03 Apr 2025 Intermediate This material is for medium-skilled players discipline mental game mindset motivation studying Tired of standard articles with the usual advice on what to do to succeed in something? - I am. That's why today's article from Phil Galfond will be in the spirit of «bad advice»: we will talk about how you should behave so that your career does not work out from the very beginning, and each new month brings you only torment and stress. All these things, in Phil's opinion, will keep you at the bottom in one way or another. We will understand the reasons for their detrimental effect on poker progress. And at the end of the material there will be 2 main obstacles that this top high stakes professional has overcome throughout his career and the mistakes he made until he got to where he is now. Sit back comfortably / do not read everything at once - the article will be long. Next - from Phil Galfond. Let's go! Way #1: Play poker purely for the money The first and most important reason for long-term failures in poker is the attitude towards poker purely as a tool for making money. I know a great many people who decided to try poker during its boom in the 2000s, but they did not last long. At first, many of them managed to earn good money here - especially considering that «the Sun used to shine much brighter» and the fields were incomparably softer. However, poker is such a difficult career that as soon as beginners (and players with little experience) get into a long black streak, their desire to continue playing disappears in an instant, and they, as a rule, begin to look at more stable ways of income. In poker, not only is there a strict natural selection, but also a strong influence of luck in a short sample of hands. Poker is hard, first of all, emotionally: endless and deep downswings, a decrease in the number of fish and a strengthening of the field as a whole, constant adjustment to the changing circumstances taking into account the great lack of information, sometimes a decrease in limits ... Every regular can continue this list. And it is very difficult to suffer and just move forward like a bot, stubbornly completing the task, despite the fact that you have 40% of the initial bankroll left. You need a lot of persistence and just faith in yourself and in the fact that, figuratively speaking, when this night is over, the Sun will shine with double strength. In the meantime, you just have to go, because the time of day will not rewind itself. Every top player I know was at one time absolutely obsessed with the game - the Game itself, and not just the money that comes as a result. They loved poker and still love it. Profitable poker can quickly become a boring practical implementation of mathematical models over a distance of many thousands of hands, 90% of which will be played semi-automatically, without any positive emotions and dopamine. And also a very difficult life during periods of countless downswings for weeks and months. So, if you do not have something that attracts you to play poker despite all the difficulties, then an unenviable future awaits you. If you have no passion for poker and also do not handle downswings well, then poker is not for you. You will soon quit it, taking up much less turbulent activities, playing poker as a hobby. I believe that love for poker is either there or it is not. It will not be possible to learn it if you have been playing for more than one day. Passion for poker - for this crazy game - is an absolutely necessary condition for even allowing the possibility of being an elite champion in the future. And it can safely be put right at zero place in the score. Those people who came here for easy money after they saw poker on TV, but do not really like the game itself, are doomed to burnout, loss of momentum and, ultimately, defeat. There are very few successful exceptions to this rule. Way #2: Build your game on mechanical memorization of GTO strategies Today, it is very popular to study the so-called optimal poker by working with GTO solvers. These are extremely powerful tools for improving the game and they have advanced the game strategies many levels forward. However, a solver is not a universal supertool. Solvers can really give you an answer to the game in any spot at all. However, to do this, you need to do 2 things: Enter into it all the data that you have (and even that you don’t have!), Teach the solver to take into account interpersonal moments like image, anger, resentment, desire for revenge, etc. But learning with a GTO solver is not mechanical memorization of answers and attempts to assemble a strategy puzzle by individual elements, trying to understand something along the way. When you play hyper-turbo-SNG / spins with a 10bb stack, - there is no discussion - there is only memorization and approximate extrapolation of a specific situation to many similar ones, because at such a stack depth after preflop you still have only 1 street of betting. Therefore, all that remains is to memorize push-fold on preflop and try to play ideally or close to it. But at normal stack depths, - especially at 100+bb, - when there are all 3 streets of betting with possible reraises, then it becomes physically impossible for any person to memorize ideal moves for each situation in order to form a full-fledged strategy and competently implement it. Solvers use complex strategies