Top 6 Revelations From Coaching Poker

22 Sep 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

Today I'm going to share with you eight revelations that I’ve had from coaching poker over the years. These things can be the difference between success and failure. If you're looking to make poker a profitable hobby, career, or something in between, definitely stick around until the end. It’s very likely that at least a few of these will have a profound effect on changing your poker trajectory for the better. Let’s get into it!

Don’t get me wrong — knowledge is a prerequisite. You need it. I didn’t spend hundreds of hours making a fully comprehensive poker theory course because knowledge wasn’t important. But I also knew that what I was giving people were the raw ingredients for success — not a secret formula that would guarantee it.

If you take a player who scores 3 out of 10 in performance and 9 out of 10 in knowledge, and compare that to someone who scores 9 out of 10 in performance and only 3 out of 10 in knowledge, the second player — the one with the stronger performance — will have the better chance of beating the game every single time.

Two Aspects of Performance

Performance has two main aspects:

• Pregame (Intent).
• In-game (Focus).

Intent is why you sit down to play. It’s often not something you say out loud or consciously think about, but it’s always there in the background. We’re always motivated by a sense of purpose. For example, when you brush your teeth in the morning, you don’t consciously say, “I’m preventing gum disease”. But that’s the underlying purpose.

The same applies to poker. When you sit down to play, your intent should be tied to progress — something under your control — not something that isn’t. If you woke up one morning and said, “I’m going to win the lottery today”, your friends would probably ask if you’re feeling all right. 

That’s a bad, irrational intent to start your day with.  Similarly, when you sit down for a poker session with intentions like “I’m going to win money”, or “I’m going to move up stakes today” — those are equally bad intentions. We’d never say them consciously, but ask yourself: do you still have them subconsciously?

Do you hope to win? Do you dread losing? Do you sometimes feel like you need to book a winning day for poker to be a positive experience? A better question to ask when you sit down is: What am I really trying to achieve? The ultimate intent should be this: to show up as the best version of your poker self, to stay curious, and to make good decisions. That’s the intent that truly serves you in this game.

The second aspect of performance is your in-game focus level. You can be really dialed in or really dialed out — and both are bad. What you want is the sweet spot, where the cadence of your thoughts is just right. You’re in the moment, in the zone, and your brain is moving in tempo with the poker session instead of fighting against it.

If you’re too dialed in, it feels like there are too many conscious thoughts. Your brain can’t organize them in time. You start timing out, panicking, or freezing. The stakes feel too high, and you’ve put so much pressure on yourself to get everything right that you can’t relax enough to actually do it.

Both overfocus and underfocus can be defense mechanisms against trying your best. Maybe because it feels intimidating. Maybe because of fear of failure. Or maybe because giving full effort feels like too much.

The key is to check in with yourself during play. Every few minutes, ask: Am I under-focused or over-focused right now? If you’re too zoned out or too locked in, just gently recalibrate—like turning a volume knob — until you find the right level. Then sit with that feeling and try to replicate it for the rest of your session.

If you can get this right, you can add the equivalent of 50 or 60 hours of EV from study in just a few minutes. It's a low-hanging fruit. Don’t neglect theory—we’ll get to that—but first ask yourself: How am I actually applying myself when I sit down to play cards?

Your F-game is your absolute worst performance in poker. It’s when you’re at your weakest, driven by a threatened mental state that pushes you into fight, flight, or freeze mode. In other games, sports, or disciplines, you’re often more immersed in the act itself. When you play tennis, for example, you’re absorbed in hitting the ball, running, and moving in rhythm with the game. There’s a physical harmony to it.

That triggers parts of the brain that make us feel threatened, unsafe — like survival itself is at stake. That’s the evolutionary hardwiring behind why we freeze mid-hand. Suddenly, thoughts are flying chaotically, nothing connects, the clock is ticking, and we just click a button — then immediately berate ourselves for making a terrible mistake.

Sound familiar? For a lot of players, freeze is the most common response when they get too dialed in. Too many thoughts, too much pressure, everything feels too important. You know the call is bad, but you make it anyway — and then hate yourself for it.

Or maybe you flee. You close down the tables after one bad hand. You avoid calling the turn bet because you don’t want to face the pain of missing on the river. You skip the c-bet because you’ve convinced yourself no one is folding to you today. All of this adds up to your F-game. Sliding from A-game into F-game usually comes from being overwhelmed by these primitive, survival-based mental programs.

So, how do you improve your F-game? Check in with yourself. Ask: To what extent is my subconscious in threat mode right now? If you notice fight, flight, or freeze creeping in, pull yourself back into the present. Try to shift into curiosity about the spot instead of fear.

And give yourself a boundary. Say, I’m not playing well. I’m at risk of falling into my worst game. I’ll play for 20 more minutes, but with focus and discipline. See if you can hold it together in that curious, stable mindset for just those 20 minutes. Then end the session. Take a break. Rinse and repeat. That’s how your F-game gets stronger.

You’ll build the muscle of resilience. But you can’t just sit there for two hours in a state of frozen brain fog. That’s how you destroy your chances, burn through your bankroll, and ultimately fail in your pursuit of becoming a successful poker player.

Trying to play poker without a solid theoretical base is like running a race with a ball and chain strapped to your ankle. I’ve seen it countless times: players trying to compensate for what they don’t know. They lean on database exploits, soft games, or some set of homegrown heuristics they’ve repeated so many times they feel comfortable — even though those habits are fundamentally flawed.

The truth is, only proper poker education fills those gaps. Poker is an extremely difficult discipline. Imagine trying to become a physicist without ever studying physics. But poker tricks us because of how it looks. It feels like a video game: you sit down at a computer, click buttons, win or lose, get a dopamine hit.

