🔵 3 things poker players can teach us about high-performance

For outsiders, the world of poker is one fraught with mystery.

Some view the game as pure luck, where a group of degenerate gamblers throw their money into the pot, with the most fortunate ultimately taking it all.

Others consider the best players in the world to be walking supercomputers, constantly running complex calculations, with the ability to figure out their opponent's exact cards by a slight twitch or gesture.

Of course, the truth is someplace in the middle.

In the short term, luck plays a massive role in who wins any single hand.

In the long term, it's those who hone their skill and consistently apply it at the tables who come out on top.

This is what makes the game so fascinating.

If you watched me play LeBron James in a 1v1 basketball game, you would certainly know who the better player is, even if you've never watched the sport before.

If you watched me play poker against my best poker clients, you'd have a hard time telling who was better unless you knew what to look for.

To be a top player in poker requires thinking about the game and the world in counterintuitive ways. This is why it has been such a powerful training ground for developing many of the performance strategies I share here.

Over the past decade, I've worked with the best in the poker world...

...from World Series of Poker champions to players winning millions in the highest-stakes games on Earth...

Here are the three critical lessons poker's elite can teach anyone serious about high performance, even if you never plan on playing a hand of poker in your life.

Deep Dive:
Three Things Poker Players Can Teach Us About High-Performance

Think in Ranges

The Poker Reality: Amateur poker players think in absolutes:

"My opponent has ace-king" or "They're bluffing."

Elite players think differently. They consider ranges...

...all the possible hands their opponent could have in that situation, weighted by probability.

Instead of thinking:

"They have AK."

A world-class player thinks:

"Their range is pocket tens or better, ace-jack suited or better."

They then make the optimal play against that entire range, knowing they'll sometimes lose when their opponent shows up with the top of the range, but they'll be profitable in the long run.

This is counterintuitive. It means accepting that you'll make the "right" decision and still lose sometimes, maybe even more often than not. However, elite players understand that optimal decision-making isn't about winning every hand; it's about making the play that's most profitable over the long term.

Your Application: In business and life, most people default to binary thinking: this deal will either work or it won't, this hire will either be great or terrible, this strategy will either succeed or fail.

High performers think in ranges. They consider multiple scenarios, assign probabilities, and make decisions that win across the spectrum of possible outcomes rather than betting everything on a single prediction.

When evaluating a new market opportunity, instead of asking:

"Will this work?"

Ask:

"What are all the ways this could play out, what's the probability of each scenario, and what's my expected value across all possibilities?"

This shift eliminates the paralysis that comes from trying to predict the unpredictable and focuses you on making decisions that compound over time.

Action Step: For your next major decision, write down 5-7 possible outcomes and assign rough probabilities to each. Then ask:

"What decision gives me the best expected value across all scenarios?"

Make that choice, knowing that even if a low-probability negative outcome occurs, you made the optimal decision given the information available.

Beware Of Tilt

The Poker Reality: Picture this: A poker player just won a massive pot, the biggest of their career. They're feeling incredible, invincible even.

What happens next? They start playing hands they usually wouldn't, making larger bets than their strategy calls for and taking risks that don't make mathematical sense.

Now picture the opposite: A player just lost with pocket aces to a lucky draw. They're furious, frustrated, wanting revenge. They start playing too many hands, chasing losses, and making desperate moves.

Here's what's fascinating:

Both players are making the same mistake. They're letting emotions, positive and negative, override their strategic decision-making. Poker players call this "tilt," and the best in the world have learned something counterintuitive: any emotional state that causes you to deviate from optimal strategy is dangerous.

The euphoria of winning can be just as costly as the agony of losing.

Your Application: We're taught to think of emotions in terms of good and bad.

Confidence is good; fear is bad.

Excitement is good; anger is bad.

But elite performers understand that the fundamental distinction isn't good versus bad. It's strategic versus emotional decision-making.

That surge of confidence after landing a big client? It might lead you to overpromise on the following proposal. The excitement from a breakthrough idea? It could cause you to skip the due diligence that would reveal fatal flaws.

Even positive emotions can hijack your judgment. The key insight is to treat emotions as valuable information about your internal state rather than as instructions for your next move. Fear tells you to gather more information. Anger tells you that boundaries have been crossed. Excitement tells you to slow down and double-check your reasoning.

Action Step: Before your next high-stakes decision, follow the lead of elite poker players and take an "emotional inventory." Ask yourself:

"What am I feeling right now? How might this emotion be influencing my judgment?"

Then ask:

"What would I decide if I felt completely neutral?"

Make your choice from that neutral strategic place, not from the emotional peak or valley.

Performance Is a System, Not an Event

The Poker Reality: Average poker players focus on individual hands or sessions. Elite players think in terms of systems and long-term optimization. They understand that today's performance is the result of last night's sleep, this morning's nutrition, their fitness routine, their study habits, and their mental preparation protocols.

What appears to be "natural talent" at the table is actually the cumulative effect of dozens of performance-optimizing habits working together.

Your Application: Peak performance isn't something that happens by accident or in isolation. It's the predictable result of systematic preparation across multiple domains: physical energy, mental clarity, emotional regulation, and environmental design.

The elite 1% in any field understand this. They don't just show up and hope for their best performance. They engineer the conditions that make peak performance inevitable.

This means treating yourself like a professional athlete, even if you work in an office. It means recognizing that your nutrition, sleep, fitness, and recovery protocols directly impact your cognitive performance and decision-making quality.

Action Step: Design what poker players call your "A-Game Protocol," a systematic approach to preparing for your most important work. This might include: specific sleep requirements, pre-performance nutrition, a warm-up routine to get mentally sharp, and environmental setup that supports focus.

The Bottom Line

The highest-stakes poker players in the world have figured out something that most high-performers are still missing:

Your edge doesn't come from just being more skilled than your opponents. It comes from applying your skills more consistently over the long term.

Professional athletes won't make the Hall of Fame if their careers get cut short by injuries they could have prevented by taking better care of their bodies.

Traders won't succeed in the long term if they become overconfident when winning and try to force the issue when they're losing.

Founders won't achieve the massive exit if they burn themselves out before they reach it.

If you have the skills to succeed, the question is: what percentage of those skills are you applying over the long term, and how do you react when the pressure is on?

By necessity, poker players must think differently to succeed.

And while you can get by in other industries by following conventional wisdom, if you want to reach truly elite levels, take these lessons from poker to heart.

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