Let me start, as I never do, by discrediting my authority. I do not claim to be the best poker player in the world. I do not even claim to be the best poker player in my house. I have, however, been able to sustain my life and grow my poker capital over the past six years with gambling as my only income. My goal here isn't to give specific advice e.g.- "You're not bluffing enough rivers" or "you're sizing too large on the flop," but to give examples of mental blocks that I (and probably others) have encountered while trying to "improve" their poker games. Without further ado:
1. You don't change the way you think or play.
Seems obvious, right? But this is for sure the biggest hurdle to clear in improving in anything; and the nature of poker feeds this problem. You might think that you're getting unlucky, and you don't need to change the way you play. You might also think that you are changing, but really you're tweaking something small (like opening to 3x instead of 4x) and not changing something huge (like determining the possible hands you're opponent can have too narrowly i.e.- putting him on one specific hand). It's also possible that you're doing something consistently wrong that doesn't yield a huge immediate loss so you don't realize it's a mistake that you're always making. A player that I admired at Commerce Casino in the early 2000s once told me "You need to avoid this mentality of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it.'" I took this to heart and vowed to always try to be improving. As an aside, I saw that same player recently playing the smallest game in the room with the smallest buy-in possible, but anyway . . . (Phil Galfond once called these "leaks hiding in plain sight," a title I really liked).
2. You keep changing the way you think or play.
But wait you just said! (Yeah, it's always fun when you can throw in the gratuitous paradigm shift). A trap I frequently fall into is that after changing something big in the way I approach the game, I will have a winning session and confirm my opinion that I did something right. (Starting to make even less sense?) For example, say I decide one day that I'm always going to 4-bet suited connectors at a certain chipstack-depth. I do this multiple times, and a few times I make big hands and win large pots. I then think I have found the missing key to my game and will be the best poker player ever and never have to worry about money ever again. This, by the way is called being "results-oriented," i.e.- taking the results of a small sample size to indicate the success of a strategy. But really I could have been getting lucky and the tweaks I made actually lowered my expected value in the game. But forever, it will be stuck in my head that this tweak was a great idea.
3. You're playing too big.
This is fairly obvious to most people when they're doing it, but they don't realize the affect it has on their games. Without going into much depth about how much money you should have to play certain limits, I'll let you know in general it is very difficult to make decisions for money that mean a lot personally to you. Once you get into a moment where you're translating pot-size into cars or houses, you're probably not going to be able to make the best, objective decision. This is pretty basic, and I won't waste more time on it.
4. You're playing too small . . . then too big . . . then way too big . . . then too small again.
Moving up in stakes is a difficult and delicate process for every poker player. By whatever metric, you realize you've outgrown your current stakes so you try to move up. Then when you're playing at least twice as big, the game is harder and maybe you happen to lose. You get stuck below your minimum bankroll requirement to continue playing this big game, but continue to play to get unstuck and continue to lose. After a few tilted sessions, not playing your best, you realize you have to move back down to your smaller game; but you can't shake the feeling of having played bigger, and the money doesn't feel the same to you so you take it less seriously. You get stuck in this cycle a few times and think that you must be doing something wrong because you're not winning money so you continue to look for tweaks in your game. However, you actually were a winning player in proportion to the games you were playing; you just happened to not win when the stakes were larger.
5. You lose your freaking mind.
This can happen a number of ways that are obvious. Anecdotally I can tell you that I've seen players lose upwards of $500,000 in a 10-20 No limt hold'em game (a game that usually has 4-5k swings in a day). It's a pretty common and obvious situation when a player loses and tilts, but it may not be obvious in the moment how much the player is bleeding away in small pots and not just whatever big pot finishes him off. ALSO, you can lose your freaking mind when you win. When I had my first "big score" hitting a Commerce Casino bad beat jackpot for $12,000 early in my career, I immediately rushed home to take my group of friends to a 1k dinner at Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. I ransomed about 5 percent of net worth for a dinner I can't remember the specifics of other than Cameron Diaz's dog frequently jumping on our laps. Nice lady, by the way. Annoying dog.
This can also happen in more subtle ways on the poker felt! I've seen players (including in the mirror) go on a big upswing/tournament win and start to play the way they've always dreamed they could play with no bankroll restriction . . . like a fucking maniac. This usually results in losing at least half of said "upswing" before coming back down to earth. Winner's tilt is a very real thing.
6. You subconsciously want to lose.
Your first instinct to this is "what sense does that make," but I'll explain the ways it can happen. The first is the simplest: If you play for fun, as most gamblers do, you bring a certain amount you're willing to lose, and (having set that terrible goal) it usually happens. You didn't actually want to lose, but subconsciously you pretty much assumed it was an inevitability.
Scenario for someone looking to play professionally: Perhaps you've been getting unlucky recently, and now you've become so disillusioned with the possibility that you could win, that you actually start willing yourself to lose so you can justify your narrative. This actually starts to affect your decision-making and you're less likely to fold a big hand in a big pot when you know you're beat because subconsciously it would be more satisfying to provide more evidence for your "I'm so unlucky" narrative than it would be to lose only half the money you started the hand with. Losing as little as possible in a losing situation is not as gratifying as knowing how unlucky you got.
I've succumbed the insanity of the mindset before and found myself flipping a coin 100 times trying to predict the outcome hoping to prove to myself that I was personally statistically unlucky. (Results 52 tails 48 heads. It wasn't me).
7. You want to be a hero
Anyone looking to enter this field should know there's no glory here. Sure, occasionally there's trophies and bracelets and immortal quotes like "If you call here, it gonna be all ovah, baby." But poker is a game kept score with money. Too many people are looking to make a call they know is inadvisable to win a thousand dollars more when the right play is folding and losing a thousand dollars less than you could have. But no one will ever get to see how vindicated they are by losing less. People think somehow their hands represent them and get attached, but really the hands dealt to you are just another story you have the responsibility of telling. Beyond all else, remember there's no ego here. Only money.
8. You've got all the moves, but you panic when the spotlight's on.
What me? No, not me! Well, maybe only in the big pots . . . and only in pots against friends . . . and only in pots against celebrities . . . and only when I know I'm doing something risky. Another thing someone once told me "when you know, like you really know you should do something, you have to do it." Spots arise still for me all the time when I think I know the correct "in a vacuum" play but get gunshy by leveling myself. "Well, he knows that I know that he knows that I know . . . So I just can't make this bluff." More often than not, an Occam's Razor approach applies. The most obvious solution is the best one. Especially if you've prepared, just pull the trigger already.
9. You're not trying hard enough.
There's an old adage about basketball that says something like "When you're not practicing, the other guy is and twice as hard." Now this doesn't mean you have to become the best so you can beat the 2nd best. In poker, you're obviously trying to play against the worst players possible. But too often people get complacent with their skill set thinking "well, at least I play way better than that guy" or "I play good enough to win." You might be over-estimating your abilities or arbitrarily stunting your growth. It's not just the work you do in preparation either. Many times in a game, players are happy to be playing only versus the standard losing players but neglecting the improvements they could making in more subtle spots against other players that add up to last value. I, personally have played with the mindset to play every hand an intently and with as much intensity as possible. This doesn't mean I'm trying to die with every hand I'm dealt. A lot of times the best play might just be to open-fold a hand, but I am certainly not taking any plays off. Every single hand, every single day, 4 or 24 hour session, every time.
Anyway, I wish I could have got to 10 so I could make some clickbait internet list, but this is all I got for now. Everyone welcome to disagree of course, but like I said "I'm not trying to tell you how I think you should play, I'm just trying to tell you how I think you should think."
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