Because of that structure, a lot of players think they don’t need to study. After all, how much study do you put into a video game? Maybe you watch a YouTube guide if you’re stuck, but you don’t spend hundreds of hours grinding out theory. Poker, though, demands exactly that level of education.

Poker Study = University Education

The best way to think about poker study is like taking a university degree.It’s not something you absorb overnight. But as you gradually build your theoretical base, your game transforms. And if you start now, a year from today you’ll be in a completely different place as a player. What you absolutely don’t want — and I’ve seen this far too often — is to end up like the student who shows up for coaching after 12 years of playing and says: “Pete, I don’t have any theory. I’ve been playing in soft live games, I’ve been surviving, I’ve been table selecting, I’ve managed to win a low amount at a low stake, but now I want more”. 

That’s what students often say when they finally come for coaching. And the truth is, yes, we can try, we can work with that — but it would have been so much easier if you had built your theoretical base earlier, before those bad habits and coping mechanisms set in.

Don’t neglect your theory. Start now. Building poker theory is a long, sometimes arduous process. But if you’re genuinely fascinated by the game and curious about how it works, the learning comes a lot easier than if you’re dreading it or constantly putting it off.

One of the biggest revelations from years of coaching is that many players unintentionally crave validation more than actual improvement. This shows up in coaching sessions when students want to talk more than they want to listen. They’ll explain their reasoning at length, waiting for me to tell them they’re right. But very often, that reasoning is nothing more than a tangled jungle of thoughts that would collapse under the pressure of real-time decision-making.

The more insecure you are, in poker or in life, the more you seek that short-term boost of validation. But poker doesn’t give you reliable feedback in the short term. You can win while playing terribly, or lose while playing brilliantly.

So when a student shows up and resists feedback, or tunes out, or insists on talking rather than learning, I know they’re not actually here for the right reason. They think they want to get better at poker, but in reality, they want poker to make them feel better. They’re using it as a form of self-validation.

A Brutal But Necessary Question

Ask yourself honestly: does this sound like me? Do I sit down to play poker because I want to feel like a good player? Do I talk about hands with others mainly to showcase what I already know rather than to actually improve?

You have to accept what you don’t know. You have to sit in that uncomfortable ignorance and say, “I just don’t know this thing”. I just need to let go of all my preconceptions and start from the beginning. Some players in poker need to do exactly that — uninstall a lot of baggage before they can move forward. 

But for now, ask yourself: to what extent is validation guiding you? Do you genuinely study out of curiosity, or are you trying to get better at poker mainly as a way to feel better about yourself? This doesn’t apply to everyone, but for some, it’s very real.

It takes a lot of honesty to admit that your ego is pulling the strings. Your ego says: “I need to feel good right now”. But once you recognize that, and once you clear your mind of those cravings, you free up space for genuine growth and progress.

This is one of the most common leaks I see. So many players who come to me are break-even. They’ve patched the major holes, they’re not bleeding money anymore, but they’re stuck. They can’t break through 50NL, or whatever stake they’re grinding.

They’ll have winning days, weeks, even months. And when the graph goes up, the brain instantly links that to skill: “I played well today. I won today. Therefore, I must be improving”. You might not consciously think, “I’ve had a breakthrough” after a 10-buy-in upswing — but your brain is still rewarding you chemically as if you had.

That’s dangerous. Because once you start believing you’re a winner after a short heater, you stop studying. You lose curiosity. You start feeling entitled, hopeful, even complacent. And when hope creeps in, it’s like saying: “I need things to go well, because if they don’t, I won’t be able to handle it”. That makes you fragile. And when variance inevitably smacks you in the face — as it always does — it hurts three times more than it should.

If you haven’t won at poker yet, that’s okay. If your graph shows –4bb/100, maybe that's a tilt. But tilt is still you. Tilt is still part of your game. Don’t hide behind the idea of “I’d be a winner if not for tilt”. Everyone would be better if they tilted less. The point is: accept where you are now. Own it. 

Work on it. Because if you do that, in a couple of years you’ll have a much better graph than if you just rode variance waves and fooled yourself along the way. Do not surf the waves of variance. It might feel exciting in the short term, but if you surf variance waves, you’ll just end up drowning with a mouthful of salty water.

This one I borrowed from Immanuel Kant — yes, K-A-N-T, not a rude word. Kant talked about the categorical imperative, which basically means you should never treat people as a means to your end, but as ends in themselves. In other words: don’t use people. Don’t exploit them.

And I think we all agree that it applies to morality. But it also has a parallel in poker. If you treat the game purely as a means to an end — just a vehicle for money — you cheapen it. At that point, it doesn’t even need to be poker. It could be any job, any hustle, as long as there’s a paycheck at the end.

Here’s the trap I’ve seen countless times: when things go well, players study a little, get engaged, feel fascinated. But the second a downswing hits, they become the victim, the main character of their own tragedy. Their focus shifts away from poker itself, and the cycle repeats endlessly.

There are only two real ways out of this:

• Admit you don’t love poker enough. Maybe it’s just not your game. Maybe you’d rather immerse yourself in something else entirely (and that’s okay);
• Commit to loving the game for itself. If you do love poker, then push through. Sometimes what’s blocking you is a mental game. Sometimes you just need to improve enough to find joy in the depth of it. That’s a catch-22: the very thing you’re chasing is the thing that motivates you to keep chasing. But if you force yourself at first — study a little, build a habit — you’ll eventually hit that flow where curiosity takes over and you’re immersed.

If you want to succeed long-term, poker has to be more than a tool. You need to love it for its own sake. I’ve seen far too many players fail simply because they never made that shift. So this is it for today — see you later and have a great week!