Among the many commonalities between life and poker, the paraphrased Solomonism “Pride comes before the fall” holds fast. Pride, overconfidence, an inflated ego, arrogance — however you put it — can have, and generally has had, disastrous consequences for many poker careers. In other words, too much ego in poker can be your undoing. This is no gripe with good self-esteem and mental health but rather the self-sabotaging effects of irrational decisions informed by undue optimism.
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A Key Difference Between Entrepreneurship and +EV Gambling
It has been said that in business, it is better to be overconfident and optimistic since you will try more things and thus increase your chances of striking gold. By contrast, someone with lower confidence and a pessimistic bent will often snare themselves in analysis paralysis, limiting the shots they take, and as a matter of sheer volume, score less.
If this paradigm is true, it is one of the ways that business and poker differ quite a lot. This is because success in poker depends heavily on making the correct and best decisions in every node of the game, more often than not. In the long term, errors a player makes pile up, eating their successes — or in poker terms, their winrate.
Poker is a game of logic, requiring skills like arithmetic, deductive reasoning, pattern recognition, game theory, risk management, critical thinking, memory and strategic planning, to name a few. To be good at the game requires rationality; neither pessimism or optimism but realism.
Too Much Ego in Poker Means We Go Broke in Poker!
The issue with overconfidence is that it incapacitates a player from making rational decisions. A pig may be confident it can fly but just wait till it launches over the cliff. The more overconfident one is, the greater errors they stand to make. Sometimes, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Sometimes, it’s a javelin in the chest (pardon the graphic descriptions).
Here are at least a couple ways that too much ego in poker can manifest and ruin your career:
- You Play Games You Aren’t Beating: A slow-bleed. Death by a thousand cuts. If you play a game you are losing in — whether stake, format or variant — it’s only a matter of time before you’ve emptied the entire clip. You might have 30 buy ins to play $2/3 at your local card room but your skillset is only beating $1/2. It might be more exciting and feel more macho to play the bigger game but if you have no way of replenishing, you might soon be grinding freerolls for that seed money you need to start that fledging poker bankroll all over again. PLO is a totally different game but it can’t be that tough, can it? Careful with contempt. It could wreck you.
- You Play Games You Aren’t Bankrolled For: There’s that classic scene in Rounders where Mike McDermott loses three stacks of high society to Teddy KGB. It’s not that he’s incapable of playing at his opponent’s level but that he fails to appreciate the amount of variance involved in short term outcomes. Putting your whole roll on the table is not a matter of ethics but of wisdom. Sound reasoning would have meant not playing a game that involves his case money and tuition. Remember, even the best players only win about 60% of their cash games sessions. Solid tournament players only cash 20% of the time. Being good at the game is not the same as controlling the elements. Even AA, the most powerful starting hand in no limit Texas hold’em is only an 82% favorite against a dominated pair.
Run It Once Training founder Phil Galfond, one of the game’s most successful players, has a lot to say about ego in poker as well, as you can see in the video below.
The Way of the Humble Poker Player
It’s true that a fool and his money are soon parted. Fortunately, no player is doomed to bankroll ruin. You don’t have to learn the hard way, though many have. Here are some things to think about:
- Study Habits: If it’s a knowledge gap that is the cause for your losses, then there’s only one way to address them: learning. And by that, I mean study. Many choose to enroll with the best poker training sites, but it’s the dedication that matters above all. Overconfidence leads to lack of hard work since being God’s gift to poker means you can coast. Coasting to drifting, drifting to shipwreck. Suddenly, you’re being pillaged by the winning regs. Arr! However, a healthy dose of humility keeps one’s head down, putting the work in, and at some point, reaping the rewards (I’m sure there’s a buried treasure pun somewhere here).
Pokercoaching.com founder Jonathan Little says it pretty well, too:
Whether you want to study or not should not matter.
If you’re serious about actually wanting to win from poker, you will do it either way.
Success is for those who want to go the extra mile when no one is watching.
— Jonathan Little (@JonathanLittle) February 3, 2025
- Off-Table Habits: Poker in 2025 is extremely competitive. Being well studied is often not enough to win consistently. At the top of each stake and variant will be a number of players who are very close in skill. Oftentimes, the differentiator ends up being how they live off the table. It may seem radical but many professionals invest heavily in their nutrition, fitness, mental health and limit many lesser joys like alcohol or partying in order to execute their A-Game when it counts. It’s a matter of preparation. If you don’t prepare for your exams, you shouldn’t expect to ace(!) them. However, there are many talented players who have tried showing up unprepared and gotten “the business”.
Again, this is not about deriding healthy self-esteem. It’s about not showing contempt for our opponents by our lack of work and unrestrained ambition. Trust me, the toughest players would love it if we just sat down with them. And, I would like not to give them the satisfaction.
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