Four Attributes of Elite Poker Players
Over my nearly two decades as a high-stakes poker player, I’ve had the privilege of observing, competing against, and befriending many of the best players the game has ever seen.
That puts me in a unique position to answer a question that I get a lot: What sets apart the truly elite poker players?
Put another way: What do most of the players near the top of Hendon Mob’s all-time money list, or those who battle in the biggest cash games in the world, have in common?
Today, we craft an elite poker player from what I believe are the four key building blocks.
1. Logical Reasoning
It’s a common misconception that math is the most important area of intelligence among strong poker players. While an aptitude for math certainly helps, the right answer is, unequivocally, logic.
Every elite poker player I know excels in logical reasoning.
Hand reading, for instance, is essentially deductive logic: You find yourself in a tricky river situation, and solve it by playing the hand backward in your mind, narrowing down your opponent’s possible hands street by street, move by move.
Similarly, exploiting requires strong logic. Against weak players, the exploits are often obvious: This person is a calling station, so you bluff less and value bet more.
But the higher stakes you play, the stronger logic you need to figure out the correct counter-strategy, as it’s not always intuitive. Often, the perfect response doesn’t involve attacking the leak directly, but taking full advantage by adjusting your strategy across multiple streets.
2. Competitive Drive
A fierce competitive drive is prevalent across all realms of achievement.
I can’t think of a single elite poker player who isn’t fiercely competitive — at least with themselves, if not others.
It's no coincidence that many of the world's top poker players were once strong athletes.
Patrik Antonius and Gus Hansen were youth tennis champions; Doyle Brunson almost became an NBA player; Jason Koon, Alex Foxen, and Chris Brewer were all college athletes… the list goes on.
The athletic talent these great players share isn’t what led to their poker abilities. It’s their competitive drive that contributed to their successes in both athletics and poker.
And the same is true for many players who weren’t physically gifted enough to reach those levels. If you dig into the pasts of great players, you’ll often find a competitive pursuit that was an obsession for them, whether it was high school athletics, chess, Magic the Gathering, video games, or something else that allowed them to push themselves to achieve their version of greatness.
For me, it was video games when I was younger and sports during my teenage years. Thankfully, I was too short to follow my passion into college athletics, and I picked up poker instead!
3. Passion
Being a poker professional comes with a lot of stress, irregular hours, and unpredictability. If you don’t genuinely love poker, enduring the grueling hours of play and study needed to continuously improve — regardless of recent results — will be nearly impossible.
Every top player I’ve encountered is, or at least was at one point, completely obsessed with poker. They aren’t in it just for the money; they are fascinated by the game itself.
During the first several years of my career, poker was my life. I'd play for hours and hours, almost every day. And even after sessions, I couldn't stop thinking about the game. I would replay hands in my mind, wondering what I could have done differently and what I might have missed. Poker was my singular goal — improving my game, moving up in stakes, and battling against the best in the world.
Since then, there have been years when my focus has been split and years when I've gone back into my cave of dedication, passion, and obsession. Those years in my cave have been the times when my game has evolved the most.
4. Self-Awareness
You can learn the basics of poker, and even reach a decently high level, without knowing where the holes in your game are. But to make the leap to being elite, you need to fill in those holes.
How are you going to work on your weaknesses if you don't even know you have them? I don't just mean strategic weaknesses, but weaknesses in your mental game, work ethic, discipline, and lifestyle.
So much of improving yourself to the point of greatness starts with introspection and self-awareness. This is not specific to poker, by the way. But I believe it becomes all the more important in poker, a game that pushes you to your limits with pressure, stress, and fear, and requires you to perform in a way that allows you to make great decisions quickly, despite whatever emotions, fatigue, or pressure you're feeling in that moment.
Further, reading other players starts with self-awareness, in my opinion. If you understand what makes you tick, it's a step in the direction of understanding what might be going through the minds of your opponents.
This is the only one on the list that not all elite pros I know share, by the way. There are a few top-tier poker players without much self-awareness, but even so, their lack of it hasn’t done them any favors.
The Sprinkles on Top
In addition to these key building blocks, I’d sprinkle in some understanding of psychology and math.
Math in poker isn’t very complicated, and high school level is all you need to succeed at poker.
Lacking math skills isn’t necessarily the end of the road, as there are a few great poker players, and certainly a long list of good ones, who aren’t great at math. But having a general aptitude for math is still going to be a big help.
Another trait that’s going to be very useful is being able to put yourself in your opponent’s shoes. This is, in essence, empathy.
What does your opponent desire? What are their fears? How might those affect their play? What kind of thought process might have led them to take this line?
Being able to empathize with other players helps to get inside their heads, and most elite poker players are pretty good at that.
The Elite Player
What do you get when you combine a high competitive drive with self-awareness of one’s weaknesses?
A poker player who’s going to work really, really hard to improve upon them.
If that same player also loves the game to a point where even the longest sessions don’t feel like work and approaches studying with child-like wonder... I wouldn’t bet against their success.
Your Path Forward
It might seem as though the makings of an elite poker player are predetermined by qualities inherent from the start.
That’s only partially true — and you might have more of these building blocks than you think!
Since you’re reading this, chances are you have a passion for poker and a curiosity about improving your game. Many of you are naturally competitive.
Whether you’re self-aware or not, it’s never too late for introspection. And even if you’re not yet a strong logical thinker, skills like hand-reading can be honed with practice.
I can’t guarantee that you’ll become an elite poker player, but I can assure you of one thing: It’s a freeroll to keep learning.
