The Games We Play (And Why You Really Play Poker)

Are you playing the right games?

I don’t mean whether you’re playing the right stakes, the right formats, or even the right strategy. I mean something deeper than that.

Most of us never stop to question why we’re doing what we’re doing. We get pulled into a game — poker, money, status, proving ourselves — and we just start playing obsessively.

If you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet you didn’t stumble into poker casually. Something about it grabbed you. The competition. The idea that skill matters. The sense that, if you figured it out, you could separate yourself from the crowd.

I know that feeling well.

What I didn’t understand for a long time is that beneath the surface, I wasn’t just playing poker.

I was playing a game through poker.

And over time, I’ve come to believe something quite confronting:

You have to win the game you’re playing to be free from it.

Only then can you see it clearly. Only then can you decide whether you actually want to keep playing — or whether it’s time for a different game altogether.

Poker was where this became impossible for me to ignore.

The Games Beneath the Game

At a high level, most of what drives us as poker players falls into a couple of categories, even if we don’t consciously label them.

The first is the wealth game.

The wealth game is about money, security, freedom, and options. It’s not about being the best. It’s about being good enough, disciplined enough, and able to profit from your skill set over the long term.

In poker, the wealth game is relatively clear. You play against weaker players. You manage risk. You put in volume. Your edge compounds into money.

If you can find soft enough games, you can win the wealth game without having to be a great poker player.

But then there’s the second game — the one that hooks far more of us than we like to admit.

The status game.

Status is hierarchical. For you to move up, someone else has to move down. It’s about respect, reputation, and where you sit in the pecking order. Who wants to play you. Who avoids you. Who you avoid.

If you’ve ever cared more about who you beat than how much you won, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

And underneath the status game is usually something even more personal.

Identity.

Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Do I belong at these stakes?

I suspect many of you reading this recognise yourselves already.

Why Poker Pulls People Like Us In

Poker is a perfect environment for these games.

It attracts intelligent, competitive, independent people — often people who, somewhere along the line, decided they had something to prove.

Prove they’re smart enough. Prove they can outthink others. Prove they’re not ordinary.

At first, it feels like it’s all about the money. And for a while, maybe it is.

But if you look honestly at your own reactions, you might notice something else driving you.

Why do certain losses bother you for days? Why does beating one strong regular feel better than crushing a table of weaker players? Why does moving up feel meaningful even when the money itself doesn’t change your lifestyle?

Poker has a way of exposing what actually matters to us.

The game behind the game.

The Status Game I Didn’t Know I Was Playing

I started my poker journey playing $15 heads-up sit and gos on Pokerstars.

At the time, the highest stakes available were $1,000 games.

The whole path was mapped out level by level, with each step being tougher to climb.

Before I’d even played my first hand, I remember railing the $1k lobbies — watching games I had no business thinking about yet.

One moment is still vivid in my mind.

I watched Adonis112 — Oliver Busquets, a legendary heads-up player — win a $1k game in just a few hands.

The chat flashed: “Adonis112 wins $2,000.”

At that point in my life, that number felt absurd.

Someone had just made $1,000 in under a minute.

But looking back, I wasn’t just watching the money.

I was watching the top of the heads-up hierarchy.

Little did I know, I was about to embark on a journey to take his spot.

Climbing The Poker Ladder

For me, the first few levels of the game were really about survival and proving that I had what it takes to support myself.

Once I reached the $200 level and felt financially stable, something shifted internally.

That’s when the status game really began.

At the time, there were roughly a hundred regulars at $200/$300, around fifty at $500, and maybe ten players who truly controlled the $1k lobbies.

I was firmly in the middle of the $200 pack, but I wanted to establish myself as one of the top regulars at this level.

I got inspired by a player named rams85 on Pokerstars, who would crush all of the other regs on his schedule.

Nobody wanted to mess with him and he was respected by everyone.

So I did what many of you have probably done in your own way.

I started battling everyone to try to prove myself.

Over a number of months I began to establish myself as one of the better regulars in the mid-stakes player pool.

I had good results against most of the regs and not many of them wanted to battle me.

With my ego inflating, one day I decided to sit the big boss himself, rams85.

This turned out to be a big mistake.

Firstly he was annoyed that I chose to sit him, as he was usually the hunter.

Secondly, he was much better than me.

Taking A Beating and Losing Confidence

For the next six months, we played almost every day.

It was one of the most brutal periods of my poker career.

I felt like I’d hit my ceiling. Each day I studied his game, devised a new game plan and tried to come up with strategies to beat him. Most days, it didn’t work.

Even when I did win, I never felt like I was on top of the in game dynamics.

I always felt one step behind him. Trying to react and counter.

I started to lose confidence in my game, and at the time, it felt like I was failing.

That I just wasn’t good enough.

Only later did I realise what was really happening: I was being forced to grow.

If you’ve ever had a player who seemed to expose every weakness you didn’t want to look at, you’ll understand this feeling.

The players who break you often end up being the ones who teach you the most.

Later that year, I moved to Bali and fortunately I was no longer on the same schedule as rams85.

When I went back to playing the other regulars at my level, I couldn't believe how much I'd improved.

I felt two or three steps ahead of all of them and I could see exactly where the EV was coming my way.

