In this extract from his new book — The Joy of Poker: Win More, Be Happy — author, coach and player Jason Su examines the pursuit of the 'A-game'.
Is this something you can attain by adding new structures, routines and practices to your daily life? Or is the key factor not something you're doing, but some things you're not? The Joy of Poker is out now and available at Amazon.
The Elusive A-Game
The first dozen or so years of my poker career were a frustrating, endless search for my 'A-game,' where everything came easy. From inside 'the zone,' my reads tended to be spot-on — and even when they weren’t, I’d move on and play great poker without dwelling on it. Sadly, these peak performances came only a few times a year. Unable to produce this quality of play at will, I had to settle for stumbling into it from time to time. To make matters worse, quite often on the days I did find myself in the zone, I wouldn’t be able to make it to the end of my session or tournament in that state and would blow all my gains in one fell swoop.
The thought I had thousands of times is the same one many of my clients come to me with — that if they could make their A-game the default rather than the exception, their earnings would go through the roof.
They’re not wrong.
Where things go wrong is in the consensus approach, embedded with the idea that your A-game is something you 'make happen' — that if you’re not at your best, there is some action you’ve missed, that, once added to your structure, will serve as the missing piece to your success.
With this belief, the natural next step is to start optimizing your habits and routines. To search, add, and tweak until everything is just right. But live in this way, and the A-Game becomes a mirage — an ideal you keep moving toward but never arrive at.
The results don’t lie
People have been relentlessly chasing their A-game through optimization for decades across all forms of competition, yet only a tiny portion of those people summon their best on a consistent basis.
A new routine or habit can make you feel better, but everyone has played great sessions and found themselves in the zone without them — and thus they are not a requirement for peak level poker. The common denominator is the opposite: in the times where you are playing your absolute best, the key factor isn’t what you’re doing, it’s the things you are not.
All the ways that you get in your own way of playing your best — the overthinking, perfectionism, talking yourself out of trusting your instincts, and becoming overwhelmed by emotion — these are the causes of your worst, most regrettable decisions. Strip them away, and all that’s left is you playing from an easy, relaxed focus — aware of your surroundings and able to respond to any situation with confidence and ease. Given that the default prescription for poor performance is always more 'doing,' it’s no wonder so few people are consistently at their best.
The real solution isn’t to add, but to subtract — rather than learn something new, unlearn what needs to go. If every peak experience contains the same list of things you weren’t doing, the truth is obvious: everything you need, you already have. It’s simply been buried under layers of learned, habituated responses to pressure and emotion that cause you to behave in ways you otherwise wouldn’t.
There is only one common thread that exists for you to have it all, to enjoy the highest possible edge while multiplying it into massive profit through consistent volume:
Presence.
The present state is where you stop getting in the way of your own success. It is where you play at the level you’ve trained yourself to play, where the game is endlessly fun and exciting, where the hours fly by and there’s nowhere else in the world you’d rather be.
If you want to consistently bring out your best, presence — not winning money, playing well, taking down this pot, outplaying your opponent, showing how smart you are, or anything else — must be your top priority. Otherwise, you will always find a way to sabotage your edge, volume, or most likely, both. But when presence is your highest priority and you have the right tools to activate that state, you are in position to maximize your potential.
The real gateway to poker riches isn’t about a system, but a relationship. The door to your highest quality play opens for you in the exact place where most either call off the game or don’t even realize that one is being played:
The relationship between you and your emotions.
A healthy relationship, and all the success that comes with it, means unlearning your habits in the face of pressure, stress, negative thoughts, and disappointment — and learning how to stay in a clear and present state instead. This is territory few people are willing to explore, but it is also where you’ll learn how to convert your poker knowledge into poker profit.
The Joy of Poker: Win More, Be Happy is available now at Amazon. Follow Jason Su on X.
