This Is Why You're Not Improving at Poker — And How to Fix It

01 Aug 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

Are you tired of being told that the reason you’re not improving at poker is because you’re just not studying hard enough? Well, good news, wizards — I’m here to tell you that there are ways you can instantly improve your poker game without needing to put in any extra study time. Let’s start!

First of all, let’s talk about what those study methods are. There are really two main categories we’re going to cover here:

• Maximizing the effectiveness of the study time you’re already putting in. This doesn’t mean doing more hours — it means making the hours you do spend more impactful;
• Maximizing your quality of performance at the table. That means playing closer to your best game every time you sit down.

Both of these are extremely important for long-term improvement in your poker game. So let’s go through them one at a time.

The first thing I recommend for getting more out of your current study time is this: choose active study methods over passive ones. The reason I say this is because so many players fall into the trap of only studying passively. And the truth is — no matter how many training videos you watch, it won’t be enough if you’re not supplementing them with active work.

Active study is what actually activates the parts of your brain that are used for making decisions in real time. Passive study doesn’t engage the physical parts of your brain that handle decision-making. Watching videos or listening to content may help you understand concepts and context, but it’s not doing much to improve your real in-game performance.

If you can, find ways to make your study more active. This means:

• Talking through hands with other players.
• Running your own sims using solvers, instead of just browsing the archive.
• Writing hands down.
• Taking notes about your opponents.

Basically, anything that’s practical and gets you mentally involved will train your brain far better than pure passive analysis.

There are huge benefits to engaging in collaborative study methods. One major advantage is that it activates multiple regions of your brain. Another is that it taps into something called the protégé effect — the phenomenon where explaining a concept to someone else actually strengthens your own understanding.

And here’s the cool part: this still works even if you’re only pretending to teach someone. You don’t need a real person in front of you. You can just simulate the process — imagine that you’re explaining the concept out loud — and your brain still gets the same learning boost.

When it comes to actually finding people to study with, the internet is your best friend. A great place to start is the GTO Wizard Discord server. Many players there form private Discord servers for one-on-one study partnerships or group sessions. 

There's even a dedicated study group channel you can check out. And because poker is global, there’s pretty much always someone online, somewhere in the world, studying the game — so chances are good you’ll find someone at your level to collaborate with.

Our third focus is this: study what you enjoy. Enjoyment is a powerful enhancer of learning effectiveness. If you focus on topics that interest you, or use study methods you genuinely like, you’ll increase the return on every hour of study — plain and simple.

Now, of course, you can’t only study the fun stuff. But if you’re unsure where to start or what subject to tackle first, going with what feels engaging and enjoyable is a smart move. When you study material that interests you, it’s more sustainable. You’re more likely to dive deeper, and you’ll reach a point where the concept becomes truly ingrained in your game.

What If You Don’t Enjoy Studying?

Now, some of you might be thinking: What if I don’t enjoy any part of studying poker? Unfortunately, if that’s where you’re at, poker is going to be a serious challenge — and it’s better to acknowledge that up front. Success in poker is strongly tied to enjoying the process of studying and improving. If you don’t have that enjoyment, if the work itself doesn’t give you some level of satisfaction, you’ll likely get bored long before you ever reach your true potential.

To grow in this game, you need to enjoy the process of getting better. The improvement itself has to be something you value. If it’s not, it’s worth finding ways to cultivate that mindset, because without it, long-term growth simply won’t happen.

Stay Immersed in the Game

The last recommendation for improving your study effectiveness is this: engage with poker as often as possible — even when you’re not formally “studying”. Why? Because consistent engagement helps immerse you in the game. It improves your ability to instinctively connect concepts together. If you completely disconnect from poker five days a week, you're not reinforcing those mental pathways. You’re not strengthening the links between the ideas you’ve been learning.

Staying engaged helps you build mental context for the material you study. It also helps counter the forgetting curve — the well-documented phenomenon where, if you don’t apply something you’ve learned soon after learning it, you tend to forget it and have to start over.

The good news? There are tons of ways to stay connected to the game outside of formal study:

• Watching live streams.
• Following poker-related accounts on social media.
• Watching poker video content.
• Reading articles and blogs about the game.

