Just like in high-performance sports, mental, physical, and emotional preparation is essential to maximizing your performance in poker.
Technical knowledge is obviously important, but knowing what to do is only part of the challenge. You still need to execute what you know — sometimes after hours of playing, under pressure, after losing a big pot, or deep into an important tournament.
Emotional control and the structure you build around poker can be what separates elite players from average ones.
Here are six habits you can start implementing to improve your game and perform more consistently.
1. Prioritize Sleep
Sleep is where much of the magic of learning consolidation happens. While you sleep, the connections created during study or a grind session are reinforced in your brain.
This becomes particularly important in poker, where long sessions require you to access knowledge and make good decisions for many hours.
You can study a spot perfectly, but you still need to be able to recognize and execute what you learned when you encounter a similar situation at the tables.
Practical tip: Keep a regular sleep schedule, ideally within a 30–60 minute range each day. Consistency can improve the quality of your rest and help you get more value from the time and energy you dedicate to poker.
2. Know Yourself
Every player is different. Copying another player’s routine or mindset may not necessarily work for you.
Understanding yourself means paying attention to the situations that affect your performance.
What makes you anxious?
What triggers your tilt?
What gives you confidence?
What happens to your decision-making when you are tired or frustrated?
Do you become too aggressive after losing a big pot? Do you become too passive when you lack confidence? Do you start registering more tournaments or playing more hands when things are going badly?
The more clearly you understand your own emotional and behavioral patterns, the easier it becomes to develop strategies that actually work for you.
Practical tip: Reflect on what causes anxiety, tilt, confidence, or changes in your decision-making. Learn to identify recurring emotional and behavioral patterns and build strategies around your own profile.
3. Set Clear Goals
Knowing where you want to go gives you direction and helps you stay focused on the long term.
In poker, however, it is important not to think only about results.
Winning a certain amount of money or reaching a particular stake can be motivating, but many of the most useful goals are related to the process you control: how consistently you study, how much quality volume you play, how often you review your hands, and how well you prepare for your sessions.
Visualize the version of yourself who has already achieved the goals you are working toward.
How does that player behave? How do they prepare? How do they respond to difficult sessions? What does their study routine look like?
Then use that vision to guide your daily actions.
Practical tip: Define clear long-term goals, but also create smaller process goals around the behaviors that can actually take you there.
4. Value Social Connections
Having a network or mastermind of players at your level or above can be just as important as grinding or studying.
Poker, especially online poker, can be an extremely individual activity. It is easy to spend hours playing and studying alone.
Surrounding yourself with people who share similar goals gives you opportunities to discuss hands, exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, learn from different perspectives, and stay motivated.
The right environment can accelerate your development.
Practical tip: Make time for people who share similar goals or who positively inspire and challenge you. Build relationships with players you can learn from and with whom you can openly discuss the game.
5. Prioritize Mental Recovery
Taking care of your mind is just as important as taking care of your body.
Poker can involve long periods of intense concentration, emotional swings, difficult decisions, and extended sessions. Without proper recovery, that accumulated stress can eventually affect both performance and motivation.
Recovery does not necessarily mean doing nothing.
Mindfulness, walking, controlled breathing, or simply creating periods away from poker can help reduce stress and prevent burnout.
The goal is to create enough space between demanding periods so that you can return to the tables capable of performing well again.
Practical tip: Include activities such as mindfulness, walking, controlled breathing, or intentional time away from poker in your routine. Find the forms of recovery that help you reset mentally.
6. Read and Keep Learning
Continuous learning is one of the most important habits a poker player can develop.
Reading can expand not only your technical knowledge but also your understanding of performance, mindset, decision-making, psychology, and other areas that influence your game.
And learning does not have to come only from books.
Reviewing hands, discussing difficult spots with other players, revisiting concepts you have studied before, and learning more about your own performance can all be part of the same process.
The important thing is to keep learning consistently rather than relying only on occasional bursts of motivation.
Practical tip: Dedicate at least 5–10 minutes each day to reading or learning something that can improve your mental preparation, your poker knowledge, or the way you approach performance.
Final Advice
You do not need to implement all six habits at once.
Choose the one that makes the most sense for where you are right now and focus on improving it.
Trying to change everything simultaneously can make it harder to build any habit consistently. Small improvements become much more valuable when you are able to sustain them over time.
Consistent improvement, even when small, compounds over time.
LET’S GO, TEAM!
If you are interested in contacting Renato, you can visit his website www.eliteperformance.gg,
or follow him on instagram @renatonunes.ep
