Poker With Presence: Recent Episodes
Jason Su
Winner of the 2023 WSOP $25k bracelet event, Alexandre Vuilleumier, comes on the show to discuss his 1.2 million dollar victory, lessons learned from being an international master in chess, and how to grow your passion for the game while also increasing your productivity at the same time.
You can find Alexandre's new Precision Poker masterclass on Upswing Poker:
https://upswingpoker.com/precision-poker-mastering-methodology/
High stakes pro and 3rd place finisher in the 2019 WSOP main event Alex Livingston shares his best advice on how to stay energized and motivated in the long run by making the game as fun as possible—not just for yourself, but for others around you as well.
High stakes pro and performance coach Jared Alderman drops in to share his experience of going through the legendary Navy SEAL training—and all the harsh but needed lessons that came with it.
Poker's funniest commentator drops by to discuss humor, luck, and the value of being brutally honest with yourself in front of others.
Kevin Rabichow drops in to talk about battling Ivey and Negreanu heads up, the most efficient ways to learn poker, and what it's like to become a recognizable high stakes pro.
The legend Phil Galfond drops in to discuss how principles from the world of improv can help increase your performance at the poker table, in business, and in life.
Chance Kornuth of Chip Leader Coaching joins the show to shares his thoughts on how to best use tells and behavior patterns to maximize your winnings.
Marle joins the show to talk about her creative process, what it's like to put your work out for the whole world to see, and the importance of being open to receiving feedback.
The 2014 WSOP main event champion Martin Jacobson joins the show to talk about how he approaches high performance in big situations, what he finds to be the most efficient ways to study and learn new ideas, and much more.
Check out Martin's course: www.prepare-perform.com
In the final daily episode, we discuss the benefits of looking through the lens of what you want, versus what you don't.
Whether you want to get invited to juicer games, or just have more good things come into your life, you need to be able to connect with others in a way that feels good to them—from a place of genuine authenticity.
The thing about you that you're most embarrassed about is also the thing that's going to give you the most fuel to propel you to your highest goals, once you get fully resolved about them inside yourself.
Presence can take you far beyond making more money at the poker table. And once it does, you'll make even more money at the poker table.
There are thousands of different ways people try to manipulate their thoughts—but only one way to directly make your nervous system feel better.
The more you open to feeling your feelings as they come, the more you'll improve your mental and physical well-being in your life—and your performance capabilities will go higher than ever before.
Depending on what state you're in, you might be seeing what's actually there, or you might just be making up a whole bunch of stories in your mind and then acting on them.
The way that you approach small decisions that have very little consequence either way determines how well you're going to be able to stay connected and solid when you find yourself facing a very big decision that will matter a lot.
You'll never create lasting change if you can't find the thing that's currently keeping yourself from acting in the way you'd like.
As you stay more present and connected to yourself, your style will emerge, and it will be unique to you.
Your ability to focus deeply on the task in front of you—without splitting your attention off into the future—will determine how well you can perform at any given time.
When you start to identify too strongly with your issues, they become a necessary part of your regular human experience, and you'll do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
Presence is effortless—and if your way of playing is to focus as hard as you can and tire yourself out, that's not it.
Andrew Lichtenberger joins the show to talk all things presence, such as: what it's like to be perceived by others the way he is, how he's able to blend technical mastery with intuition, and what he meant when he tweeted that luck might be just "another form of skill."
Whether playing poker or dealing with holiday travel, learning how to accept things as they come—as a feeling, not a thought—will get you where you want to go.
If you're having trouble being totally happy for people around you having success, you've got a big problem on your hands.
When you fixate on wanting something to be true, you'll start to convince yourself things are true when they aren't—and this will derail your performance over time.
Educating players at the table is a financial disaster, but something that happens all the time if you get overly dependent on external things for validation.
The worst advice you can implement into your game in big moments is to "act like you've been there before," because you haven't—and trying to pretend you have will create tension in your system and take you out of presence.
When you stop trying to pretend you're something you're not, a huge weight drops away and you can finally play and perform from a place of creativity and flow.
It's not about the words—it's about the feeling being experienced when the words come through.
When you think you're bored, it's likely that there's much more going on behind the scenes.
When you choose from presence, you'll often choose the exact same thing as if you're not—but the process is still priceless.
Going after what you want most means also being willing to face and get present with all possible outcomes—a vulnerable, but powerful position.
When you learn how to feel presence and connection in one aspect of life, it very easily translates to everything in your world.
If you're overly attached to winning, it also means that you haven't trained yourself to be present with the feelings that come with losing—and it will eventually bring you down.
To get to levels you've never reached before, you need to keep increasing your capacity to have more of what you want—otherwise you'll always bring yourself down when you reach your limit.