that are physically impossible for people to memorize and apply perfectly. And if you try to do this, then most likely, you will get new leaks in your game, which will lead you to even greater mistakes and losses. What happens if you just memorize the solver game You will play great on the preflop, okay on the flop, and you will not be enough for the turn and river - you will play there as you know how. When you study with a solver, you should not try to memorize it, but strive to understand how the solver «thinks» in similar situations. In fact, solvers do not think anything - they do not have the functions to think and self-learn. They act «brute force»: they find a line of play with the maximum EV by enumerating and calculating all possible situations. The machine does not analyze - why should it calculate anything, take anything into account, etc. It just makes a full analysis based on the entered data, and that's it. But you, as a human, are able to see the common ground between similar spots and can isolate the «logic» of your movement from preflop to river in such spots based on the answers the solver gives. This is a successful way of self-study, not just memorization. Illusions about GTO Many people fall into the illusion that mastering GTO poker will guarantee you stable and high win rates even against the toughest opponents. In reality, you will sacrifice part of your win rate in favor of greatly reduced exploitability. However, the very essence of poker is to exploit your opponents for maximum win rate. Well, that's not what we're talking about now. You shouldn't strive for perfect GTO for several main reasons. Don't create unrealistic expectations for yourself. If you set yourself the goal of mastering GTO perfectly, then you've already lost. You won't succeed, because it's absolutely unrealistic. Perfect GTO poker is unimaginably, unattainably difficult for the human brain to play in a real game without the help of advisers. Even the top high stakes players don't play pure GTO poker. There is also a significant exploit between them. Since they play against each other all the time, and their win rates vary, it's not just about aiming for the ideal. However, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't practice GTO at all. We can still learn a lot from solvers and apply it to the game. But these will still remain just separate elements of a GTO strategy, which are sometimes interconnected with each other. But not a full-fledged GTO. You will benefit much more from mastering the exploitative approach to playing poker. Poker solvers work similarly to how computers look for the best move in chess by evaluating hundreds of thousands of positions, where about 90% are ones that a real person would not even look at, because they would immediately dismiss them as a nonense. And at the end of the search, the computer shows / makes this best move itself. If you chose to play the flop perfectly, then, like a solver, you must also play the turn and river perfectly! Otherwise, what's the point of check-raising with a naked backdoor gutshot from 54o against a non-surrendering opponent when you have no idea how to finish him off in the future with a good chance of success. The solver plays perfectly on all streets of the hand, and its decisions on the flop are based on the fact that it already knows what the ideal move will be on any turn. And then - on any river. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for you not to memorize something that you most likely won't be able to apply perfectly anyway (or at least in average +EV), but to immediately start learning how to exploit your opponents more effectively! Besides, it's all much simpler than GTO. Otherwise, your GTO game will be limited to the flop, and in general will be extremely far from ideal - and this is despite the fact that «learning» just the flop is a very difficult task. And this will irritate you ... Exactly so - it will no longer be GTO, but some kind of hodgepodge with a bunch of mistakes against different types of opponents. And you will often be visited by questions like: «Should I really 3-bet these hands like my solver, when I have no idea what to do with them OOP on all 3 streets postflop?» Finally, one more stone in the garden of GTO Earlier in my career I was a tournament player and I learned the game using a primitive push/fold calculator. I would enter stacks and positions into it and manually enter calling ranges for each player. The program would tell me exactly which hands could be pushed positively in a given spot. Today's tools are much better, but... Manually entering a variety of variables each time I run it made me very insightful about how each variable affected the EV of my decisions. In short, it allowed me to extrapolate what I learned to the game and become good at solving real-world problems at the table on the fly. Especially when I'm playing against a very exploitable opponent. The point is that it didn't take a lot of nerding to understand how poker works in my environment and start spending time on real-world experience rather than theory. I'm not suggesting you ignore today's programs, but it would be better if you used pen and paper at least sometimes - to think with your own head. Way #3: Base your confidence on recent results This is an extremely common problem for the vast majority of poker players. And it is