The Inner Game of Poker: Why You Play Worse Than You Know How To

You keep finishing sessions feeling like you didn't actually play your best poker.

You know you're a good player. You've worked hard on your game. You've put the hours in with solvers, you've run the sims, you've studied the spots. And yet at the tables, something keeps slipping. The mistakes you'd never make in the lab keep showing up in game. The gap between what you know away from the table and what you can actually execute on in game is somehow getting wider, not narrower.

So you go back to the lab. You study more, you grind more sims, you tell yourself the answer must be more knowledge.

And the same gap shows up the next session.

This is a frustrating cycle that many poker players find themselves in. So let me explain what's actually going on and how to break out of it.

Studying more won't fix this

I want you to think about the times you played your best poker. Not the times you got the best results, the times you genuinely felt like you played your best.

Now ask yourself what that felt like. Was it effortful? Were you forcing things, analysing every spot, judging yourself, trying hard not to make mistakes? Or was it the opposite? Did it feel free flowing? Were you trusting yourself, being creative, going with the read that felt right in the moment?

I've had this conversation with hundreds, probably thousands of players now. Almost everyone says the same thing. Their best poker has a quality of ease to it. Not laziness, not autopilot, just a kind of effortless trust in themselves.

Now think about the opposite. The sessions where you finish feeling you didn't show up properly. What was different? Almost always there's an element of trying too hard. Trying to force things. Trying to make sure you make the right play. Trying to exploit this opponent in exactly the right amount. Wanting the result too much. The mind doing too much.

The gap between your best version of yourself away from the table and your in-game version isn't a strategy gap. It's a mindset gap. Which is why studying more strategy will never close it.

You have two mindsets. You're using the wrong one.

To understand the gap, you need to understand that there are two completely distinct mindsets you can be in, which most players aren’t aware of.

Mindset 1: The Training Mindset 

This is effortful, calculating, analytical, judging. It's the mind trying to get things right. It's remembering the chart in your head, replicating the move you saw in yesterdays study session, checking your plays against what the solver said.

Mindset 2: The Performance Mindset

This is intuitive, free flowing, trusting. It's letting yourself fully respond to the unique problem in front of you. It's going with the read because the read is there, not because a solver told you to do it.

Both mindsets are useful. Yet they are not useful at the same time.

The training mindset is what you want when you're studying. You want that analytical, judging, calculating part of your brain fully on when you're building your strategy and getting the reps in. That's where it belongs. That's how you become a good poker player in theory.

But here's the counterintuitive part: when it's time to actually play, you have to switch it off. The training mindset that built your game is the same mindset that strangles it in real time. You have to consciously turn one mindset off and turn the other on.

Most players never make this distinction. So they sit down to play stuck in training mindset, mind running hot, overstimulated, second-guessing every decision, trying to make sure they don't make a mistake. And then they wonder why their best poker keeps showing up only in flashes.

A Steph Curry insight

I once heard an interview with Steph Curry that stuck with me. If you don't watch basketball, just know he's widely considered the best three-point shooter of all time.

In one game, there were five seconds left on the clock, his team was down by two, and they needed a three to win. Everyone knew Curry was the threat, so he had two or three defenders all over him. He did this intricate spin, caught the ball, created space, and drained the three just before the buzzer.

After the game the interviewer asked him what he was thinking in that moment. They were expecting some revelation about reading the defenders, calculating the angle, out thinking his opponents.

Yet Curry said he was thinking exactly…nothing.

He wasn’t thinking anything, we was just fully present in the moment.

Unsatisfied by the answer, the interviewer probed hime again, to which Curry answered, “I trusted the work I’ve done to prepare me for that moment”.

That's what elite performance actually is. Not a smarter or louder mind in the moment, but the ability to trust the work you've already done and get out of your own way. The reps live inside you. The job in the moment is to let them out, not to override them with thinking.

A lesson my coach tried to teach me at 14.

I learned a version of this the hard way as a teenager.

From the age of 11 to my early 20’s, I’d compete in events around the UK. I used to train really well, often beating runners that would go onto medal at the nationals.

Yet in races, I’d always underperform.

It would never click for me in a race the same way it did in training. After one race, where I didn’t run very well, my coach pulled me to one side.

He said, “Adam, do you know what your problem is?”

I said something like, “maybe I’m not fit enough.”

To which he said, “No. It’s not that. Your problem is you try too hard.”

I was 14 at the time and I still remember having a visceral reaction to this. I tensed up internally just hearing it. In my head I thought, “What are you talking about? I just got passed on the last lap because I couldn't try hard enough. Now you're telling me to try less? That makes no sense.”

