Why I Still Play Full-Time While Running a Mindset Coaching Practice (And What It Means for You)

To be honest with you, the past months in poker didn't go that well for me. Last year I've transitioned to playing live (which I didn't have much experience in) and torched a decent amount of my bankroll. Since then, I've been slowly rebuilding online, but the past months haven't been great - pretty much a break-even / slightly winning stretch. Past days have been horrible though. And that led to me feeling anxiety while sitting at the tables, even though I wasn't actively thinking about being on a downswing, or scared about anything in particular. I'll tell you soon how I worked through that.

I've heard some version of that story from dozens of players in coaching sessions. Yesterday I was just the player in the chair having it.

That gap between hearing about tilt and sitting inside it is one of the reasons I still play full-time while I coach. It's also the objection I get asked about more than any other, usually phrased something like: how can a coach who doesn't grind actually understand what I'm going through?

Fair question. These are my thoughts:

The people teaching the mental game mostly aren't at the tables

If you've read anything serious about poker psychology, you've read Jared Tendler. His A-game/C-game framework is genuinely useful and I recommend his book to clients regularly. But Tendler built his reputation as a coach and a licensed mental health counselor, not by playing full-time. He's never pretended otherwise. Elliot Roe works from a hypnotherapy background and built Primed Mind off it. Tricia Cardner brings a PhD and years of research. These are smart, credentialed people whose work I respect.

Notice what almost none of them do, though: sit down at stakes you actually play and grind a full session the same week they coach you through one.

I'm not saying that disqualifies their advice. Good frameworks are good frameworks. What I'm saying is there's a difference between studying a state from the outside and being in it on a Tuesday afternoon with your own money on the table. A coach who hasn't played in years is working from notes. When you describe the exact feeling of stacking off light after a cooler, I don't have to reach for a case study. I probably felt something structurally identical this week.

"Felt time" beats coaching hours

There's a metric coaches like to advertise: hours coached, clients served, testimonials collected. Useful information, but it measures the wrong thing for mental game work.

The other thing that transfers is what I'd call felt time. How recently, and how often, you've had to regulate your own nervous system in the seat that your client is sitting in. A surgeon who last operated in 2016 can teach anatomy. You still want the one who was in the OR this morning holding the scalpel when the pressure spikes.

And this isn't just a nice metaphor I made up to sound credible. The research on poker specifically supports it. Laakasuo, Palomäki and Salmela surveyed 478 players and found that emotional stability was directly linked to poker experience. More experienced players scored lower on emotionality, meaning they'd built the capacity to stay level when losses hit (Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2014). Emotion regulation in poker isn't a fixed trait you're born with. It's a skill you build by repeatedly being under fire and learning to work with it. Which means the value of a mental game coach depends heavily on whether they're still doing the reps, or just remembering them.

Why I'm not just a grinder with opinions

The other half matters. Plenty of pros can tell you "just don't tilt, bro." That advice is worthless, and part of why it's worthless is that it's not built on any actual model of how the mind produces tilt in the first place.

I'm a licensed psychotherapist. I work from three clinical frameworks, not from vibes:

• CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) for the thought patterns that quietly cost you money, the cognitive distortions that make a normal downswing feel like proof you're a losing player.
• ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) for the moments where you can't think your way out, where the goal isn't to argue with the tilt story but to stop letting it drive.
• TA (Transactional Analysis) for understanding why the person who reloads for the fifth buy-in feels like a completely different version of you than the one who sat down calm three hours earlier.

The combination is the point. Clinical training tells me why the mind does what it does. Playing full-time tells me what it actually feels like in the spot you're describing, at the stakes you're describing, this month. Most coaches have one of those. I've built my practice around having both.

What I did once feeling anxious yesterday

Back to my downswing.

Old me argued with the feeling. Told myself to calm down, reminded myself about variance, tried to reason the feeling into submission. That never worked, because you can't out-argue your own limbic system in real time.

What I did yesterday was an ACT defusion move that takes about ten seconds. Instead of treating "you have no reason to feel anxious" as an instruction I had to obey or fight, I just named the feeling. I feel anxiety. And then I asked "ok, what is this feeling trying to tell me?" and welcomed it. I explored how it feels, and where I feel it in my body. Not surprisingly, after taking this approach the feeling just started to let go.

Then I sat out for a few minutes. Took a breath. Came back.

The next orbit I folded a hand I would have stubbornly stacked off with if I'd still felt that high arousal. That fold is where the real money was. The coolers cost me a few grand of variance I'll get back over a large enough sample. Tilting off three more buy-ins trying to feel better is the leak that actually ruins players, and the research bears this out too: in one study of 291 online players, the frequency of tilt episodes was the single strongest predictor of losing control and gambling excessively, ahead of every other factor measured (Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 2020).

That is the difference I'm selling. Not "don't tilt." Specific, ten-second, repeatable tools I used with my own money on the line yesterday, that I can teach you to use with yours.

What this means for you

When you bring me a hand or a spot or a spiral, I'm not translating it out of a textbook I read a decade ago. There's a good chance I faced something structurally similar recently, ran the intervention on myself, and know exactly where it holds up and where it breaks.

I'll also be straight with you about the limits. None of this makes tilt disappear forever. The goal isn't being a monk who feels nothing at the table. The goal is becoming a player who notices the story starting, creates distance from it in a few seconds, and keeps making good decisions while the feeling passes through. That's trainable. The research says so, and my own session-by-session data says so.