PERFORMANCE HOLDBACKS: 3 REASONS YOU’RE NOT PLAYING YOUR BEST POKER
Understanding Performance Holdbacks in Poker
Every poker player faces invisible patterns that consistently undermine their performance. These aren’t just occasional bad sessions or variance, but systematic barriers preventing optimal performance. To understand how these patterns affect your game, let’s explore the different performance levels you experience at the tables
Your A-game doesn’t always feel comfortable or effortless. Sometimes you’ll feel stressed, challenged, or uncertain — but what sets this level apart is your ability to effectively use your skills and resources despite these feelings. Complex situations might still feel difficult to navigate, decisions may require considerable effort, and you might even have moments where your performance drops temporarily. The key difference is that during your A-game, you can manage these challenges effectively. Performance holdbacks are minimal here, and when they do appear, you can either handle them well or prevent them from significantly impacting your decisions.
But poker isn’t always this manageable. It’s during your B-game where Performance Holdbacks become more prominent and harder to handle. You know you’re not playing your best poker, even though you might be playing reasonably well. It’s like cooking with a few missing ingredients — you can still make the dish, but it won’t be your best version. How this affects your game varies from player to player — some might struggle more with emotional regulation, others with decision-making, and others with focus. What matters is that these Performance Holdbacks are now more noticeable and challenging to manage, creating a clear gap between your current play and your A-game capabilities.
Then there’s your C-game — the state every poker player dreads. Here, performance holdbacks dominate your play. Your decision-making becomes clouded, your focus fragments, and you feel disconnected from the game. It’s like trying to solve a complex puzzle with key pieces missing. Your performance drops well below your capabilities, and the frustration of knowing you can play better only makes things worse.
What makes these performance patterns particularly challenging is their subtle nature. You might not notice their impact until you find yourself stuck in your C-game, unable to break out of your B-game, or struggling to consistently reach your A-game. And when these Performance Holdbacks remain unaddressed, their impact extends beyond the poker table — they begin to affect your mood, emotions, and motivation. Like small leaks in a boat that gradually let water seep in, these patterns might seem insignificant individually, but together they can undermine not just your performance but your entire poker journey. Their effects compound over time, creating a growing gap between your potential and your actual performance.
The first step isn’t just recognizing these levels exist, but understanding the specific patterns — or holdbacks — that influence your performance. Based on my experience working with poker players, I’ve identified three distinct categories of Performance Holdbacks that affect every aspect of your poker journey…
The Three Types of Performance Holdbacks
Mental Holdbacks
Mental Holdbacks emerge when key areas of your psychological performance aren’t functioning optimally. At their core, these holdbacks revolve around five crucial components of mental performance in poker: emotional regulation and intelligence, mindset, confidence, motivation, and stress regulation.
When your emotional regulation is compromised, it affects everything from basic decision-making to complex strategic thinking. Beyond obvious tilt, subtle emotional shifts gradually impact your choices throughout a session. Many players struggle to recognize their emotional state changes until they’ve already influenced several decisions. Similarly, limited emotional intelligence can cause you to miss valuable information at the tables, both from yourself and your opponents.
Your mindset is particularly crucial as it shapes not just how you approach challenges and opportunities, but how you perceive and handle your emotions, stress, and behavior. It directly influences your motivation levels. Restrictive belief systems can create invisible ceilings on your performance — you might believe you can only achieve “so much” success or that certain stakes or achievements are beyond your reach. These seemingly realistic beliefs function as self-imposed limitations.
Many players believe confidence should appear spontaneously or can be summoned at will when needed. This is a fundamental misconception. Confidence isn’t something that magically appears — it’s something you build systematically over time. Yet when running bad, players often find themselves questioning their basic poker knowledge and abilities. This can lead to either overly cautious play in spots where aggression is needed, or unnecessary aggression when trying to prove something to yourself.
Motivation, while often overlooked, is fundamental to consistent performance. When motivation wavers, it affects your willingness to study, your focus during sessions, and your resilience during challenging periods. This creates a subtle but persistent drag on your performance that compounds over time.
Stress regulation plays a vital role in your poker performance. This involves your ability to handle pressure situations, manage both poker-related stress and personal life demands. It’s crucial to understand that stress and demands from your personal life will affect your performance at the tables if not properly managed. Family responsibilities, relationships, health concerns, financial pressures outside poker, or other personal challenges — these all contribute to your overall stress load and can significantly impact your decision-making and emotional stability at the tables. Tournament final tables, moving up stakes, playing bigger pots, or facing tough opponents — all these situations create additional pressure that needs to be managed effectively. Your capacity to regulate stress affects not just your immediate performance but also your long-term sustainability in the game. Poor stress regulation can lead to decision fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and decreased performance over extended sessions or tournament series.
Routine Holdbacks
Routine Holdbacks appear when essential daily practices that support your poker performance aren’t properly structured or maintained. Three critical routines often suffer: study, sleep, and performance.
Most players approach study without a systematic plan. They watch training videos or review hands randomly when motivation strikes. Without structured study routines, skill gaps persist and leaks remain unfixed. The challenge isn’t just about putting in study hours — it’s about bridging the gap between knowledge and execution. Studying poker can be overwhelming given the vast amount of information available. That’s why it’s crucial to understand which areas need work and develop a clear study plan with effective learning strategies. Even with dedicated study, players often struggle to bridge the gap between understanding concepts and applying them in real-time situations.