Presence is universal, and gives you the stability and confidence to grow and learn new things at a much faster rate than you otherwise would.
Michael Jordan's emotions no the court were often unprovoked, but it was very much real to him—and so was his ability to channel it into incredibly high performance.
If you want to stay sane and continue performing at a high level, you need to learn when to believe your thoughts and when to ignore them.
Sometimes the fastest way to the top is to stay at the bottom for a little longer than most.
Regret is an experience that happens when you don't allow yourself to get present with all the emotions that come after something happens. Feel it all, regrets fade away.
The world prioritizes speed, but doesn't understand that the fastest way to reach big goals is to slow down and presence first.
Every situation, whether in poker or life, is one of a kind, and the best way to move forward is to first connect with all the feelings and emotions that are present in yourself and others.
Reading and avoiding tells isn't about the body, it's about how well you can feel the intentions of your opponents, and keep them from feeling that in you.
In this special episode, high stakes player and founder of Solve For Why, Matt Berkey, drops by to talk about impostor syndrome, how we relate to poker differently as we get older, and why people are always comparing themselves to one another.
You can learn more about Solve For Why and all they offer at SolveForWhy.io
When we experience fear, our brain chemistry changes—and we become vulnerable to believing things to be true that we otherwise never would.
To be the best version of yourself, you need to own up to who you really are—then bring presence and connection to showing up how you want to be seen.
Stop trying to resist what's actually true, and you'll free up your energy to channel into your best performance.
The key to sustained success is to create the aliveness and focus that comes with having everything on the line, without actually having to put everything on the line.
If something someone says or does bothers you, take it as a sign that it's reflective of something you're already thinking or believing.
The life you've lived and the people you've come across have programmed you to respond to specific things in specific ways. Presence gives you the ability to choose another path if that's what you really want.
Hard things happen, and the pain never really goes away—it's our job to keep growing bigger around that pain so that we can keep moving on with our lives.
Use your emotional intelligence to move through downswings that come right after an upswing.
With great possibility comes great energy and emotions—so much to be presenced and so many edges to explore.
Before you go into deep technical analysis after your sessions, be sure to check in with yourself first to see how you feel about it first.
When we start something we never expect things to snowball out of control—but it does happen, and what you do in that first moment is what really matters.
One key skill in poker and life is the ability to increase your capacity to enjoy what's happening in the moment without splitting your attention elsewhere.
In order to overcome your fear of failure in poker, you have to get completely present with the idea that failure is always on the table—get comfortable with this, and you free yourself up to play your best.
There's nothing more frustrating than knowing you should do something, but doing the opposite before you can turn your intuition into action.
Don't try to copy what makes someone else successful—instead, focus on shifting as much of your poker experience to using your natural talents and strengths.
There's room inside you to include both happiness and fear—let both in together, and you'll enjoy the experience much more while also unlocking your highest levels of performance.
There's always that one person who seems to crush you every time you play, and dealing with that dynamic is a skill worth developing.
When you're in a downswing, resist the temptation to go straight to action—and let yourself feel everything that needs to be felt first.
The more present you get, the more you can recognize when you need to pull back versus when you can keep leaning in and growing into a bigger version of yourself
When big money is on the line, you literally become a different version of yourself with altered thoughts and ideas.
When you master presence, you can start to create huge shifts in outcomes by executing very subtle processes.
"Focus on yourself" is great advice, but it doesn't address what actually caused you to lose that focus in the first place
The more there is at stake, the more valuable it becomes to be the person most able to relax into presence and connection while everyone else gets uncomfortable.
When the action starts heating up at the table, you need a reliable way to notice when you start to "spin out," which is the sign that you're about to do something you'll regret later.
The worst advice you can implement into your game in big moments is to "act like you've been there before," because you haven't—and trying to pretend you have will create tension in your system and take you out of presence.
As you continue to learn how to play with presence, going back to the old way is no longer an option.
Entitlement isn't something you rise above, it's something you learn how to be with and redirect into higher levels of performance.
Presence gives you the ability to find the plays that you need and want on a moment by moment basis.
Positive thinking can be beneficial, but it becomes a big problem if you use it as a way to not face and accept all possible outcomes.
When you complete a task or reach a goal, the element of feeling a felt sense of appreciation is what will complete the feedback loop and let you move forward as a stronger version of yourself.
Learning how to tap in to the feeling of whether you're genuinely happy to be at the table or not is a skill that will bring you clarity and happiness over time.
Presence is an edge that few have mastered at the poker table, which means those who get in early will benefit exponentially more than those who jump in later.
We're constantly learning and taking in information—whether we know it or not. Presence lets you tie it all together and apply it with ease.
