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This article was written by blackrain79.com contributor Fran Ferlan.
Most people lose money over the long run when playing poker.
But a select few of the top poker players are able to rake in millions and millions of dollars, be it through tournaments or cash games.
So what separates these top performers from the rest of us mere mortals?
In this article, we’ll take a look at 6 traits virtually all best poker players have in common.
Some of these may very well surprise you.
Let’s get right into it.
Top 1% Poker Player Trait #1: Superior Skill
Poker is a game of skill, which makes it different from other luck-based games you would play at a casino.
Luck does play a significant role in poker, and arguably more so than in other competitive arenas.
But just because there’s SOME luck involved in poker, it doesn’t mean it’s all about luck.
Luck plays a role in everything you do, and poker is obviously no exception.
But over the long run, skill prevails.
Over the long run, everybody gets their fair share of both good and bad luck, respectively.
A lot of amateur poker players tend to focus too much on the luck aspect of the game.
One of the reasons for that is they simply haven’t played enough volume, so they put too much emphasis on their short term results.
Since you can’t really control how you’re running session to session, the best poker players simply shift their focus to improving their skills and becoming the best player they can be.
If you’re the best poker player at the table, it doesn’t really matter how you’re running, or how many times bad players “get lucky” against you.
When it comes to improving your poker skills, there’s two ways you can go about it.
The first way is to simply play more poker.
Like with any other skill, you get better at it the more you practice.
The best poker players simply have more experience at the felt which allows them to make better decisions with the information they have available.
They will be better at reading the board and their opponent’s ranges, picking up cues based on the betting patterns, timing tells, physical tells and so on.
They will also be more skilled at concealing their own hand strength and not giving off any information to their opponents.
But merely playing more poker doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll improve your skills.
There’s a lot of amateur poker players out there who never seem to improve because they keep making the same, predictable mistakes over and over again.
Check out my other article on the 3 common poker mistakes most amateur players still make over and over again these days.
This is where the second part of the equation comes into play.
The single best way to quickly improve your poker skills is to pair deliberate practice with studying off the felt.
The best poker players have spent countless hours away from the table studying the game and working on identifying and fixing their leaks.
Then they apply what they learn in the game. After the game, they reevaluate their performance and repeat the whole process all over again.
This method of focused, deliberate practice is the single best way to improve your skills across the board, not just in poker.
Most poker players get stuck because they just play for the sake of playing, and think their results will improve as soon as “their luck turns around”.
In other words, a lot of players just play on autopilot, and don’t actively think about how to improve their skills.
There are a couple of reasons for this, but it mainly comes down to a lack of motivation or boredom.
If this feels familiar, the solution is actually pretty simple: try to cultivate a sense of curiosity.
Being curious means there is always something new to learn, which can motivate you to keep working on your game, both on and off the felt.
To make this into a habit, simply ask yourself the following question: “I wonder if/how…”
This single question is guaranteed to help you stay focus and engaged during your sessions, and it will also motivate you to work on improving your game off the felt.
A lot of poker players don’t really like studying off the felt because it feels like a chore, and they would rather just sit down and play some cards.
But if you develop a sense of curiosity, you will actually look forward to your studying as much as you look forward to actually playing.
The trick is to work on something that piques your interest, instead of doing something you think you should be doing.
You can also experiment with different formats to find something that works for you.
If you really don’t feel like reading, there’s a bunch of useful videos you can watch.
For example, see my latest video on how to win at poker in 30 days.
Never miss my new YouTube poker videos. Join 120,000+ who are already subscribed.
Top 1% Poker Player Trait #2: A Sense of Curiosity
All the top poker players in the world all life-long learners.
This dedication to continuous learning goes hand in hand with the growth mindset.
Nobody was born a poker pro, and everyone started out as a fish at some point.
Poker fish stay fish because they don’t learn from their mistakes.
In fact, a lot of poker players don’t even see the point because they falsely believe poker is all about luck in the first place.
Others may recognize poker as a game of skill to an extent, but they overestimate their skill level and think they already have it all figured out.
This illusion of knowledge is dangerous because it prevents you from ever learning anything new.
If you think you already have it all figured out, why would you bother learning anything new?
This is a misguided belief of course, because nobody has everything figured out.
This is also true for the pros, even though their knowledge of the game is vastly superior to the rest of the player pool.
The best poker pros know the scope and limits of their knowledge. In other words, they know what they don’t know.
Contrast this with a recreational player who doesn’t even know what they don’t know.
