the kitchen — those are bad protocols. Your focus needs to be sharp and uninterrupted.

Think about it like this: if you had a job interview, or you were studying for an important exam the next day, they’d respect your need for concentration. But if your family sees poker as just a casual game — like Call of Duty or some video game — and they feel it’s okay to interrupt you during a session, you have to set boundaries and explain that’s not acceptable.

If you’re focusing on poker as your livelihood, or trying to go pro or semi-pro, or pursuing serious goals through this hobby, your partner needs to get that when you’re at those three tables on your screen, that’s work time. It might not be your main job, but it’s still work.

Ideally, you should have your own dedicated poker space — a room where you can close the door, like a home office. Sitting in the living room on a laptop with the TV blaring and conversations happening around you is not the setup for serious play. Ever notice how you play your absolute worst poker in that kind of situation? Honestly, you probably play worse than if you were drunk. I know I do.

Playing just for leisure — because you want to have fun, or you’re tired after a rough day and looking for a dopamine hit or some quick satisfaction — is usually a bad idea. Playing to fill a void, to escape life’s problems, or playing just to make money or to win that day is a big problem. Sure, your long-term goals can be to win and make money. But playing on any given day just because you want to make money that day or chase the feeling of winning is risky.

These are all practical, real-world considerations about how poker fits into your life at home, especially since most people play from home. There’s so much more I could say on all four points I’ve covered.

So, I’ll wrap up this topic by saying: if there’s a topic you want me to dive deeper into — whether it’s checking results, managing ego, dealing with drinking, or practical game stuff — just let me know. I can do a full video or stream on it.

Above all, take a moment to reflect on your current poker habits. Check in with yourself. How are you doing on these fronts? Is there something you can do today to improve your poker life and boost your win rate — even without getting technically better? With that being said, thanks for reading. Hope you’re enjoying the mental game content. Catch you next time. Bye-bye for now!