usually treated only by colossal playing of hands / tournaments, gaining long-term experience of going through different periods of the game and observing your long-term results and graphs. Those who have been earning money from poker for more than one year usually do not worry about short-term results anymore. Any professional will tell you that poker is a game of skill, thinking and action. That the cards are just tools here. This is true, and there are no contradictions and mistakes here, but this is for a long distance. In the short and medium term, the manifestation of variance and its impact on your win rate can be really colossal. And if we practically do not feel upstreaks, but just think that everything is going fine and as it should be, then during periods of downstreaks our self-confidence can seriously shake. It is the variance that determines the current profitability of the game in a short time/quantitative period: if you won a tournament / played a session with a significant profit (or loss), then these results are largely generated by a lucky / unlucky coincidence of circumstances, and not by your skill. The share of skill is certainly present, but it is a smaller component of the resulting sum. The effects of both luck and skill accumulate over time. Luck will more or less even out over time, and it is skill that will determine your long-term EVbb/100 or ROI% - your monetary efficiency. Variance is harsh. Most people greatly underestimate it, and also suffer from it - especially among tournament players. I was like that too in the early stages of my career. I myself suffered from this at the beginning of my career, until I played 1+ million hands and realized and accepted that everything bad (and good) that happened in a particular week or month is a mere trifle, and it is not worth paying attention to at all. And even more so - to dwell on failures and throw ashes on your head. In a short sample, it is easy to fall into various illusions. For example, double your bankroll in 1 week and feel like an invincible God of Poker, and then spend the rest of the month wondering what kind of switch has been flipped, so that you are now bleeding away everything you have earned through backbreaking labor. In such periods, thoughts like Looks like game over. I probably won't be able to win here anymore. Maybe I need to seriously change my strategy? Maybe I should experiment with something new in the game? constantly come into your head. Learn to ignore short term results because there is a lot out of your control in poker. Countless events and a series of events in poker can be classified as manifestations of variance - with both signs. Worrying about recent failures, you may have the illusion that you owe all your previous successes not to yourself, but to the fact that you were lucky all this time. At the end of 1, 2, 3 years, your skill will inevitably overcome the consequences of dispersion and reveal your true results and the real EV of all actions in total. And if you worry about it, it will constantly throw you off track, and your game will finally become random and fall apart. In poker, losses are not uncommon even with the most ideal play - your opponents may simply be running better. You can read your opponent perfectly, have all the necessary and reliable information to make the most profitable decisions, but your opponents still win. Such periods can last for many sessions, weeks and even months. The lower the difference in skill between opponents, the more often this will happen. Many truly talented and capable players once broke down completely under the destructive blows of variance and eventually simply gave up, deciding that «not at this cost», that «it was not meant to be», and under all those other destructive thoughts that sometimes come to your mind. Many regulars tend to give up and go for long periods of mental «recharge» when things are going badly for them, losing precious $/h. Some people stop playing poker for an indefinite period until they are fired up with the zeal to continue playing, remembering all the hardships of poker reality. Therefore, it is vital for a professional poker player to have a very strong psychology. And if you intend to play professionally, making poker your main/only source of income, you will have to pump up your mental fortitude to the utmost. Way #4: Learn poker completely alone The fastest and most reliable way to succeed in poker (and almost any other business) is to develop together with like-minded people. I remember my first summer in Las Vegas. I had been playing semi-professionally online poker for about 2 years. I learned poker by participating in forums and studying a lot of books. But during the preparation for the WSOP, I stayed in the same house with 5 other guys. It was the first time in my life that I watched someone else play. From the outside. And when I saw something unusual for my strategy, I always asked the other person - why did he play like that? Because for me it was sometimes something unthinkable - was it even possible? The benefits of interacting with other poker players (it's better if you don't compete with each other) are many: Learning completely unknown ways to win, Learning new tactics and strategies - strengthening your gaming arsenal, Learning new ways of thinking and understanding where this leads, Learning from experience - you'll need