This is the difference between conscious competence and unconscious incompetence.
When you first start to learn about a topic, you can learn a lot of new information in a relatively short amount of time.
This new knowledge can give you the false confidence that you have it all figured out, and it’s just a matter of time before you’re playing high stakes with the best of them.
But after delving deeper into the material, you begin to understand the sheer scope of the field, and gradually start figuring out how much you actually don’t know about.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with how much there is to know and how out of depth you are, don’t worry.
This is actually a good thing.
It means you’ve moved past the beginner's overconfidence, and you begin to appreciate the complexity of the topic.
This is where the true learning can actually begin.
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Top 1% Poker Player Trait #3: Growth Mindset
The growth mindset is something virtually all the top poker players have in common.
In fact, this mindset is arguably the single biggest prerequisite you need to achieve long term success in this game.
Simply put, the growth mindset means having the belief that skills and abilities can be developed through hard work and practice.
This is the opposite of a fixed mindset, where people believe that skills and talents are innate and static, and there’s nothing much you can do about it.
A fixed mindset can come in the form of self-limiting beliefs, or in the form of certain claims beyond one’s control.
A lot of poker players have a number of limiting beliefs that’s holding them back from reaching their goals, and they could all be traced back to fixed mindset.
Here are a few examples of (self) limiting beliefs:
"I don’t think I could ever do x because of y."
"I’m not really a math person."
"I never get my fair share of good luck."
"They always suck out on me on the river."
"I always seem to run bad when I move up the stakes."
I could go on, but you get the point. These beliefs may vary based on severity and how detrimental they can be to your game.
Some of them can be easy to fix, but others may require a radical mindset shift.
For example, if you think you’re just naturally unlucky, poker may not be the best fit for you.
If you think you’re unlucky, playing poker will give you plenty of opportunities to reinforce that belief.
If you play poker for a while, you are guaranteed to be on the receiving end of “bad luck” over and over again, and there’s nothing you can do about it except to stop playing altogether.
Alternatively, you can adopt a growth mindset and look at obstacles as an opportunity to improve your game and learn something new.
In poker, there’s a lot of things you can’t control. You can’t control the cards you’re being dealt, and you can’t control the actions of your opponents.
The only thing you can control is the way you play the cards you’re dealt, and more importantly, how you react when the cards aren’t falling your way.
Fortunately, this is a skill as any other, meaning you can get better at it with practice.
Some people may be naturally more talented for certain skills, but raw talent can only get you so far.
What matters more is the effort you put into honing your skills.
In poker, your results will be directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into improving your game.
Focusing on improving your game for improvement’s sake will make playing poker a much more rewarding experience than just going through the motions and complaining about “bad luck”.
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Top 1% Poker Player Trait #4: Long Term Outlook
Poker is a game of skill, but it can take a while for your skill edge to truly manifest.
Poker has a short term luck element involved, so how much you earn on a given day or a month is not entirely within your control.
A lot of amateur poker players have a hard time getting past their short term results.
If they run badly, it often affects their game in a negative manner, so they get impatient, try to chase losses, move up the stakes to “break even” and so on.
But this only exacerbates the problem, and chasing the action often ends up backfiring.
Similarly, if they happen to run well, they wrongly assume that poker is an easy game, and they could seemingly just print money at will.
This can lead them to overestimate their abilities, jumping up the stakes and ignoring the basic bankroll management rules.
Then they’re left blindsided when the cards inevitably swing the other way, and their bankroll takes a huge hit along with their confidence.
Again, poker is a game of skill, but it can take a while to accurately assess your actual skill level.
Another problem is that most amateur poker players simply don’t put in enough volume to actually get to the long run.
For example, if you only play a couple hundred hands over the weekend, it’s going to take you a while to actually build up a significant sample size.
So let’s say you accumulate around 10,000 hands over the course of a few months.
You can run really bad or really well over that period, but either way, it’s hardly a huge sample size in the grand scheme of things.
Even though it may seem like you’ve been playing for countless hours, it’s hardly enough to account for variance.
It’s not uncommon even for winning poker players to experience prolonged losing or breakeven stretches.
In fact, even if you’re a winning poker player with a good winrate, you can still break even for as much as 100,000 hands!
If you think that sounds preposterous, I suggest you play around with a variance calculator and see just how much variance can impact your short term results.
This is why the best poker players simply don’t pay attention to their short term results, either positive or negative.
They know that winning poker is all about the long run.