It's rarely the first "thing" that happens that determines the quality of your experience—it's how you respond to it that matters.
Let go of the idea that simply being better than the people you're playing with is good enough, and focus on your own level of performance each day relative to what you're fully capable of.
Poker offers you an endless amount of information—but you can't see it clearly if you can't end the cycle of projection inside yourself.
Presence lets you makes the distance between you and the answer you're looking for as short as possible.
The value of having experienced success before is that in future spots you can relax into the moment, knowing you've done it before—but it's feeling that can be created even if you haven't.
If you want to learn how to access your intuition in tough spots, you've first got to create a healthy relationship with the unknown.
If you want to let go and play your best in big moments, you need to first get completely present to all possible outcomes, good or bad.
Traits and accomplishments have nothing to do with how confident you feel. Instead, it's all about how well you can get out of your head and relax into the moment—meaning, you can generate more confidence anytime you want it.
High performance seems to require different skills for live and online poker, but master the common element of presence and you can be one of the few who excels at both.
Your play will get a whole lot better when you enter into the state of "what wants to happen" rather than "making it happen."
Learn how to use your intuition at the table in the same way that a great chef uses all their senses when cooking up a meal.
Being fully present doesn't mean that you can't anticipate what might be coming—in fact, the more present you get, the more you'll be able to see the whole picture in a way that's smooth and relaxed.
There are thousands of different ways people try to manipulate their thoughts—but only one way to directly make your nervous system feel better.
Everyone understands that tournaments and cash games require different technical skillsets, but few can tell the difference in terms of the performance skillset required in each format..
The moment where you're most uncomfortable is the moment where you have the most power to grow into the version of yourself that you're looking to become
When you go back and review your biggest mistakes, it's likely that right before the spot came up you disconnected from presence and flow—and from there, became prone to playing below your skill level.
When you stop resisting what is happening, you free up your ability to find creative solutions to the problems you need to solve
The more you go into your head, the less you're able to stay connected to your intuition and subconscious knowledge, which is what's needed to play well in tough, unknown spots.
If you always wait till the big moment arrives to focus on being completely present, your overall performance ceiling is far lower, and you end up creating far fewer big opportunities for yourself.
No matter what your journey is, you can always increase your level of effectiveness by increasing your level of investment.
Taking pleasure at the sight of someone else's pain is a sign that you've lost connection between yourself and what your own highest goals for your performance are.
If you're looking to grow regularly as one who plays with presence, you need vision and clarity—which come through reflection and anticipation.
The more you open to feeling your feelings as they come, the more you'll improve your mental and physical well-being in your life—and your performance capabilities will go higher than ever before.
Nothing is more damaging to your long term success than avoiding the emotions that come with the swings of the game. To play your best in big moments, you've got to learn how to feel it all as it comes.
It might look like the trash talker has a million different tricks, but it's really just one.
When we lock in to a read without being open to feedback from our environment, it can often lead to big errors in judgement later on.
To reach your highest levels of performance, you need to understand that certain situations require you to stop thinking, and start feeling.
Andrew Lichtenberger joins the show to talk all things presence, such as: what it's like to be perceived by others the way he is, how he's able to blend technical mastery with intuition, and what he meant when he tweeted that luck might be just "another form of skill."
When you play from a place of presence, you're able to tie all the pieces of the story together and substantially increase your ability to get the outcomes you desire.
Momentum isn't real in the sense that the cards are ever due to change, but it's very much real in the sense that the way things are going impacts the way we feel, which impacts our ability to perform moving forward.
Making sure you're always in a good place when you play is a two step process: know what you need in order to recharge your batteries, and create a system that alerts your conscious mind the moment that your system says it needs to recharge.
Listen to my interview with Runchuks here: https://runchuks.podbean.com/e/jason-su-on-how-to-build-a-fulfilling-career-in-poker/
When you start to think that you need to "go above" what you currently are anytime a great player shows up, you end up trying to navigate territory you haven't studied and can't play the game on your own terms.
When it comes to meditation, the only thing that matters is for you to find something that reliably creates a calm and focused state inside you.
When you understand that every emotion is available to be felt at any time, you become able to flow with what's happening without resistance—a great skill in both poker and life.
If you want to get into someone else's head, first you've got to get out of your own. Do this successfully, and you'll gain a huge performance edge.
Humans are by nature terrible at predicting what will make us happy in the future—the best we can do is to get present to what makes us happy now, figure out how to squeeze as much as possible out of it, then see where it goes.
You can copy a cool play that you saw someone else make at the table, but you won't get the full impact of the brilliance of it unless you channel the same level of presence they had too.
Raging your way through your emotions and berating others in public to create presence might get the job done, but there's definitely a better, more respectful way.
