Top 3 Secrets of High Stakes Poker Pros

07 Feb 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

In my coaching practice, I’ve worked with many players who compete at the highest stakes in poker. What I've discovered is that when you reach high stakes, your problems don’t just disappear. If you haven't built a strong foundation to understand what you need to feel good and perform at your best, those problems can actually intensify. As you play for larger sums of money, emotions grow stronger, and anything you've neglected to address in the past will come back and hurt you even more.

Ideally, you want to work through these issues as you climb up the stakes. This will help you reach the highest levels faster, and once you're there, you can simply enjoy the game, play your best, and live the dream. Let’s dive into the three things you need to know to make this happen.

When I talk to top players at the highest stakes, the best in the world, they often tell me the same things I hear from players at much lower stakes. They'll say things like:

• I just hate getting bluffed.
• I don’t want to be bullied, so I end up making these plays.
• Losing hurts so much, it makes me not want to play poker.
• Bad sessions make me question everything about my life and make me hate poker.

These are the same complaints even from the most successful players — those who’ve made millions from poker.

In fact, if these issues are unresolved, you might feel them even more. When you thought success would make everything better, but it doesn’t, it can lead to thinking there's something wrong with you. That can lead to the natural conclusion: «Maybe there is something wrong with me?». 

So what you need to understand is that the problem needs to be addressed. It's not going to leave and success does not fix it. 

The second thing you need to understand is that having a deep knowledge of poker isn't enough. Nearly every successful high-stakes player I’ve coached has told me something like, «I have a friend I study with, and honestly, he understands the game better than I do». They often mention how their friend comes up with ideas they can’t even find themselves.

What this tells me is that knowledge alone doesn’t directly translate to success in high-stakes poker. It doesn’t automatically lead to higher stakes or a successful career. 

What truly matters is learning how to execute that knowledge in the heat of the moment. When you’re overwhelmed at the table, no matter how much you’ve studied, you might fall back on old habits and forget everything you've learned. 

Knowledge sets the foundation for what you're capable of, but your ability to perform at that level is the skill that propels players to the highest stakes.

The last thing I want to share on this topic comes from a conversation I had with one of my longtime clients, Kevin Rabichow. Kevin is a top-level tournament player and well-known coach in the poker world. By the way, on our website you can check out all available poker coaches, including Sergey «Jayser1337», Stoyan Obreshkov, Matiss C, Francesco Campioni and many others.

So, I asked him next: «What separates the highest stakes players from those who struggle to move up from the mid-stakes?». He told me that what mid-stakes players don’t understand is that, even at the highest levels, we still often find ourselves in situations where we have no idea what’s going on. We have to figure it out in the moment, right there while we’re playing the hand. 

It’s not as though they have all the answers or never feel uncertain. They constantly encounter spots where they don’t know what to do next. It’s in these moments that they separate themselves from those who can’t break out of the middle of the pack. 

High-stakes players are able to lock in, focus, and stay present. They feel the emotions that come up but don’t let them take over. They trust their instincts instead of trying to play the way they imagine the solver would or how they think their peers or viewers want them to play. They block out all the external noise, stay true to themselves, and execute based on their instincts and what their senses are telling them.

That’s what sets them apart from the rest. High-stakes poker players aren’t superhuman or invincible — they’re just regular people who’ve worked through certain things inside themselves. This allows them to perform at their best even under intense pressure.

So here’s the key takeaway for today's topic: the problems you face now will only get bigger if you don’t deal with them. They’ll be your problems at higher stakes, but amplified. Now is the time to address them.

So, learn how to stay present with your feelings right now. The more you study, sure, that's helpful — but unless you can access that knowledge while in the game, from a calm, relaxed, focused, and present state, it won’t translate into success. It won’t help you move up in stakes or convert into real money.

Then, you need to get really good at improvising. That’s what high-stakes players do — they wing it. They can make great decisions on the fly, even when they have no clue what's going on, and they trust their instincts. Once you can do that, you’ll start embodying the qualities that every high-stakes player has. That’s what will give you the best shot at reaching the top!