Sleep routines, though crucial, are frequently neglected, despite sleep being the primary way our mind recovers and recharges. Poor sleep quality directly impacts decision-making ability, emotional regulation, and focus. A poorly rested mind simply cannot perform at its best, regardless of skill level or experience. During tournament series, irregular schedules and late-night sessions disrupt natural sleep patterns. Many players push through fatigue without realizing how significantly it degrades their performance, making decisions they would never make when well-rested. Fortunately, there’s growing awareness in the poker community about the importance of quality sleep, with more players recognizing that a good night’s rest is as crucial to their performance.
Performance routines encompass how you prepare for, execute during, and recover from poker sessions. Most players sit down without proper preparation, assuming they’re ready to play or believing they don’t need to warm up. They rarely set performance goals for their sessions and lack consistent warm-up protocols, in-game focus maintenance strategies, and energy management practices for long sessions. Equally concerning is the absence of cool-down routines — players often finish sessions and try to sleep, but find their mind still racing with hands and decisions, affecting their sleep quality. Many also lack proper post-session review practices. This missing structure leads to inconsistent performance, impaired recovery, and missed opportunities for improvement.
The absence of solid routines doesn’t just affect isolated sessions — it undermines your ability to perform consistently over time. Like a professional athlete training without a proper regimen, you’re leaving significant potential untapped.
Strategic Holdbacks
These Strategic Holdbacks are often the most challenging to detect and manage, as they operate in the background of your poker career. Unlike Mental or Routine Holdbacks that become apparent during sessions, Strategic Holdbacks can go unnoticed for months or even years while quietly limiting your progress.
Our brains are wired to be goal-directed — it’s how humans navigate life and make decisions. Having clear objectives doesn’t just give us direction; it fundamentally shapes our behavior and motivation. Yet most poker players set vague, outcome-based goals like “make more money” or “play better.” Without specific, measurable targets and clear action steps, these goals remain wishes rather than achievable objectives. They focus on results they can’t control instead of the processes that lead to improvement. This misalignment between how our minds work (needing clear, actionable goals) and how most players approach their poker career (with vague objectives) creates a significant performance gap. When we have clarity about what we want to achieve and how to get there, our brain naturally organizes our behavior, attention, and energy more efficiently. Without this clarity, we often find ourselves putting in effort but not making meaningful progress.
Strategic planning and goal-setting work hand in hand — they help us understand and prepare for the demands we’ll face throughout the year while keeping us focused on what matters most. Yet most players’ year planning is often reactive rather than strategic. They jump from tournament to tournament without a structured approach to their schedule, failing to align their choices with their long-term objectives. This leads to poor preparation, inadequate recovery time, and missed opportunities for skill development. Without a clear annual plan, they struggle to balance playing time with study, rest, and personal life. When players lack this strategic framework, they often find themselves making impulsive decisions about which tournaments to play or what skills to develop, rather than systematically working towards their goals through deliberate prioritization. The result is a scattered approach that undermines both immediate performance and long-term growth.
The competition system — a proven framework that’s been used for decades in traditional sports — is where year planning and goal setting converge into a structured approach to competitive performance. It enables players to systematically prioritize different phases throughout the year: from training and study periods, through pre-tournament preparation, to competition itself, and post-tournament recovery. Yet in poker, even at the highest stakes, this systematic approach remains largely unadopted. Players enter tournaments without systematic preparation, fail to maintain consistent performance during events, and don’t have structured recovery protocols. They treat each tournament as an isolated event rather than part of a larger competitive system, leading to burnout and inconsistent results. This gap between how traditional athletes approach competition and how poker players manage their tournament schedule represents a significant missed opportunity for performance optimization
Negative variance is an inevitable part of poker. During these periods, it’s natural for our confidence to waver and our emotional responses to intensify. Perhaps most critically, many players lack a clear downswing strategy to handle their responses to these challenging periods. Instead of having predetermined plans for managing their psychological and professional stability during downswings, they react emotionally to losing periods. Without a systematic approach to handling their response to variance, players often make their situations worse through poor bankroll decisions, emotional play, or destructive study habits during these challenging periods. The difference between those who maintain stability during downswings and those who struggle often comes down to having a structured strategy for managing their response to these inevitable challenges.
Why They Matter
Most players only notice these Performance Holdbacks during major downswings or frustrating sessions. However, these patterns are constantly affecting your game, creating a gap between your potential and actual performance. The impact of these holdbacks largely depends on the structures, tools, knowledge, and support systems you have in place. Some Performance Holdbacks, like the emotional impact of variance, are inevitable parts of poker — here, having the right tools and support can help you manage their impact more effectively. Other holdbacks, like poor study habits or lack of strategic planning, can be prevented or significantly reduced through proactive work and systematic approaches. Understanding this distinction is crucial — it helps us focus on preventing what’s preventable while building resilience and management strategies for the challenges that are inherent to the game.
The Path Forward
Usually, players only address Performance Holdbacks reactively — waiting until these patterns have already created significant problems in their game. It’s like waiting for your car to break down completely before getting it serviced — the repair becomes more difficult and costly. Working on these patterns before they become major problems is not just smarter — it’s actually easier and more effective. Addressing Performance Holdbacks requires more than surface-level fixes. It demands a systematic approach to identify and resolve these patterns early, creating lasting improvements in your poker performance while preventing the escalation of challenges that could be avoided.
So, what patterns are currently affecting your game, and are you waiting for them to become major problems before addressing them?