27 Jan 2025 Beginner This material is for beginner players bankroll discipline mental game mindset motivation You know what I love about poker players? They’re so good at making money, yet so reckless when it comes to building healthy relationships around it. No matter how much you win, it never feels like enough. You’re never able to grow and sustain a trajectory that will get you where you truly want to go. In this article, I’m going to break down some of the mistakes poker players make with money—mistakes that reveal unhealthy financial habits and ultimately sabotage their success. If you don’t address these issues, they’ll keep holding you back. Let’s fix them now! #1: Stupid Prop Bets So let's start with stupid prop bets. Now I'm not talking about the funny stuff like can I dive into the bottom of the shark tank in the Bahamas. Well that is dumb but for different reasons. So I'm talking about: Weight loss bets. Study prop bets. Volume bets. It’s where you bet somebody an amount of money that if I don't reach this goal by this amount of time, I will lose the money. Now it looks good in theory. You're motivating yourself to take action towards something that you otherwise wouldn't do but you're using the fear of losing money as the way to get yourself to do stuff. What do you think is going to happen, once the bet is done and you no longer have that fear of losing money to drive you? Exactly, you're going to get fat again, you're going to stop studying again, you're going to start finding ways to not play poker again. You're going to lose the motivation to do all those things. So you cannot use the fear of losing money to motivate you into doing things. If you do it's going to always give you a temporary boost, but it's never going to give you sustainable results. You have to change your relationship to how you're using money. Get rid of it in terms of how you motivate yourself. Don’t use fear as a motivator. #2: The Stop Loss Don't even get me started on the stop loss. Okay so: I'm going to stop playing when I've lost this much money. I'm going to stop buying into the tournament and re-entering once I've lost this many buy-ins. You know what happens? It’s the same thing as when you go on a diet and tell yourself, “I’m not going to eat sugar”. Then, one day, you do eat sugar. And the amount you eat is exactly the amount you kept yourself from eating, plus a million on top of that, all at once. From there, you’re back on that same trajectory, eating even more than you were before. That’s what happens when you try to set rules to restrict yourself from doing things your emotions are pushing you toward, right? So the stop loss is a rule designed to keep you from continuing to play when you're in a highly emotional state. Well guess what when you hit a certain level of emotion you don't care about the rule anymore. You only care about the rule when you are making the rule. You were making the rule when you were feeling calm and relaxed. That's when you were making the rule. The version of you that is in charge of executing the rule freaking out right. You just got stacked by the fish for the fifth time. The game is amazing - chips are flying everywhere around you. You want a piece of the action, but you keep getting dealt. You're not going to stop, and if you do it's not going to be because of the rule, it's because you had just enough presence inside you to leave before you blew up. But there's always going to be a threshold of emotional pain where you're not going to go, and so at that point there's no need for a rule in the first place because there's always a place where you're not going to do it. So stop trying to manage your decisions around money and start trying to learn how to deal with the emotions that made you think that you needed the rule in the first place. Fix the emotional side. You don't care about the rules anymore. You're going to be able to just keep playing no matter what and play well and earn your money. #3: Attitude Towards Money Finally the big one is the way that you relate to money in general. Now, if you are one of those people who starts to feel really good about yourself: I'm a good person. I’m a hard worker. I’m worthy of respect and love and admiration, because i'm winning money. And then imagine when you're not winning money - here’s the thoughts are next: I'm losing. I'm such a horrible person. I’m such a loser, and I don't deserve anything good. When this is how you operate you're not just playing poker anymore when you sit down - you're playing to be able to feel good about yourself. So now the stakes are way too high. It's not just chips and cards and money it's like am i going to get to go home feeling good about myself today or not. So you cannot afford to live your life like that every single day and I am convinced that this is the primary reason why so many poker players are so miserable. I have seen people who literally won World Series of Poker tournaments and several hundred thousand dollars and lost all of that money within a few days, because deep down they did not feel happiness. They thought they were going to feel the money did not fill the hole, and did not fill the void inside them that they were thinking it would fill, so they just got rid of it. You cannot have money be the thing that you think is going to fill the void. If you do, you're always going to sabotage yourself, when you get your hands on any of it. Recommendations for Poker Players So if you're ready to sustain success, you're gonna need to do next: Stop trying to manage yourself in rules around how you use your money, and start focusing on your emotions instead. You gotta stop using the fear of losing money to motivate yourself. You gotta start learning how to feel good inside of yourself in a way that has nothing to do with your bank account, poker balance, your bankroll, your graph or any of that. You gotta learn how to love yourself, feel good about yourself, and appreciate yourself, regardless of what is going on. If you do those things, now you all of a sudden have a healthy relationship with money, I can guarantee you very few poker players have this, except for the people who work with me, so you will naturally start to see your profits soar because everybody else is going to be breaking down around you, while you are holding firm feeling good playing your game on your terms.