Getting Inside Your Opponent’s Head: Mastering Emotional Awareness to Win More

12 Jul 2025

Beginner

This material is for beginner players

While many focus only on technical skills, the real winners combine that with curiosity about their opponents and an ability to exploit the gaps others overlook. Today, we’ll dig into how emotional intelligence and strategic insight come together to help you rise from a good player to a top competitor — finding inefficiencies, reading people deeply, and making those game-changing decisions that separate the best from the rest.

If you’re in your poker career feeling like you could always be getting a little bit more — your results could always be better, your performance cleaner, crisper, and at a higher level than it is — then I’m going to give you something here that I think you’re almost certainly missing.

Way back when I first started playing poker, all of us winning players were really good at this. But over time, with the increase of technical knowledge, this element has really gotten phased out of the game.

I was telling one of my clients the other day about how you guys are all so freaking good at poker now — you know so, so much — but what you have lost in the process is this incredibly valuable element of curiosity about who you’re going up against when you’re in the battle.

Imagine you were playing against somebody who knew you completely — even better than you know yourself. Imagine they understood your emotions completely. They knew exactly when you started to get frustrated, when you were feeling really great. They know what upsets you and how to upset you. They know exactly what to say to put you in a state where you’re going to perform worse over time.

This is the aspect of the game that I think has really gotten lost over the years as technical knowledge has ramped up: the fact that poker is a human-to-human game. Doyle Brunson said it best in one of his books I read early on — a line that really made an impression on me: poker is a game played by people.

At the end of the day, no matter what happens with strategic developments and who’s doing what, you are playing against one other person. Your best bet to make as much money as possible, to dominate them when you’re playing, is to understand them at the deepest level possible.

And I think this is where poker players have gone wrong in the last 10 or 15 years. The basis of the game has shifted from “I want to understand you deeply so that I can crush you” to “I want to understand the game deeply so that I can come up with a strategy that beats your strategy”.

Understanding the Difference: Strategy vs. Opponent

It might seem similar on the surface, but it’s really two completely different things. One aspect of the more modern trend is: I’m just here to learn poker, and I want my poker to be better than your poker. But at the end of the day, that’s all in service of one thing — which is winning as much money as possible.

You can combine all the knowledge that you get, but bring it back to this idea that, yeah, I have all this knowledge, and what I’m really here to do is to understand who you are. Try and get as clear of a picture of your emotional state, what you like, what you don’t like, what you’re comfortable with, what you’re not comfortable with. Filter every one of our interactions in this way so that I can learn about who you are and use that to always stay one step ahead of you. And that’s going to require the lost art of curiosity.

We’re deep into World Series of Poker season right about now, which means that you’re going to start seeing clips of poker hands getting played and then posted on social media. In the comments section, you’re going to see all the people saying things like: this hand was good, this hand was bad, this decision was worth this much money, this decision cost them this much money — and it’s all in search of the right answer.

We’re all very obsessed now with figuring out what is right, what is wrong, was this good, was this bad? And when you get caught up in this, there’s one critical thing you’re not doing.

You’re not getting curious about what happened over here that put this person into the state where this play started to look like a good idea. What can I learn about what I just saw? Because I know they don’t normally play this way, so what was happening over here? I wonder, what could they have been seeing? What could they have been feeling? What was happening right before that maybe created some internal discomfort in them that made them behave in this way?

The Missing Discussion About Emotional Awareness

See, I don’t see any discussion about stuff like that, and I certainly don’t see people getting curious about how does that happen to me? That’s where you’ve got to always take it as: what causes me to get into these uncomfortable states? Where do I get more comfortable? Where do I get very uncomfortable?

So, you get to do it both ways — you get to learn about yourself, you get to learn about other people. What happens is that the more and more you get to know somebody, the more and more that this will influence your instincts, your behavior, your decisions in big moments. Because if you truly know somebody at a deep level, you are much more equipped to stay one step ahead of them.

Pairing Technical Skill with Genuine Curiosity

All the technical knowledge you gain really can be used in service of staying one step ahead in this way, when paired with being genuinely curious about who you’re up against. And that’s what I’m not really seeing much of these days out in the poker world.

