A few months back I was eating dinner with some friends and our casual conversation quickly escalated into a heated discussion on poker. The topic of whether it could be beaten came up. I, as a professional poker player , argued, “Well, of course it is beatable, otherwise how am I” survivin’?”

They went so far as to say that if we were to sit down and run out several simulations where we went all in on the flop with a flip situation, I would win more often because I am just a generally lucky person.

Naturally I was taken aback by that statement for two reasons. Firstly, because I was offended that they pretty much attributed everything I have accomplished to luck. Secondly, the sheer lunacy of that statement would catch any reasonable person off-guard.

I probably overcompensated when I responded by saying that I guarantee that I could turn anyone into a winning player if they just sat next to me and I told them what to do. At the time, I actually thought this was true, but now I’m not so sure.

Recently I started thinking what the constitution of a successful poker player is; what makes someone like me win, while other people seem to struggle and lose? I did some soul searchin’, so to speak and thought okay, what are some of the attributes I have that pushes me over the edge?

Here are some of the attributes that I came up with:

Reason and logic – When faced with a problem, I’ve always been the type of person to attempt to look at all the angles. Specifically to poker, trying to look at the big picture every hand and base your decisions is critically important. What I mean by that is in poker, rarely is anything static. An example would be If there is a fish at the table, you might not want to reraise with pocket aces because if you do, you’ll get the fish to fold . A good poker player looks to play as many pots with poor poker players as often as he can. Another example would be that you might not want to reraise with a hand like AK because the guy who originally raised is extremely tight and will only get the money in with AA or KK while at the same time folding out dominated aces. It’s important to be able to read the entire situation and base your decisions of those. I also think you can’t be superstitious when playing poker. Poker is a game of odds and percentages. If you start believing in things like luck, doom switches, or rigged websites, it takes away from your own personal responsibility to improve as a player.

Intellectual curiosity, strive for perfection – I actually thought about this because my friend John and I were playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! on NES. It wasn’t enough for us to beat the game (to be honest we never beat Tyson because he’s impossible) , but we had to go back and start over to find the perfect star combinations to beat our opponents as fast as possible. That drive for perfection, I think while a little OCD, is extremely valuable to a poker player. By the way, I immediately offered a staking deal to that friend just because I know he could be a good player, but nothing ever came of it.

Dedication – It isn’t enough to play a few hours a week. You have to play thousands and thousands and thousands and millions of hands to do this game right. Not to be arrogant or anything, but I’ve been doing this professionally since August of 2007 and I like to think I’m a pretty decent player. In December of last year, I went on a 100,000 hand break even stretch. That is a ridiculous amount of hands and if I, a professional poker player, can go through something like that, that gives you an idea of how much variance is actually involved in the game. You cannot expect to win unless you put in the time and effort to do so.

I’m not just talking about variance either. There are a million subtle things that you pick up by playing a god-awful amount of hands. There are timing tells and situations that arise where you subconsciously know where you stand because you’ve been there before. After playing several hundred thousand hands, you get a pretty decent idea where you stand every single hand. You get an idea of how strong your opponent is, how strong your opponent perceives you to be. That information is invaluable.

Egoless – Unless you’ve accomplished something really substantial, assume you know nothing. Be as humble as possible and take advice from anyone you can whom you respect and feel is a better player than you are. This game owes you nothing. You don’t deserve anything for being smart, talented, or driven. The numbers add up over time and the only thing you can do is your best to not give away any money unnecessarily. Being egoless helps you improve as a player because if you think you are “the best” you will unknowingly trap yourself into bad tendencies that will cause you to lose money in the first place. By having an arrogant attitude, you won’t actively look to improve your game and you won’t ask for advice as often.

Emotionless/Tiltless This is obviously very important and I think everyone really understands this. If you lose a few buy-ins to bad luck, then you start giving away your money because you’re upset – it’s just going to own you and your win rate. It helps to set a stop loss. If you lose three or four buy-ins, quit for a while and come back when you are feeling better emotionally. The great Phil Ivey has a one buy-in stop loss. Granted when he loses, he loses $100,000. Throwing money away because you are pissed off is just about the dumbest thing you can do. During a session, try to objectively look at each hand that you got stacked on and ask yourself, “Is this standard or am I tilting a bit?” If the answer is the latter, then quit until you are in a better state of mind.

Creativity/Adaptability – This I don’t rank very high but feel the need to add it because while yes, it’s nice to get advice from others and learn through training sites such as cardrunners or deucescracked, trying out different strategies on your own needs to be done. This doesn’t mean to make fancy plays all the time to try to win every pot. What I mean is don’t be afraid to try out new things. Don’t play standard abc poker all the time because yes, it will beat the bad players, but you’ll never improve as a player. You must splash around in a fashion that makes sense to your opponent. If you sense he has a weak made hand, raise him. Put them in tough spots. The key to being a large winner is putting as much pressure as you can on your opponent. If you lose a buy in or two bluffing, don’t worry about it. Learn from it. Learn what works and what doesn’t work. Mold your game to what works for you.

That’s about all I can think of for now. If you can think of any other attributes that are necessary to be successful feel free to post a comment or send me an email at sniderstyle@gmail.com

Well, that night of our dinner and our heated discussion, I wasn’t able to win the argument. It ended up at a stand-off, half the table was on my side, and the others were on the side of luck. Perhaps, I wasn’t able to give a persuasive enough argument, but I think that would change if any of those people were to read this article. Now, I definitely don’t think I can coach/train anyone to be a successful player because I really think a person needs to have at least a few of these qualities to be successful and to be honest, not many people do. That’s why winning poker players are so rare.