The 4 Hardest Parts Of Poker Nobody Warns You About

Last week I posted a video that, to be honest, took off more than I expected. The response told me something I already suspected but had never seen confirmed so clearly: the hardest parts of poker aren't the parts everyone talks about.

If you missed it, you can watch it here:

But I want to do more than point you at a video today. I want to actually walk you through the four challenges in writing, because reading them slowly, with your own game in mind, lands differently than watching. You can pause on the one that resonates the most with you and reflect on it.

Now let's get into it.

It's not the strategy

Here's the hard part about poker that nobody warns you about when you start taking the game seriously.

It's not learning solvers. It's not exploiting your player pool. It's not the strategy at all. The strategy side has its challenges, sure, but for most of us strategy is the fun part. It's a genuinely great game to learn, and if that were the whole job, far more people would be winning.

The hard part is everything else. It's having to show up as your best self, make good decisions under pressure, and deal with the enormous amount that's completely out of your control.

These are the parts that quietly turn a winning player into a losing one. These are the parts that make it hard to move up and hard to keep progressing in your career. And they're the parts that separate the players who truly excel from the ones who stay stuck at the same stake for years.

I've had thousands of conversations with poker players about exactly this. The same four challenges come up again and again. For each one there's a specific skill you can train to get past it, and every player I've met with a long, durable career has, knowingly or not, built these skills. Let's go through all four.

1. Dealing with losing

It sounds obvious. But dealing with losing is genuinely hard, and it never fully goes away. No matter how good you get, you're going to lose often. If you play tournaments, you'll lose more sessions than you win. That's just the structure of the thing.

The difficulty isn't the loss itself. It's our relationship with it, how much we resist it. We're working toward our goals, toward making money, toward proving we're good. So a loss feels like moving backwards, like we're not showing up as the player we want to be. That creates an emotional reaction, and the reactions cluster at two extremes.

On one side: frustration and annoyance that heats up into anger. Why is this happening to me? I keep working on my game, I'm a good player, I'm playing well today, why am I not getting the results? On the other side: despair and hopelessness. It's out of my control, why even try, I'm just going to lose another flip. That's the victim mindset, the quiet belief that you can't change any of it.

Poker is uniquely cruel here, and it's worth being honest about why. Most things in life have a clean feedback loop: good decisions get rewarded, bad ones get punished, and over a short window the signal is roughly accurate. Poker breaks that. You can play absolutely perfectly and lose to someone clicking buttons who happened to get there. That gap, between what you did and what you got, is where the resentment lives, and it's the gap that breeds the "this is unfair" feeling.

The skill: Emotional Regulation.

You are going to feel emotions at the table. That is not the problem and it never was. The problem is letting them run on autopilot, disregulated, which just means out of sync with what's actually happening. You lose one pot and react like you've lost the month.

The work has three parts. First, understand your triggers, the specific things that set you off. For some players it's losing to one particular regular. For some it's getting sucked out on. For some it's dropping a certain number of buy-ins in a session. Get specific about yours. Second, build awareness of what the trigger does inside you, because the body and the mind move together. When frustration shows up in the body, the mind writes a story to match it: why does this always happen to me, I'm so unlucky, I'm such an idiot. Third, notice your response pattern. When you're triggered, do you fire wider and chase high-variance lines? Or do you go into your shell and start missing bluffs and value bets? There's no universal answer, there's only yours.

Then comes the real move, and it's the one that changes everything: you change the meaning you give the event.

Say an opponent bluff-catches you on the river. "He's so lucky, he should be folding there, I'm always the one this happens to" is one story, and notice how it casts you as the victim and lands as anger or helplessness. But is that the reality, or just one available narrative? Here's another, equally true: "He had it that time. That's in his range. Standard spot. No big deal, I'm still a winning player." Same hand. Completely different weight. One feels heavy; the other feels light, almost like nothing happened.

You'll never fully stop feeling things, and you shouldn't try to. The aim is to widen the range of emotional states you can still play good poker inside, to be able to say I feel this in my body, and I'm okay, I can handle it, I don't need to run from it. That's emotional regulation, and it's trained one disarmed trigger at a time.

2. Dealing with downswings

If losing a single session is the short-term sting, a downswing is the long, grinding version: the weeks, the months, sometimes the years where you start to doubt everything you thought you knew about yourself.

This is where the mind catastrophises, taking the present and blowing it up into a permanent future. What if I never win again? When is this going to end? What if I'm stuck like this forever? Am I even still a winning player? Can I afford to keep doing this? 

Your confidence crumbles, and here's the genuinely dangerous part: you stop playing your normal game. You either take on more risk out of frustration, forcing higher-variance lines, or you go passive, folding too tight, passing up the bluffs and the thin value you'd normally take. So what started as a variance-driven downswing turns into you actively playing worse. The hole gets deeper because of how you're reacting to the hole.

Honestly, of all four challenges, I think this is the hardest. Everything you've built (your money, your identity as a good player, the runway you've worked for) feels threatened at the same time. It can feel incredibly heavy.

You need two skills here, and they work together.

#1: Perspective. On a downswing, almost everyone zooms in. They pick a high point and a low point, draw a line between them, and narrate a tidy little story: "I'm on an X-buy-in downswing over the last four weeks." It feels like the truth. But it's a cherry-picked sample, deliberately framed to confirm how bad you already feel. Your job is to deliberately zoom out: a month, six months, a year, your entire career. Your mind is a pattern-recognition machine; show it a straight line going down and it concludes I suck. Show it the full graph and it concludes oh, you're actually a crusher. You're not lying to yourself; you're just choosing the honest, representative sample instead of the panicked one.