But the problem is that the long run is far longer than most people actually realize.
For this reason, all the top poker players adopt an extremely long term outlook.
They pay attention to their short term results only insofar to help them find potential leaks in their game.
When analyzing their hands, they don’t really care if they won or lost, but rather whether or not they played their hand to the best of their ability.
If the answer is yes, it means their play has a positive expected value (it’s +EV), and it’s likely to earn them money over the long run.
If the answer is no, they see it as an opportunity to improve their strategy in the future.
In other words, they don’t care about the individual outcomes of the hands they played, but rather about the expected value of each play.
All the top poker players think in terms of expected value to drive their decisions at the felt.
This sort of a detached, analytical approach is absolutely crucial if you want to make it in this game.
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Top 1% Poker Player Trait #5: Discipline
Playing poker professionally may sound like a dream job to many aspiring players.
Being a poker pro indeed offers an unprecedented degree of freedom, but it does come at a cost.
Being your own boss may sound good in theory, but less so in practice.
The problem with being your own boss is that you tend to allow yourself certain liberties you certainly wouldn’t tolerate from your actual employees.
You wouldn’t tolerate your employee constantly coming in late, slacking off, or skipping work days altogether.
But when left to our own devices, this is what most of us would probably do if we could get away with it.
Playing poker for a couple of hours a week can be incredibly fun.
But playing poker full time can be just as much of a grind as your regular 9 to 5.
Except for the fact you aren’t actually guaranteed a paycheck at the end of the month.
Except for the fact you aren’t actually guaranteed a paycheck at the end of the month.
It’s true that you have the privilege of setting your own work hours, but this is also not everything it’s cracked out to be.
When playing poker full time, you don’t always have the luxury of playing whenever you feel like it.
If you’re playing cash games, you often have to play when the games are good, i.e. when there’s a lot of recreational players around.
This usually means the evenings or the weekends, or the times you would actually spend time with friends and family.
And if you’re playing tournament poker, you have to play when the tournament is actually taking place.
You can still pick and choose the tournaments you want to play, of course, but you’re still constrained by the format.
Not to mention that you can’t really know how long the tournament is going to last beforehand.
So setting up your own hours is a challenge in and of itself, but the biggest challenge by far is actually putting in the volume when you would rather do anything else.
That’s why the top poker players have a tremendous level of discipline.
This involves actually being able to show up day in and day out, no matter how badly they’re running, and no matter how badly they would rather just take a day off.
When you’re playing poker recreationally, you can just get up and leave any time you want.
But when you’re doing this full time, you just have to sit there and get your ass handed to you over and over again.
Not to mention the countless hours you have to spend away from the felt to study, analyze your game, find and plug leaks, work with a coach and so on.
Everybody likes playing poker, but very few people actually like studying it.
If you’re just playing poker for fun, you can just skip the boring stuff altogether.
You simply don’t have that luxury if you’re playing full time.
The amount of effort it takes to get to the top in this game is incomparable to most 9 to 5 jobs.
I’m not saying this to discourage anyone from trying to go pro, because I’m all for dreaming big.
I’m just saying that it doesn’t take any less effort to get there compared to other professions.
So not only do you need to love the game for what it is, you also need to have the discipline and the perseverance to slog through all the countless obstacles you're going to encounter day in and day out.
Top 1% Poker Player Trait #6: Patience
Playing poker is fun. Winning at poker consistently, on the other hand, can be outright boring at times.
Even if you are the best poker player at your table, you still need to be dealt decent cards to win.
And this won’t be the case most of the time you actually play poker.
In fact, by following the proven winning tight and aggressive strategy, you should only play around 20% of all starting hands on average.
This most of the time you spend on the felt will include a lot of folding.
This is often hard to come to terms with for amateur poker players.
After all, how can you win if you don’t play?
But the trick is to only play the spots where you have a significant edge over your opponents.
So if you want to win in poker consistently, you need to be willing to endure a bit of boredom.
The problem is, even if you only play strong starting hands, you’re still not guaranteed to win all of the time.
Due to the short term luck element involved, you can still experience prolonged losing periods despite playing perfectly.
This is arguably the hardest aspect of the game to come to terms with.
Doing everything right and seemingly getting punished for it over and over again is incredibly frustrating, and this is where most players simply lose their patience and start throwing the good money after bad.
This can manifest in many forms, but it usually involves playing hands you shouldn’t really be playing, chasing draws with bad pot odds or implied odds, or bluffing too aggressively at inopportune moments.