to make fewer mistakes yourself, Watching how a more advanced player copes with failures, And also getting feedback on your game - other eyes see things differently. In all respects, this speeds up your progress much, much more! You just need to put your ego aside. And many of us have difficulties with this, yes. But you can always go your own untrodden path and greatly complicate your career - the choice is always yours. Way #5: Keep considering that if the pot is won, then it no longer matters how This is a consequence of the focus on the result, but it deserves a separate discussion. «Pain» is the strongest group of emotions, and they stick in the memory much more firmly than positive feelings. Most players analyze lost hands between sessions. After all, losing a buy-in is much more painful than winning it - it is pleasant. And we tend to look for mistakes exactly where we lost the pot. The typical chain of thoughts is as follows: I lost a hand in a large pot, => This means that I lost a lot of money, which I no longer have => This means that I need to check the correctness of the game from the point of view of all concepts => And make sure that I did everything correctly or get rid of the negative habit => This way I will feel much safer, and therefore happier, and will live and play longer. But when we win a pot, we usually don't care how exactly we won it, and we don't ask ourselves whether we will lose money if we systematically play in a similar way. So we simply don't spend resources on analyzing the hands we won. And sometimes they contain a lot of fundamental mistakes that burn tons of money for you. Way #6: Quit the game early when you win, and when you lose, play until you can win back Also a very common problem for not very experienced players and just gamblers. I personally have never had such a problem, because I love poker with all my heart, and I love playing it. I never tried to «save» when I managed to show a serious profit in the current session (and over a longer period), and when the game is clearly not going well for me today - I finished it as early as possible, if I realize that I am in a bad condition to go «through all the hardships» of bad luck. When you have a good plus for the session and leave the game early, then you leave a lot of potential profit to your opponents, making them only stronger, and yourself - under-realizing at the moment at your peak. - What peak?! - When everything works out for you, you usually play in your top style, your A-game. And suddenly stopping playing, your neuroresource and «tailwind» remain unused for future use. When everything is good, you Play with a fresh head, With an excellent emotional background, With a minimum of fear and desire to punish the opponent, And so on - say it yourself. You have maximum EV, and self-management (the degree of realization of EV) can exceed 100%. Conversely, when you're banging your head against the wall trying to win back lost money, you're almost always playing too many hands in D, E, and even Z-game. That is, you're playing on noticeable tilt. Your head is foggy, your eyes are pulsing, and your anger and resentment are surging out. You're not going to play optimally on tilt. You will: Be afraid to bluff for a lot of money, even IP, Be afraid to call big bets, afraid to lose another buy-in, Expect that the next card will ruin everything as usual, so you won’t bet on thin value, In general, avoid uncomfortable spots and opponents a mile away, which will further fuel your emotions... Therefore, set yourself a limit on your loss per session (stop loss) in advance and closely monitor your emotional state, and at the first signs of significant tilt, stop playing today. Path #7: Keep thinking that if someone else makes a mistake, you are immediately better than them It's almost a sin to be so arrogant without good reason. For several reasons. When a player sees others make mistakes, he becomes overly confident: both about a specific opponent and in general. If you were to review a played session, as if you and I were physically sitting next to each other and going over every hand you played, I guarantee you would find so many stupidly played hands that I would hear - «Oh my god, did I really play like that?!», - «Something just snapped at me here,» - «I did something crazy here too,» that you would quickly realize how often you make mistakes during a game and immediately forget about it. We make mistakes because we think about the wrong thing at the right moment, and also when we are under time pressure. And then we make a mistake, and then we recognize it and get upset about it. So we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and accept these excuses in ourselves. But when we see someone else play badly, we don't think like «Hmm, he probably knows what to do, he just screwed up this time. Maybe because of time pressure, or maybe even a misclick.» We look at his mistake and think «Does he think this is a good play? - Well, I certainly don't play that stupidly. That means I'm much better than him.» When you tend to think in this style, then 2 super-loss-making tendencies will begin: You will consider your opponents significantly weaker than you based on such a short sample (maybe he ran terribly so he flared up once), You will start getting into games where in reality you have no advantage over your opponents. But based on the