It took me years to understand what he meant. Trying harder, in the way I was doing it, was actually blocking my performance. The tensing up, the strain, the forcing, that's what was making me slower, not faster. The mind had taken something my body already knew how to do and started micromanaging it. Performance vanished.

The same thing happens at the poker tables, all the time. You try too hard. You go into trainer mindset. You become rigid. You start replicating the solver outputs you've memorised. You try to make sure you play "solid." And in the process, you lose your creativity. You lose your connection to the unique moment you're in, this exact hand, this exact opponent, this exact texture, that you could solve in real time if you were actually present for it.

Wisdom from The Inner Game of Tennis

If you play racket sports, you’ve probably came across the book The Inner Game of Tennis. Yet it's just as applicable to poker, or trying to perform your best at anything.

The author makes the same distinction I'm making, but he calls them Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is the training mindset, the thinking, judging, critical mind. Self 2 is the performing mindset, the part of you that actually knows how to do the thing.

His core argument is that the biggest obstacle to learning and to performing well is Self 1. The thinking mind, the part that's trying to control everything in real time, is what gets in your own way. Quiet that down and Self 2 already knows what to do.

If you'd like to work on closing this gap properly, with structure, this is the work we do inside The Poker Athlete.

But here's the crucial caveat, and it's where most people get the inner-game stuff wrong. This only works if you've done the training.

For example, if I'd never picked up a tennis racket and I tried to play "Self 2" tennis, just trusting myself to swing, I'd hit balls randomly into the fence. Trust without preparation is nothing.

The performance mindset relies on the training mindset having already done its job. You build the reps. You internalise what a good forehand feels like. You drill the spots, the ranges, the bet sizing decisions, the exploits. Then, and only then, in the moment, your only job is to keep the thinking mind quiet so what you've already built can come out.

The Skill of Presence

So the question becomes: how do you actually get into the performance mindset more often, and more reliably? Because most players experience it only as a vague feel. They get glimpses. They know it exists. They just don't have a system to access it on demand.

Underneath the performance mindset is a specific, trainable skill. It's called presence.

Presence is being fully here, in the moment, taking in all the relevant information around you, and responding to it. When you're present, you have access to information that's simply not available to the trainer mindset: the texture of this opponent, the read that's quietly forming, the intuition that says something's off here. 

You're not second-guessing yourself. You're not critiquing every decision. You're not worrying about variance, the last hand, or the bills. You're just there, absorbing the situation, looking for the best move you can find right now.

When you're stuck in training mindset at the table, none of that information is available to you. You only have access to what your conscious mind can actively retrieve in that exact second. There's no intuition. There's no feel. You're trying to solve poker with raw thinking power, and poker has too many variables for that to be your best mode.

Most players play their entire careers in trainer mindset and never know there's another gear. There is. It's the gear the best players in the world play in.

I host a podcast called The Mechanics of Poker with my co-host Rene where we interview some of the highest-stakes players in the world. Almost all of them describe the same arc. They go through a long phase of being deep in trainer mindset, grinding solvers, obsessing over theory, trying to get every spot right. That phase is necessary. But the players who reach the next level all describe the same shift afterwards: realising they'd done the training, and now it was time to step out of it. Time to be intuitive again. Time to trust themselves. Time to be creative.

And when you're in that state, there are no rules. You can hero-call because you feel he's bluffing. You can three-times-pot bluff because you feel he can't call. You're in the moment, not rigid, not second-guessing, not gripping the wheel. You just go.

So here's what to actually do

So the model is simple, but the practice isn't.

There are two mindsets. The training mindset is for studying. It builds your strategy and your reps. The performing mindset is for playing. It's where you actually execute what you've built.

Most players don't know the difference, so they walk to the table in training mode and stay there. Mind hot, overthinking, judging, gripping. The gap between what they know and what they can execute keeps widening, and they keep trying to fix it with more study, which is the one thing that can't fix it.

To close the gap, you have to train the skill underneath the performance mindset: presence. Being fully here. Trusting the work you've already done. Letting your intuition do what your conscious mind cannot.

This is not something you can read your way into. You can't intellectually grasp presence and have it show up at the tables. You have to actually practise accessing it. You need to learn what it feels like for you, build a reliable system for getting into that state, and train yourself to trust it under pressure.

If this email has resonated, if you can see the exact gap I'm describing in your own game, this is your chance to actually do the work on it.

The Poker Athlete is my 8-week bootcamp where I coach a small group of serious players live each week through the four mindset skills and four performance skills that close this gap. Presence is one of them. By the end, these are no longer intellectual concepts you understand. They're operating systems you live inside. The version of you that shows up at the tables stops looking so different from the version that shows up in the lab.

If you're serious about working on these skills, this is your chance.

→ Apply for The Poker Athlete

Adam