Winning in anything takes work. If you want to succeed in chess, basketball, business, it doesn’t matter–it’s all about work. Those who put in the needed reps to improve will have success in the long run.
To win at online poker consistently, you need to be working to improve your poker strategy regularly. You do not have a chance to compete if you don’t do this. Imagine not practicing basketball and expecting to be one of the best players when you play. With online poker, you’re competing with people all over the world for real money. This will bring out thousands of people who are willing to study day and night at the prospect of playing a card game to make money.
To compete in this environment, you must work! This will mean playing regularly, studying regularly, and having a disciplined approach to the game. It’s too cut-throat to expect to win consistently without doing these things.
VOLUME – You must play to practice your strategy and pick up the nuances through experience. Someone can tell you the keys to being a good boxer, but until you get into the ring and get hit a few times, you’re not going to have any chance implementing what they teach. A lot of learning is through trial and error. This is true for most things in life. Poker is no different. You need to be playing regularly as well as recording your sessions and/or marking hands to review later.
STUDY – Watch training videos, talk with other poker players, review live footage and hand histories. Look at how your frequencies compare to those that are having success. Use tools on the market to see how a computer would advise you to play. This is what it takes to compete and win consistently. When this much money is on the line, the competition will be fierce. Poker is not a get-rich-quick-scheme, and you are doomed if you think it is. Like any field, to have success, you must put in the work.
DISCIPLINE – Poker has a significant element of luck which often clouds the minds of people. They win a tournament and think they’ve solved it when in reality, they just ran in the top 1% of outcomes which statistically has to happen to 1 in 100 people in that tournament. Now they stop studying and are going to be less likely to have sustained success. You must regularly study and play, regardless of your results. Never be satisfied. You must be hungry to improve every single day. This compounds fast! If you get 1% better every single day for an entire year, you will be 36x better than you were to start the year. Imagine trying to compete against someone that is improving 36x every year if you aren’t working equally hard. To work and improve consistently, you’ve got to have discipline.
MINDSET – This is the glue that keeps it all together. To play your “A” game, you must be focused and present in the moment. Winning is tough with a sub-optimal mindset. There are many ways to improve your mindset, including meditation, reading, writing, fitness, and even hypnotherapy. Success in poker requires you to make the best possible decisions at a high frequency. This becomes impossible when impeded by tilt, negative emotions, and other distractions.
The key to winning at online poker consistently is purely in the work. Work hard, and you put yourself in the best position to have success. If it were easy, everyone would be winning.
