The Real Reason You're Stuck at Mid-Stakes

19 Sep 2025

Beginner

This material is for beginner players

If you’ve made it to mid-stakes, let’s be clear: you already have talent. You’ve studied the game, applied solid strategies, and beaten your player pools. You’ve climbed through the micros, battled at the small stakes, and proven that you belong in tougher lineups. That’s no small achievement. But here’s the frustrating truth: talent and strategy alone won’t carry you further.

Why Players Get Stuck at Mid-Stakes

If you’re struggling to move up, the issue usually isn’t a lack of solver knowledge. It runs deeper. At mid-stakes, two main factors hold players back. The first — and often the most damaging — is mindset.

On the surface, it’s easy to blame variance, a bad run, or tougher opponents. But in reality, what keeps players stuck often happens internally. After working with thousands of players, I’ve identified four major mindset leaks that repeatedly derail progress.

1. The Identity Ceiling

You don’t fully believe you belong at higher stakes. The gap between the player you are now and the player you need to become creates hesitation and self-sabotage. Playing it safe feels easier. This fear becomes a ceiling.

2. Tilt and Emotions

The daily swings of poker wear you down. Bad beats, coolers, and mistakes knock you off balance. Frustration, anger, or brain fog creep in, and you start making decisions you normally wouldn’t. Sometimes that shows up as reckless aggression and wider call-downs. Other times, it’s risk aversion and overly passive play. Either way, you’re no longer playing your A-game.

3. Lack of Resilience

Downswings don’t strengthen you — they break you. Big setbacks feel personal. Long losing streaks feel like proof you’re not good enough. Instead of using tough stretches as fuel to improve, you let them chip away at your confidence. With fewer positive results to lean on, self-doubt grows louder.

4. Poor Perspective

You zoom in on short-term results — one bad session, one bad week — and lose sight of the bigger picture. Your mind creates a negative story about why you’re running bad and why the game feels unfair. This makes variance unbearable. You fixate on things outside of your control — results, opponents, luck — and spend less energy on what you can control. The result? Worse play and sometimes avoiding the grind altogether.

One Leak Is Enough to Hold You Back

You don’t need to suffer from all of these mindset leaks. Maybe tilt doesn’t affect you anymore. Maybe years of grinding have built up resilience. But here’s the catch: even one leak is enough to unravel everything. Think of it like a chain — it’s only as strong as its weakest link. You can have three strong links, but if one is weak, the chain breaks there.

The same goes for your game. Without a bulletproof mindset, you’ll keep holding yourself back or sabotaging yourself when it matters most. Take a moment to reflect: do any of these leaks sound familiar? We’ll come back to fixing them shortly.

If your mindset is solid and none of those leaks apply, then there’s a very good chance you’re dealing with the second type of obstacle: performance leaks. Just like with mindset, I’ve identified four of the most common ones that keep players stuck at mid-stakes.

1. Lack of Focus

Your attention drifts. You autopilot. You get distracted. And late in your sessions, your ability to concentrate collapses. You already know how costly this is. Every time you slip into autopilot, you’re bleeding EV.

2. Lack of Energy

You’re playing tired, drained, or burned out. Poor sleep, weak recovery, and inconsistent lifestyle habits leave you running on half a tank. Energy is the fuel of performance. If your energy is low, your game is capped — no matter how sharp your strategy is.

3. Poor Stress Regulation

Poker is brutally stressful. It takes a toll not just mentally but physically. If you can’t shut off the stress response and recover properly, you end up chronically stressed. When that happens, you stop adapting to the pressure. Your body stays in fight-or-flight mode, and your performance gradually breaks down.

4. Lack of Presence

The fourth leak is lack of presence — playing with a scattered mind. You’re not fully there. Instead of focusing on the hand, you’re replaying past mistakes or getting anxious about what might happen next. That split attention costs you, because in poker, being half present is the same as giving up edges.

Even One Leak Is Enough

Just like mindset leaks, you don’t need to suffer from all of these. Even one performance leak can derail your whole game. Think of performance like a Formula 1 car: every part has to work together for it to run at top speed. If one part fails, the car stops.

It’s the same in poker:

• You can be full of energy but lose focus, and that’s enough to kill your edge;
• You can be present and focused but unable to regulate stress, and you’ll break down sooner or later.

The bigger issue is that you don’t have a performance system — the routines and habits that keep you playing your A-game consistently.

So before we talk about solutions, take a moment to reflect:

• Where is your biggest leak right now?
• Is it in your mindset?
• Or is it in your performance?