So think of it as a shift in terms of what your actual job is as a poker player. Stop thinking about it in terms of “my job is to come up with strategies that defeat their strategies.” That’s the end result, and you’re going to get there much faster when you decide that what you’re actually here to do — your main priority — is to get to know who you’re up against, get to know who you’re spending all this time with, get to know who you’re doing all these interactions and battles with as much as possible.

Your Daily Job: Knowing Your Opponent Deeply

Your new job and your actual job is to get to know your opponent as much as possible so that you can crush them, so that your strategies will always stay one step ahead of theirs. When this is the approach you take, it starts to infuse everything that you do — not just at the table, but the way that you study, the way that you watch hands, the way that you review hands.

Every hand you look at is just you getting a clearer perspective about who you’re up against — how they think, how they feel, what they like, what they don’t like — so you can use that advantage to put them in as many uncomfortable situations as possible, creating more and more edges for yourself going forward.

Now, if you’re not skilled in the art of feeling your own feelings as they come, none of this is going to work. I suspect that’s why so few people are doing this these days — because there’s a whole can of worms inside when it comes to your own emotions while you play the game. It’s far easier to just exist up here in your head and try to think strategy versus strategy. But if you can go inside yourself and stay present with your feelings as they arise, then you become available and able to really notice what’s happening over there, on the other side, in your opponents.

So get present with your feelings so that you can really take in what’s happening over there, get to know who you’re dealing with, take advantage of that information, and pair it with all the skill, study, and knowledge you have. That’s what’s going to get you unstuck. That’s what’s going to take you to the highest level.

I’m certain the best of the best performers — the people winning the most money — on some level, are doing a version of this. They’re always curious about who they’re up against. That’s how they come up with those above-the-rim plays where you watch and think, “How could they make that laydown right there?” or “How could they make that thin value bet?” or “How could they make that hero call?” Well, on some level, they just understand their opponent deeply in that moment, enough to divert their strategy from what they would normally do.

Quite often, that’s the difference between finishing ninth place and taking first place. Being a pretty good winning player versus being a top, top player is being able to do these things consistently and trusting that you know how to do it.

Take It to Another Level

You know, I always hear people talking: I wish I could go back to the good old days 20 years ago when nobody knew anything about poker. Well, the thing about that is there’s always a gap. There’s always an inefficiency.

There’s always an area of the game where people are not paying attention and putting their focus on. Back then, it was technical study, and so if you had that stuff down then, yeah, we made a lot of money off of that, but that’s not how it is now.

It’s taking the thing everybody’s good at and then taking that to another level with something that they’re not. I strongly believe that this is that thing. So I hope you take this conversation to heart and apply this to your game. Remember, it’s not that I create a strategy to beat you. It’s: I get to know you as deeply as possible through all of our interactions so that my behavior will start to shape in ways that naturally stay one step ahead of you and win faster, win more, move up faster — all the things that you want, I think, lie within there.

What separates those who play poker from those who win at poker for a living? It’s not just knowledge of pot odds or the ability to read a bluff — it’s the ability to accelerate learning, adapt faster than the field, and stay ahead of trends in an ever-changing game. In today’s environment, where solvers, databases, and coaching are widely available, what matters is how you use these tools. The truth is, without expert guidance, most players study inefficiently — wasting time, misapplying concepts, or even training bad habits they don’t realize they have.

At Getcoach, we take that guesswork out of the equation. Our platform is built by winning professionals who have battled at the highest stakes both live and online. We provide structured learning paths, from beginner to elite, designed to fit your current level and goals. Our students get access to:

• Personalized coaching plans tailored to your playing style and leaks.
• Exclusive solver outputs and breakdowns you won’t find on free YouTube content.
• Live hand reviews, database analysis, and private group sessions.
• Mental game training to help you handle swings, tilt, and burnout.
• Guidance on bankroll management and game selection — because it’s not just about how you play, but where you play.

We don’t sell dreams — we build real grinders.

Build Your Career, Not Just Your Game

Poker is one of the last frontiers where skill can create freedom. But freedom comes at a price: you need to run your career like a business. That means having systems, tracking results, planning your study, and surrounding yourself with people who push you to get better every day. At Getcoach, that’s exactly what we offer: a community of players committed to growth, with access to the best tools, strategies, and coaching in the industry.

If you’re serious about making poker your profession — or just want to maximize your potential — join Getcoach and start working smarter, not harder. The game keeps evolving. So should you!