The argument usually goes something like this: well, if I can’t win with strong cards, why not try to win with trash cards?
You can clearly see why this is a faulty logic, but a lot of players are guilty of abandoning the winning strategy if the cards don’t seem to fall their way.
Of course, this leads to even more losses, which leads to more frustration and down the rabbit hole we go.
The solution is to try to keep playing your best despite the negative short term results, but this is obviously easier said than done.
The best poker players are able to keep their cool and continue playing close to their best no matter how badly they’re running.
In fact, this is a crucial factor that separates the pros from everyone else.
The most important factor that will determine your success over the long run is how you deal with the inevitable setbacks and obstacles you face.
Everyone can keep playing well when the deck is hitting them in the face.
But being able to keep making good decisions despite the negative results is a trait that only a select few players possess.
Top 1# Poker Player Trait #7: Sense of Humour
This one make come off as a surprise, but this character trait is almost universally present in all the top performers in a given field, not just poker.
A good sense of humour is also closely linked to high IQ, which certainly helps.
But it mostly comes down to how you deal with adversity.
People with a good sense of humour tend to be more emotionally resilient, mostly because they manage to find the positive in almost any situation.
They’re also able to make light of any situation, and they’re able to laugh at themselves as well.
This has a couple of benefits.
First of all, being able to laugh at yourself means you’re not taking yourself too seriously.
If you have an ego problem, you’re not going to make it very far in this game.
Secondly, having a sense of humour makes you more resilient to fatalistic thinking, something virtually all poker players are guilty of to an extent.
You can certainly see how having a sense of humour can help you on the felt.
Being able to laugh off all the never ending coolers and suckouts is like a superpower.
Dealing with tilt and frustration is something every poker player has to struggle with.
There’s no magic cure to prevent tilting in every situation.
But having a sense of humour is certainly the next best thing.
Being able to play poker and even make some money from it is a privilege most people can’t afford.
There’s no reason to take it too seriously. If you’re playing with money you can afford to lose, you can afford to laugh it off and just have some fun.
If you want more, here are the 7 poker tips that changed my life.
7 Traits of the Top 1% of Texas Hold'em Players - Summary
If you want to achieve success in this game, knowing the latest advanced poker strategy is only a part of the equation.
Virtually all the best poker players share similar traits that allowed them to reach the top of their game.
Fortunately, all of these traits can be cultivated through determination and consistent practice.
To sum up, here are the 7 traits all the top 1% poker players have in common, in no particular order of importance:
1. Superior skill
Poker is a game of skill, and the players who reach the top simply have a superior skill level against their competition.
Poker has a short term luck element involved, but the skill prevails over the long run.
2. Curiosity
Improving your poker game is a lot easier when you’re deeply passionate about learning and mastering new skills.
If you often find yourself playing poker on autopilot, try to cultivate a sense of curiosity by asking questions and always looking for new things to learn.
3. Growth mindset
Players with a growth mindset believe that skills can be improved by continuous learning and deliberate practice.
They also look at obstacles as opportunities to learn instead of setbacks.
4. Long term outlook
Poker is a game of skill over the long run, but the long run is a lot longer than most players actually realize.
The best poker players don’t pay much attention to their short term results, because they’re not an accurate indicator of actual skill.
5. Discipline
If you want to make decent money in this game, you need to put in a lot of volume. This means showing up and playing your best day in and day out, even though you would rather do anything else.
It also means working hard on fixing your leaks and studying away from the felt, which is not always fun and exciting.
6. Patience
Winning at poker can feel like a major grind, especially at the lower stakes.
This is particularly the case if you happen to run bad for prolonged periods of time.
During these times, it’s important to stay patient and trust in the process, regardless of how you’re running session to session.
7. Sense of humour
Poker can be incredibly frustrating at times, so it’s a lot easier if you manage to find a way to laugh at your misfortune.
At the end of the day, playing poker should be an enjoyable experience, even if you’re losing.
So try to laugh off the bad beats as best as you can.
With a positive mindselt like this, you are guaranteed to have a lot more fun at the felt, and also make a lot more money in the process.
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This article was written by Fran Ferlan
Poker player, writer and coach
Specializing in live and online cash games
For coaching enquiries, contact Fran at fran.redline@gmail.com
Or apply directly for poker coaching with Fran, right here
Lastly, if you want to know the complete strategy I use to make $2000+ per month in small/mid stakes games, grab a copy of my free poker cheat sheet.