previous rare glitches of your opponents, you will think that you do. And then, naturally, you will lose money, getting a bunch of new problems. But we all sometimes make mistakes and look like fools to those who don't know us yet. That's normal. Way #8: Jump up a stake to recoup your losses faster We all know perfectly well that we shouldn't do this even when we're at gunpoint. But, damn it, you still do it and end up in zero. This usually happens when a player wants to finish the day in the black at all costs. And in his current state of mind, he thinks that this is how he increases his chances. But to call a spade a spade, this person is starting to gamble. He often acts (unconsciously) like a Martingale game. It works something like this. Let's say, you play roulette. You bet $5 on black, and if you win, you walk away with a win of +$5. If you lose, you bet $10, and if you win this spin of the roulette, you also walk away with a win of +$5. But if you lose this bet too (5 + 10 = $15), then you bet $20. If you win, you walk away with +$5, and if you lose again, you bet again, but this time $40 . . . And so on up to the maximum available bet. But for each bet you will win +$5. - That is if you have enough money. Many people think that since you will almost always walk away with a win, then it is a good strategy to play according to Martingale. However, in reality, each individual bet in roulette has a negative EV due to the presence of 1-3 Zero fields. And you will inevitably lose all your money if you bet long enough. In roulette, the presence of just one «Zero» (a green cell with the «0» symbol) makes the probability of winning = 48.6%, which already leads to -1.4% over the long term for each bet made. In different types of roulette, the casino has an EV advantage of 1.5-5.3%. So the longer the player bets, the faster he will lose everything. The casino will always be in the black - it wins guaranteed, and the players - by chance. In these games, we have a deliberately negative EV, and the longer we play, the more money we will lose. Imagine a typical chart from a bad player's tracker (a tournament one is better): he has individual large wins for thousands of dollars, but the overall trend is downwards, and after some time he will still go into the red. Just for fun, a friend of mine lost a ton of money this way, topping it all off with a bet of $80,000. And this applies to poker in the same way. Only here your EV is not static (and even negative), but depends on the mass of your choices. In poker, only how much you win over a long period matters: 1 year, 2.3 - and so on. The results of even a single month should not matter. In addition, you must clearly understand that at the upper limit, more skilled opponents and greedier fish play. So even in a better mental state, you should not always play there without the technical skill to beat them. And when you are trying to make up for a lost game, then in 95+% of situations you are not thinking about the quality of your game and the circumstances in which it occurs, but about how to quickly get into at least some minimal profit, and end the session for that day. You're tilted, you're not «here» mentally, you're making too many mistakes and your EV is way down at this time. Keep doing this and you'll end up broke. Way #9: Trust every person you like Poker is a game for money, and with other people's money. In it, as in the outside world, there are plenty of people you shouldn't trust, and it's better not to have any contact with them at all. Wherever big money is involved, there have always been, are and will be scammers, cheaters and fraudsters. This applies to both offline, where you can fall under the «charm» of another person in a moment, especially if it's a charming girl, but also to online poker. When my friends and I were gradually getting used to offline, we regularly crossed paths with such people. The truth is that such people have succeeded in quickly gaining the trust of others, becoming good acquaintances, and then even «friends», but they are always ready to do you some dirty trick. They take you with their charm, charisma and ability to read your gut. They look nice, good and even fair. Any conversations and business start with them very quickly. And many are not alarmed by the fact that it happens extremely quickly and smoothly. Many people believe that they have a good compass inside themselves, which will always tell them whether the person in front of them is a good person - and usually this is intuition + life experience. However, those bad people we are talking about now are successful because they are good at deceiving other people and using them for their own selfish interests. My advice is simple: Don't be naive, don't believe in miracles (especially when it comes to big money) and by default don't trust strangers in poker and poker-related circles too much. I'm not advocating that you trust charming and charismatic people less than ordinary people by default - well, just a little bit. Just always think about your financial security first. As a rule, a random stranger will be interested in your money (you're a poker player, which means you earn well), and not your personal qualities. Be especially wary of those who offer to help you financially in some way: back you, lend you money, etc. (or for you to back them yourself). First, study this person yourself, ask