To develop yourself optimally as a poker player, you must be willing to invest a lot of time and money in your game. You’re constantly looking for an edge over your opponents and seeking spots where you can extract even more value. If you don’t do this and only show up at the tables, you’ll never make as much progress as your competitors. Almost all the progress you can make lies in analysing your game, studying your opponents, and familiarising yourself with the latest tendencies of players.
Hiring a poker coach who plays at higher stakes and from whom you can learn is something many professional or ambitious poker players do, and it often involves significant financial investment. This isn’t exactly new information. However, one area that often takes a back seat for many players is the added value of a mental poker coach, who helps in building the right mindset for achieving long-term success in the game. Because if there’s one thing that can be stressful, it’s the pressure cooker of emotions that we call the poker world.
What we do as a mental poker coach
As a mental poker coach, we at the Poker Mindset Lab help professional or ambitious poker players develop the right mindset for poker. Because no matter how strong your game, statistical knowledge, or strategy at the tables may be, no one is immune to the stress, suck outs, bad beats, and tilt that come with playing poker. You need to learn to manage these challenges.
Through one-on-one coaching, webinars & Q&A’s in our Discord we help you become aware of the different mental skills needed to achieve long-term success in this game. You’ll find that these skills not only support you at the tables, but also become essential tools in your toolbox for pushing your limits and achieving success in any challenge you choose to take on.
Breaking cycles as a poker player
It doesn’t matter if you are trying to battle tilt, increase your confidence, improve your discipline around your poker career or you want to know how to better deal with downswings, poker players go through the same cycles when they want to change their behaviour. As mental poker coaches, it us our job to guide you in breaking toxic cycles that limit you from reaching your potential.
1. Awareness
In the first phase we as mental poker coaches raise awareness around a certain problem. This could be a mental trigger, unhealthy habits, stress reactions, thought patterns or certain belief systems. If you are aware of your issues, you can then start to change them. We help you actually observing what is happening.
2. Building mental skills
Once you are aware, it is our job as coaches to hand you the right mental tools so you can start building your skills. This could concern goal setting, visualisation, self talk, focus and attention, compassion, implementation intention, acceptance & commitment, relaxation techniques & many more! Every challenge needs a different approach and every player responds differently to different tools.
3. Practice & application
Now the fun part starts! You can start practicing these newly obtained tools and work out for yourself what works and what doesn’t. Some players will respond very quickly and others need more time to figure out what works for them. It is important to have an open mind about different techniques and drop your possibly negative beliefs around them. In the end these tools might be the key to you reaching a new level in your poker career!
4. Reflection & adjustment
Usually after one or two sessions we start handing out the tools and in the third or fourth session we start reflecting. Are you making any progress with your struggles? Do you feel like things are working out or do we need a completely different strategy?
This part of the cycle might bring us back to the practice & application phase if they don’t seem to work for you. If it does suit you then it is time for the last phase!
5. Building a habit and hone the sword
When we have found something that works for you as a poker player it is time to engrain this in your day to day life! This could be visualising your next day the night before you sleep, they could be breathing excercises when you feel a tilt trigger popping up or it could be implementing thoughts when you need to. Your key to reaching the next level in your poker career is making sure these habits will become part of your system. This way they are going to last and truely make you a better poker player! This phase is for what we call building mental resilience.
It is important to keep reflecting every once in a while on the skills you are honing and the habits you are building. Are they still doing the trick or can we improve and optimise them even more?
When you reach this stage you could use us a mental poker coaches to guide you every once in a while or decide to practice on your own until you hit another problem on the road. If you do, the cycle starts anew!
Conclusion: What do we do as mental poker coaches?
As mental poker coaches, our role is to guide players in mastering the psychological aspects of the game, transforming challenges into growth opportunities and helping them achieve their best, both at and away from the table.
Through developing self-awareness, building mental resilience, and equipping players with tools to manage stress, tilt, and intense emotions, we empower them to approach each game with clarity, focus, and confidence. By fostering these skills, we help our clients create a sustainable, winning mindset that not only enhances their performance but also strengthens their resilience, allowing them to thrive over the long term in a game as mentally demanding as poker.