And give yourself far longer to climb out, six months rather than today. Most players want the downswing to end yesterday, because they're uncomfortable and want validation now. Hand yourself six months to make a lot of money, and the desperation drains out of every session.

#2: Resilience. This is my favourite skill to work on during a downswing, for one simple reason: you can only train it when things are actually hard. Reading about stoicism on a heater builds nothing. Resilience isn't just surviving adversity, it's getting stronger because of it. Look at the genuinely tough people you admire; they were all forged in hard times. So the downswing is your training. It's your Rocky scene. The move is to lean in, not away. Most players lean away: when will this end, I just want it over. Flip it completely: Bring it on. I've got this. Is this all you've got? You're talking to the variance, to the universe, to the downswing itself.

And life has a strange way of stepping aside when you stop flinching, like the bully in the schoolyard who backs off the moment you square up. You can even rehearse this away from the table: most people get into a cold shower and think when does this end, it's so cold. Change the line to this is cold, and I've got this, is this as cold as it gets? and the same sensation becomes completely tolerable. Lean into the hard thing and you prove to yourself you can handle it. Once you truly believe you can handle a downswing, it's game over, it becomes just another thing you ride out.

Side note while we're here: this exact pairing, perspective and resilience, is what we train in weeks four and five of The Poker Athlete program. If your downswing game is the part that's leaking, that's the work, and you can apply here.

3. Dealing with mistakes

If you hold yourself to a high standard, and most serious players do, mistakes don't just cost chips. They sting your sense of who you are. I'm an idiot. Why did I do that? I'm better than this. It's all judgment: you read the mistake as a verdict on your strategy, your ability, your worth.

But the mistake itself is never the real problem. What happens next is. You make an error, and then you spiral, ruminating, berating yourself, replaying it, and you're so far inside your own head that you miss the next three decisions. One mistake quietly poisons the rest of the session. That's the actual cost, and it's almost always bigger than the original error.

The skill: reframing, moving from judging to accepting.

Start by accepting the permanent truth: no matter how good you get, no matter how many solver reps and sims you run, mistakes will always be there, staring back at you, showing you you're not finished yet. That's not failure, that's the game. So change your relationship with them.

Every mistake is one of two things.

It's a strategic mistake, a genuinely tough spot, weird sizing, chips in odd places, where your brain overloaded and you weren't sure what to do. Perfect. That's a blind spot in your knowledge. Get curious: mark it, study it, close the gap.

Or it's an execution mistake, you knew the read, the guy was practically showing you he had it, and you called him down anyway. Also interesting, but a different question: I knew better there. Why didn't I trust myself in that moment? What got in the way?

The shift is from "I'm an idiot" to "interesting, what can I learn?" If you're thinking easier said than done, my mind just judges, here's why it judges: you're treating every single decision like a final exam, being rigid about a performance that was never meant to be flawless. Drop the exam framing. The goal is to lower your error rate over time and learn from each one as it appears, not to never make them.

4. Having to constantly improve

If you're not improving, you're stagnating, and in most games, especially online, stagnating means getting left behind. The pools keep moving; soft live games might let you coast for a while, but most environments won't. And if you actually want to move up rather than just cruise, you have no choice but to keep growing, consistently, over a long stretch of time.

Most players struggle exactly here, not with whether to improve, but with consistency. They get a burst of motivation: they watch a video, read a book, catch a podcast, and think right, this is it, things change now. They work hard for a couple of weeks, maybe see some early success, and then slide right back to the old habits and routines. The spike fades and nothing structural actually changed.

Underneath it, they're often trapped in a web of stories about what they can and can't do: what stakes they can beat, how many hours they're capable of, which levels are "too hard for someone like me."

The skill: Self-Awareness, and deliberately building a new identity.

The reason you keep snapping back is that you're fighting your current identity: the whole stack of habits, routines, and beliefs running you on default. Willpower against your own identity is a fight you lose by attrition.

So stop fighting it. Instead, define your 2.0 identity, the aspirational version of you that's already living your goals. How much do they grind? What are their routines and habits? How do they handle a cooler, a downswing, a long session? What are their character traits and their mindset? Get it genuinely specific.

Then start showing up as that person, a little, every day. At first it feels like this is just an exercise, it's not really me. But reinforced daily over time, it stops being a costume and becomes you.

And here's the quiet relief hidden in this approach. You don't have to drag your old self forward and laboriously fix it. You can simply drop it. You don't have to do battle with all the narratives and beliefs that have been holding you back, you can set them down and step into the version you actually want to be, enough times that it becomes the truth. That's the whole game with this one: not improving the old self, but becoming a new one.

Bringing it together

Those are the four challenges I see most often, and the skills that get you past each:

• Dealing with losing → emotional regulation

• Dealing with downswings → perspective + resilience

• Dealing with mistakes → reframing

• Having to constantly improve → self-awareness

Notice what's not on that list: strategy. That's the entire point. The strategy is the fun, learnable, drillable part, and if you could strip away everything above, poker would just be a great strategy game you get good at and beat. It's everything around the strategy that actually decides whether you keep winning, keep moving up, and keep enjoying the game years from now.

None of these skills are quick fixes. They take real work, the same drilling, the same showing up, the same consistency you already give your strategy study. You can absolutely start on your own, today. This email is a starting point. The video is a starting point. Pick the one challenge above that hit closest to home and just begin there this week.

But if you're serious about actually working on these skills, this is your chance.

I'm reopening The Poker Athlete program, my 8-week bootcamp where I coach you each week through these exact skills, alongside a small group of other serious players doing the same work. We don't just talk about emotional regulation, perspective, resilience, reframing and identity. We train them, deliberately, the same way you'd drill your strategy. The spots are limited by design, and a new group is opening now.

→ Apply for The Poker Athlete

I look forward to reading your application.

Adam