I focused the rest of the year on hitting Supernova Elite volume and cementing myself as one of the top players at my stakes.

Meanwhile, rams85 went of a rampage at the $500 level and destroyed all of the top regulars there.

This was very reassuring to see. It made me think that maybe I wasn't too far behind the guys above after all.

And then came the bold move.

The Battle of A Lifetime

In 2015, the $1k lobbies were guarded by the top 10 heads-up sit and go players in the world.

Legends who had held these lobbies for years and who were seen as untouchable.

The only player to break into the level in recent years was Dan Coleman. He was a beast of a player, who went on to win the $1million buy-in One Drop that same year.

Yet me and my two housemates decided that we wanted to be the next to break in.

What unfolded over the next 8 months would be enough to write a book on, but in short, we battled the best players every day until they finally let us in.

After multiple six figure downswings and losing over 75% of my bankroll, I got accepted.

I remember waking up one morning to see I had been added to a Skype group called "$1k regs", which was reserved for the top 10 players in heads-up sit and goes.

To make room for me, someone else had been removed.

This was my crowning moment where I finally felt like I had arrived.

I could now share the highest stakes lobbies in my format with only a handful of the very best players.

I was respected and recognised by my peers.

I'd made it.

Yet Something Was Missing

What I didn't realise at the time, is how unsatisfied this was going to leave me.

For the next 12-18 months I was able to sit the $1k lobbies and wait for the fish.

With no more regs left to battle, this was the money printing seat I'd dreamed of years previously.

Yet if I'm being honest, I quickly got bored of it.

There was no more competition, no new mountain to climb, no one to challenge me and stretch me out of my comfort zone.

I should've been loving making lots of money and exploiting the fish for as much as I could.

But I didn't. It felt more like a 9-5 job where I clocked in my hours and got my payslip.

I’d already won my version of the status game and established myself as one of the best players.

And once that was over, the wealth game alone wasn’t enough to fill the space it left behind.

As much as I struggled to accept this, it was time for a new game.

What Winning Really Gives You

Here’s what I understand now.

We are all playing games, either consciously or unconsciously. We want to win to fill a void, a feeling of lack that we internally feel.

It could be a lack of money, a lack of freedom or a lack of respect. For many of us, myself included, we just don't feel like we are enough.

So the games we play become our way to fix this. If we can just win, climb to the top of the mountain and prove ourself to the world, the feeling will go away.

We will finally be enough.

Yet when we get there, it's not what we expect.

Instead of fulfillment, we get clarity.

We see that it was just a game and that winning it doesn't fundamentally change how we feel about ourself. We have a different view, but it's the same "you" looking out.

So we are left to confront a stark reality: is this game still worth playing?

At this stage you can see through the illusions of the game and you know that it's not going to solve your internal problems. Although this might sound like a bad thing, it's actually very liberating.

Now you get to make a choice. You get to keep playing the game because you love it, or to step away without resentment.

You don’t transcend a game by walking away from it early. By opting out when it gets tough.

You transcend it by seeing it through to the end and reflecting on where it takes you.

That clarity is a form of freedom.

Poker as a Mirror

Poker isn’t just a way to make money or to create freedom.

If you take it seriously, it becomes a mirror.

It reflects your ego. Your fear. Your need for validation. Your relationship with success and failure. It shows you how you relate to uncertainty, pressure, and even yourself.

In that sense, poker can become one of the most powerful tools for self-awareness there is.

The problem most people have is that they never really win the games they’re playing.

They stay trapped — chasing approval, security, or proof — without ever understanding what’s underneath.

Poker forced me to confront this.

By playing it all the way through, I was forced to see myself more clearly.

Poker was my vehicle for personal development and to understand myself more deeply.

And it lead me to my next game — helping other poker players to win their own games.

What Game Are You Playing?

I suspect many of you will recognise parts of yourself in this story.

The obsession with moving up stakes.

The need to be seen and respected by your peers.

The feeling that you need to prove something to yourself and to the world.

Rather than having these drives run in the background, we can bring them into our awareness now and be more conscious of them.

So, what game are you playing right now?

Is it the money game?

Is it the status game?

Is it the validation game?

Or is it the growth game?

There’s nothing wrong with any of these, as long as you’re conscious of it.

The danger isn’t playing games, we are all playing them. The danger is playing games unconsciously that you didn't choose to play. Or playing the wrong game for the wrong reasons.

Being a Poker Athlete is about playing the game of poker all out, to sharpen yourself and find out who you really want to be.

To win the game you’re playing.

Then decide, from a place of clarity, whether you want to keep playing.

That’s real freedom, at the table and beyond it.

P.S. I didn’t arrive at these insights by stepping away from poker.

I arrived at them by playing it fully — through the obsession, the swings, the wins, the losses, and the identity that inevitably gets tangled up along the way.

Over the years, I’ve worked with thousands of poker players and seen the same patterns repeat themselves — not just in how they play hands, but in how they relate to pressure, success, failure, and themselves.

That experience became the foundation of my Poker Athlete program.

If this piece resonated with you, and you want to use poker as a vehicle to improve yourself — not just technically, but mentally and personally — you can apply here.

Adam