And here’s where the strategies start to blend together. There’s a big overlap between studying with others and maintaining high engagement. If you’re regularly studying with other players, you’ll naturally start talking more about poker, paying closer attention to what’s happening in the poker world, and staying mentally active around the game.

That’s why it makes sense to combine all these strategies:

• Active learning.
• Collaborative study.
• Regular engagement outside of play.

You’ll notice that when you look at how the best players study, all of these factors are part of their process. These methods don’t exist in isolation — they reinforce each other and work together to accelerate improvement.

Now we’re shifting into the second major area: how to actually improve the quality of your play when you’re at the table. And the first piece of advice here targets what is probably the number one issue for recreational players — don’t play when you’re tired. If you’re exhausted, just don’t play poker — simple as that.

Most people don’t get enough sleep to begin with. And if you’re playing poker after finishing a full day at work — if you’re coming home and grinding online for four hours every evening — you’re going to play far below your best.

There are many players who learn a new concept to a decent level of understanding — and then go out and completely misapply it. They make false assumptions about its value, or they use it incorrectly at the table. And often, this happens simply because they’re too tired to execute with clarity or precision. When your cognitive capacity is compromised, your implementation is sloppy — and that slows down your development. In some cases, it can even set you back.

Treat Every Session as Competition

This next tip is especially important for recreational players: treat your sessions as real competition. It’s easy to think of poker as just a fun activity. You show up, toss some chips around, hope to hit a heater, and call it a night. But that mindset shows in your performance.

If you treat poker like a hobby or a gamble, where you just hope things go well, you will not perform at your peak. On the other hand, if you treat the game the same way an athlete treats competition — with seriousness and intent — you start to condition yourself to take every session seriously.

Yes, it’s a gambling game. Yes, we can’t control the outcomes. But what we can control is our preparation, our focus, and how we approach the game mentally. The goal isn’t to show up and “hope it goes well”. The goal is to consistently show up and play your best.

Build a Pre-Game Routine

This next point ties directly into that competitive mindset: you need to build a consistent pre-game routine. If we’re showing up to compete, we need a warm-up process. Just like athletes stretch before a match, poker players should mentally prepare for their session. A strong pre-game routine helps you enter a focused, competitive mindset before the first hand is even dealt.

Your pre-game routine doesn’t need to be complicated. It could be:

• A short workout.
• A few minutes of meditation.
• Running drills in GTO Wizard Trainer.
• Or anything else that reliably puts you in the right mindset to play.

The goal is to mentally prepare yourself — to trigger the mindset that says: “It’s game time”. A warm-up helps reinforce neural pathways, boosts your confidence, and creates a sense of control and predictability. It builds momentum. You finish your routine, and now you’re locked in — ready to compete. And the more consistent you are with this, the more it will strengthen your overall preparation every time you sit down to play.

And finally — this might be the hardest advice of all: forgive yourself for your mistakes. Research shows that forgiveness plays a crucial role in healthy self-evaluation. Beating yourself up after a mistake does not make you more likely to get it right next time. In fact, it usually does the opposite.

It creates stress, pressure, and anxiety — all of which interfere with your ability to learn and perform. When you agonize over a punctured stack for days or weeks, you’re actually making it harder to recover and improve.

Instead, learning to forgive yourself leads to:

• Reduced anxiety.
• A better, more open learning process.
• A brain that’s better equipped to respond productively to mistakes and challenges.

Berating yourself shuts all of that down. Even though it’s tough — especially when you make a costly mistake, when you lose a big pot, or when you feel like you should’ve known better — you’ve got to let go of the idea that self-punishment leads to growth. Because it doesn’t.

You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to face difficult spots and misplay some of them. That’s part of the process. Over time, forgiveness is far more powerful than self-criticism — and it’s key to becoming a better player.

That’s going to be it for today's topic — hopefully you’ve found some useful tips to start getting more out of your study time and play better at the tables. None of this is about working harder for the sake of it. It’s about doing things that actually make a difference — whether that’s studying in a more active way, building better habits, or just taking your sessions more seriously.

If you want help applying this stuff in a structured way, check out Getcoach. It’s a coaching and learning platform where you can study smarter, train your decision-making, and improve your game over time — without wasting hours on things that don’t move the needle. You’ll find tools, content, and a community that’s focused on real improvement. Thanks for being with us today — and good luck out there!