1/ The poker spiral of doom:

Step One:

* Have very few expectations
* Play and learn from a relaxed and easy state
* Win some money, gain confidence, and keep feeling good as you keep learning and growing
* Really enjoy each win, losses are just lessons to learn 2/ Step Two:

* Eventually, run bad and lose a decent amount
* Replace the relaxed and easy feeling with tension and anxiety
* Try to "get it back" from this state
* Winning isn't fun, just a relief—and losing feels suffocating
* Try to avoid pain at all costs

🔷 I've been asked many times:

“What do you recommend to warm up before playing?”

My advice here is different from most.

3 things I prescribe for a great warmup:

* Get Clear
* How, not What
* Be Intentional

More on each of these below: 1/ 🔷 Get Clear

How do you want to feel?

* Focused
* Present
* Ready
* Grounded
* Excited
* Energized

Are all good possibilities.

But if you don’t know exactly how you want to feel, you can't do what’s needed to get there.

Once you know?

The next steps get easier.

1/ Do you struggle to put in high quality volume?

Or feel like your winrate never matches your skill level?

It’s not a coincidence.

And it’s likely you’re falling into one of two performance traps: 2/ There are two major types of people in poker:

1) Frontrunner

2) “Back against the wall”

1/ Showed up for restart at WSOP one day.

Two guys are in mid-conversation.

One says:

“Yeah, I always go there to eat every time I come to Vegas, it’s not fancy or anything but it’s so satisfying every time.”

Instantly I know what they’re talking about: 2/ It could only be In-N-Out Burger.

The reason:

Of all the places to eat, they are the one that will always deliver the sensory experience that your brain is imagining it’s going to have.

It created their empire.

Here’s how you can use this concept to win more at the table:

1/ The holy grail of poker is to not be results oriented.

It’s a concept that gets talked about a whole lot more than it's actually felt.

Ironically, trying to be less results oriented actually just makes you more results oriented. 2/ When your goal is to not care about results, the natural tendency is to squash all your emotions that come from winning or losing—win a big pot, don’t get too high, lose a big pot, don’t get too low.

Except it’s all a mirage.

Something I’ve noticed in my work:

1) People tend to relax and stop growing when things are going really well, and most don’t seek out big changes and support until the house is burning down. 2) The state that you’re in when you seek out support determines what type of results you can get, and most people are going at it backwards.

A thread on insights and intuition:

1) I recently heard about Ben Affleck asking a question on the set of Armageddon, regarding the best way to drill a hole on an asteroid:

Why wouldn’t you just train astronauts to drill, rather than train oil drillers to become astronauts? 2) Such an obvious plot to me hole now, but only after hearing him say it.

Reminds me of all the hands of poker I’ve butchered where I knew something was off, but missed a key detail that was staring me in the face and messed up a spot terribly because of my narrow focus.