High Performers vs. Low Performers
Over a year ago, I wrote a post called The Reason You’re Losing at Low Stakes, which to this day is the most popular post I have written. In that article, I argued that players who are losing at low stakes are breaking down at the logistical level.
As I mentioned in my most recent post, I’ve now had the opportunity to coach about one hundred students. I’ve had some students achieve incredible success, and many others achieve results that are more modest, but still respectable. At this point, I very rarely have students who completely fail, but I still see quite a few students hit a low ceiling. They usually stagnate at 100nl or 200nl. Sometimes they’ll get to the point where they can take a shot at 500nl, but they never seem to stick the landing. They always get eaten alive in the bigger games and have to drop back down to 200nl or lower for months to recover before they can take another shot.
I could say these players are failing logistically, and that would be true, but it wouldn’t be a complete explanation. The real question that has always bugged me is why. Why are some players able to keep improving, while other players stagnate?
I may never be able to fully answer this question, but over time I have gotten a lot better at recognizing the patterns of high performers and low performers. There are three major patterns I see in low performers in general. A low performer may not have all of these patterns, but they will usually have at least one that is holding them back severely.
1. Low performers are unwilling or unable to focus on what matters.
They are extremely focused on small, insignificant details and rarely interested in fundamentals or the big picture.
If you put a bunch of low performers into a study group together, usually what they will do is start randomly discussing hand histories, and it won’t be long before they get stuck debating something profoundly unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
For example, low performers might spend fifteen minutes talking about what the best value bet size on the river is in a certain hand, whereas a high performer will just say, “I don’t really care, as long as we’re betting, because the EV difference between different bet sizes will be very small–next hand.”
Low performers lack attention to detail for things that really matter: the fundamentals. They will talk for hours about obscure concepts that have no use to them, and then they'll make basic mistakes like overfolding their big blind preflop.
It's not fun to work on the fundamentals, because the first thing a low performer has to accept is that he is not as good as he thought. Then he has to put in the boring, practical work to fix his leaks, and finally he has to hold himself accountable to making a lasting improvement. In my experience, low performers are, for whatever reason, not interested in this type of work.
2. Low performers are uncomfortable with consistent, gradual improvement over the long term.
They tend to flip-flop between not changing anything at all, and changing too many things all at once.
Low performers simply cannot stick to a simple plan over the long term. There is always something that drags them off course.
It’s truly painful to watch what happens when you force a low performer to consistently show up and focus on the fundamentals for more than a month or two at a time. They will start off strong and make slow, but measurable progress. Then, suddenly, they fall apart. They might make up some excuse for why they need to take time off. Or they might convince themselves that they need to do more than what they are doing, and start changing a bunch of things. Either way, they stop doing what they’re supposed to do, and then they quickly ruin the progress they’ve worked so hard for.
High performers are more consistent. They rarely make big changes to their study routine, or take so much time off that they lose progress. They have big aspirations, but they know they can’t achieve them overnight, so they usually are focused on just getting a little bit better each week or each month.
High performers never get tired of the basics. They obsess over the fundamentals, even romanticize them at times, and tend to avoid focusing on minutiae. They understand intuitively that, as the saying goes, “once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.”
3. Low performers don’t believe in themselves.
They think that everyone else is better, smarter, or luckier than they are.
This final point is a tough one to nail down. Some high performers, including myself, have a lot of confidence issues. But high performers truly want to win, and they believe that if they work hard and line up a lot of good decisions in a row, they will eventually figure out a way to win.
Low performers tend to think the opposite way. They think that no matter what they do, it’s not going to be enough. They give the players they are competing against too much respect. They always feel like they have to do more in order to win. This feeling of inadequacy causes them to do too much, which distracts them from focusing on what’s important.
A low performer who is beating 200nl thinks he has to change his whole approach in order to beat 500nl. A high performer understands that he’s probably already good enough to beat 500nl. And even if he’s not, he only needs to get a little bit better. And once he gets to 500nl, he’ll take the same approach to beating 1000nl, and so on.
Are you a high performer, or a low performer?
The point of this post is to help low performers identify the behaviors that are keeping them trapped in a low performance cycle. As you read through the examples, do you resonate more with the low performance behaviors, or the high performance behaviors?
If you identify yourself as a low performer, it might be enticing to think about why you gravitate towards these behaviors, but in the end I don’t think it really matters. All that matters is that you identify where you’re going off course. If you can do that, then you’ve already begun to break the cycle of low performance.
At that point, it’s simply a matter of asking yourself: do I really want this? Maybe the reason you’re struggling in poker is because you don’t really want to succeed. You might like the idea of being a successful poker player, but you’re not actually willing to do the work that it takes.
It’s worth mentioning that the very best poker players I know don’t really feel like they’re working when they’re improving their game. The work feels more like play to them, so they naturally work harder than everyone else.
You don’t necessarily have to be this passionate about poker to make a decent living, but I think that some people who really struggle to put in the work are better off giving up poker and finding another job that is more interesting to them.
If you do decide that you really want to succeed in poker, then you have to focus on the fundamentals. You should have a very strong attention to detail, and even be obsessive at times, but don’t focus on minutiae. You should be focusing on the basics, and never lose sight of them, even when you add new things to your game.
Next, be sure to work consistently, and focus on gradual improvement. Some day, you could be playing games that are 10x or 100x bigger than the games you’re playing now. But the only way to get there is to get a little better each day.
Finally, you have to believe in yourself. You have to respect your opponents, but not too much, otherwise you won’t fight hard enough to win pots. You have to have faith that if you just improve a little bit each day, you will eventually become better than the regs at your current limit, and the next limit, and so on. Remember that there is no mystery to success, just consistent, gradual improvement, day in and day out.
You can’t go from being a low performer to a high performer overnight, but you may be surprised how quickly things can turn around when you stop shooting yourself in the foot. Success breeds confidence, which breeds ambition, and more success.
“In my case my appetite came with the meal. I don’t think that’s an expression in English, but what I’m trying to say is, as I got better, I got more ambitious as well.”