The first step to fixing a leak is knowing exactly where it is. The good news is that every leak can be fixed. Each one can be plugged by training a specific skill. When you build that skill, the leak disappears. 

So, to really move forward, you need to work on two things:

• Building a bulletproof mindset;
• Creating a performance system.

Let’s go with the first one.

A bulletproof mindset isn’t just a nice idea. It’s the only way to handle everything poker throws your way. There are four skills that will help you fix your mindset leaks:

Self-Awareness

Deep down, you might not fully believe you belong at the higher stakes. That creates hesitation and second-guessing. Self-awareness helps you remove those limits, reconnect with your values, and step into a stronger version of yourself who thrives at tougher games.

Emotional Regulation

Bad beats, coolers, or mistakes can drag you into reactive poker. Emotional regulation means recognizing your triggers and keeping your responses under control, so you stay composed and rational no matter what happens at the table.

Resilience

Downswings can chip away at your confidence until you start doubting yourself. Resilience allows you to bounce back stronger, using adversity as fuel to keep improving.

Perspective

When you get too zoomed in on short-term swings, every session feels like an emotional roller coaster. Perspective lets you zoom out, see the long game, and stop fixating on things outside your control — focusing instead on what really matters for your long-term success.

You can have a rock-solid identity, regulate your emotions, bounce back from setbacks, and keep perspective. But if your performance system breaks down, you won’t be able to bring your A-game when it matters most.

That’s why the second piece — performance — is just as important. And again, there are four key skills that directly repair the most common performance leaks.

Focus

One of the biggest leaks at mid-stakes is lack of focus. Your attention drifts, you slip into autopilot, or you lose concentration late in sessions. Focus is like a muscle. When you train it, you learn to direct and hold your attention where it matters — on the tables — without letting distractions steal your edge.

Energy Optimization

Another leak is low energy. Playing tired, drained, or burned out means you rarely bring your best self to the felt. Optimizing your energy through nutrition, fitness, recovery, and lifestyle allows you to perform at a consistently high level — not just on those random “good days”.

Stress Mastery

Poker is stressful. Add life stress on top, and the pressure starts creeping into your game. Stress mastery is about developing the tools to regulate and reset your nervous system. You learn when to ramp up activation to perform under pressure, and just as importantly, when to shut it off to recover fully.

Presence

The fourth performance leak is lack of presence. A scattered mind pulls you out of the moment — replaying past mistakes, worrying about the future, or splitting attention between the game and something else. Presence means being fully there, hand after hand. In poker, even a small gap in focus can be incredibly costly.

Presence anchors you in the hand you’re playing. It makes you open, receptive, intuitive — even playful — instead of bogged down by mental chatter.

When you work on these four areas — focus, energy, stress mastery, and presence — you create a performance system that allows you to bring your best game every time you sit down to grind.
It becomes systemized, not left to chance.

Here’s the most important point: every leak comes from a skill you haven’t mastered yet. If you’re struggling with tilt, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you — it just means you haven’t built the skill of emotional regulation. If you lose focus, it’s because that “focus muscle” hasn’t been trained. If stress breaks you down or you lack energy, it’s because you don’t yet have the right tools to regulate and recover.

Just like your technical game, these are not fixed traits. They’re skills. And like any skill, they can be trained, improved, and progressed over time. Think about how you approach a strategy leak. You identify where it’s coming from, make adjustments, and then put in the reps until the fix becomes second nature.

Mindset and performance work exactly the same way. Every challenge you face at the tables comes back to a skill you haven’t yet developed. And once you identify the leak, you’ll know exactly which skill you need to start training.

Reflecting on Your Leaks

We’ve covered a lot of different leaks in this video. Now it’s your turn to reflect: which ones relate most to you? Just take a short break and think about where your biggest leaks are right now.

• Mindset: maybe it’s doubts about your identity, emotions you can’t control, a lack of resilience, or too narrow a perspective;
• Performance: maybe you struggle to focus, run out of energy, collapse under high stress, or fail to stay present.

You’re probably not dealing with all of these. More likely, it’s one or two key leaks that cause most of your problems.

Here’s what I want you to remember: every leak comes from a skill you can train. Just like you’ve done countless times with your technical game, you can:

• Spot the weakness.
• Work on it.
• Turn it into a strength.

That’s the path forward. That’s how you break through the mid-stakes wall. So, take a moment to be honest with yourself: What’s the one leak you need to fix first? No matter the answer, keep working on those leaks, and I’ll see you at the higher stakes. Good luck!