other people's opinions about him, and so on - this will help you avoid making a mistake, or even an irreparable one. Way #10: After playing and learning «enough», get to the point where you understand EVERYTHING That is, having seen how your current game is bearing fruit, stop developing your psychology and strategy. I know many examples of how people win money over a period of time (sometimes even over years), and then stop learning. Especially - to adopt knowledge and experience from other people. I have already said before (in Way #4) that Joint learning with other people is the best way to quickly become a successful regular, at least on midstakes. But sometimes people reach such a state that they are already tired of learning anything and looking at others, and focusing on their long-term results, they see that they have everything and are already better than everyone around them. So they stop growing, some more stubborn competitors begin to overtake them, and as a result they see how their income gradually begins to fall. I believe that even if you play at the highest limits, even if you are a poker genius, even if you don't have fears like Phil Ivey, that is, you are the best poker player in the world, then You always have something to learn and where to grow. Always, in 100% of cases. And believe me, you yourself will enjoy learning when you understand that you owe your win rate to your knowledge, fortitude and unstoppable desire to absorb something new into yourself. Bonus: What Phil Galfond suffered enough during his career The biggest difficulties for me were caused by the two next points. First: Developing in poker alone When many of my acquaintances and friends stopped playing poker one way or another, I was left, essentially, without support and experience from the outside. This alone seriously slowed down my growth in limits and reduced my income in general. Believe me, it was much more difficult to move forward in poker alone than with like-minded people, although I myself am quite an introvert. In addition, then I began to create and develop my own, now former, poker room, so the results of my game fell even more. Second: Trust in several people who initially had a good attitude I, like several of my acquaintances, repeatedly backed and lent our money to various, as it turned out later, bad individuals. At first everything was fine, communication started and developed with a bang - of course - but soon we realized that they were not going to return what we had borrowed. We, poker players, are used to not making long-term and global conclusions based on just one unsuccessful attempt. That is why it sometimes happens that it takes more than one approach to understand and accept the pattern. Maybe we were mostly unlucky, or maybe these were our personal mistakes and oversights, for the most part. Be that as it may, without a long study of the person we are interested in, neither I nor my friends give him more money. Summing up Everyone here saw something new or repeated something long forgotten, but valuable and never losing relevance. Phil Galfond tried to explain in detail the most common tendencies that ruin a player's career in the bud. Regardless of circumstances, childhood and in general - origin - any of us can have one or more of the listed tendencies and habits. If we follow our weaknesses and bad habits, allowing them to determine how we behave, then we will receive losses, anxiety, a constant headache from minuses and all the other pain that can only be imagined. The first step to getting rid of these tendencies and problems is to see them at all and take them under observation. When you are conscious and clearly understand that you have such and such illusions, you will be able to act much more effectively even with them. And then gradually correct them. The best thing you can do is systematically improve. In any scenario, these 11 paragraphs were suffered through the sweat, nerves, and sometimes even the blood of those who walked the thorny path of poker for many years and millions of hands played, and who managed to go through all the typhoons and falls into the unknown, becoming many times stronger than their former selves. Finally, a little advice from the pros Let's go back to the first Path: playing poker only for money. Even being a super-successful poker player does not always equal personal happiness. After all, the life goals of most sensible people are to find personal happiness. If you take away the rose-colored glasses and successful one-time wins in top tournaments and/or cash games with fat fish, then what remains is a harsh and unsightly reality. Considering the lifestyle that you will have to lead for years and decades in order to become a successful professional player, you must be the kind of person who loves Poker itself: the cards, the huge pots and the bright emotions that come to you along the way. You must enjoy the process of the game, as amateurs do, but only have reason and sufficient self-control to act correctly and in a timely manner. If you are this type of person, you will eventually be able to go through the thorny path of a professional poker player, easily enduring all sorts of downswings and illusions, every now and then returning to the game with great enthusiasm, and at the same time earning huge incomes in poker, which you can only dream of now. Now do it.