When your need to be right becomes the most important thing, you start to reach—and you lose the ability to stay centered and unaffected by results.
You can't make fear go away—it's an essential part of the human experience. But, once you accept this and recognize it as soon as it comes, you can use all the energy that comes with it to take your play to higher levels.
No matter how much you study, exercise, and meditate, poker will always bring you into contact with a spot you've never seen and a feeling you've never felt. Presence is what allows you to navigate the unknown and take you from good to great.
To perform up to your full potential, you'll need to build out your internal and external environments to support you in being completely comfortable being yourself and enjoying success.
It's not enough to build out a process and focus on it—you've got to personalize it to your own tastes, otherwise you're not going to stick to it.
The key to being able to end all self-sabotage in your poker game and life is all about learning how to use presence to catch yourself as it's happening.
Yes, playing poker with presence will get you more success at the tables—but it can't be the only reason why you're doing it.
When you're present and locked in, the whole game opens up. The question then becomes: how can you more consistently recognize you're in this place versus one of disconnection?
When you display supreme confidence that's not grounded in connection, you'll likely be the last to know.
Presence gives you the ability to find the plays that you need and want on a moment by moment basis.
Mastering a few critical concepts is far better for your performance than trying to learn and implement a hundred new things.
When you go straight to the mental reframe in times of stress, it's not actually giving your nervous system what it needs to calm down so you can get back to playing your best.
If you want your friends and family to start living with more presence so they can live happier lives—show, don't tell.
Once you've done the work to become a skilled player who is consistently working on your game, there's one final element you need to add to go to the top—you.
Studies show that the more you get into your head, the more you become susceptible to performing below your standards.
When you routinely fall into the trap of "next time will be different" you fail to account for how you are the common element in a life where you're not getting what you want.
Sometimes you might as well just do the opposite of what your mind is telling you. The key is figuring out when you're in one of those times.
If you want to win as much as possible, you need to learn how to get out of your own way—and not let fear dictate your decisions when things are going amazingly well.
The biggest winners aren't the smartest or most knowledgable people—they're the ones who can continually press their advantage without others catching on and adjusting, a painful and expensive lesson I had to learn in my early years.
When you create an agreement with yourself from one state of mind, it's going to be hard to enforce it from a completely different one. To bridge those two states, you need presence.
Get familiar with these experiences at the table and you'll be able to save yourself a whole lot of pain, frustration, and money.
The way that you approach small decisions that have very little consequence either way determines how well you're going to be able to stay connected and solid when you find yourself facing a very big decision that will matter a lot.
Presence can take you far beyond making more money at the poker table. And once it does, you'll make even more money at the poker table.
Depending on what state you're in, you might be seeing what's actually there, or you might just be making up a whole bunch of stories in your mind and then acting on them.
When you don't feel respect your opponents as human beings, you can't understand where they're coming from, and worse—you lose your ability to deal with the variance that comes with playing against them.
When you think you're bored, it's likely that there's much more going on behind the scenes.
Before you can play with creativity and flow, you need to generate a feeling a true acceptance of reality inside yourself.
When we experience fear, our brain chemistry changes—and we become vulnerable to believing things to be true that we otherwise never would.
It's not about the words—it's about the feeling being experienced when the words come through.
Talking about your issues rarely is enough to solve them—and quite often just enables you to continue repeating your mistakes.
You don't become a consistent high performer through a single moment of enlightenment. It only happens once you become the person who chooses presence—moment after moment, day after day.
The worst advice you can implement into your game in big moments is to "act like you've been there before," because you haven't—and trying to pretend you have will create tension in your system and take you out of presence.
Relaxing into your highest performance happens far more often when you are completely comfortable in your own skin—which means you've got to learn how to get out of the blame and criticism game, and deeper into the appreciation game.
When you don't know what to do, the best way to get to the answer is to focus on getting completely present and curious—and from there, you build your emotional resilience and let the answer find you.
As you continue to learn how to play with presence, going back to the old way is no longer an option.
When you lack the ability to understand what context your opponents are living in, you can't make the proper adjustments against them.
Insight follows experience, and to get the full insight, you've got to let the entire cycle of an experience play out.
The key to getting where you want to go isn't about projecting a certain image out into the world and to yourself.
Checking your results during sessions isn't what creates an emotional reaction inside you—the emotion was already there before you ever did it.
When you stop trying to pretend you're something you're not, a huge weight drops away and you can finally play and perform from a place of creativity and flow.
When we lock in to a read without being open to feedback from our environment, it can often lead to big errors in judgement later on.
When the action starts heating up at the table, you need a reliable way to notice when you start to "spin out," which is the sign that you're about to do something you'll regret later.
When you feel like someone is "in your head" and always a step ahead of you, they're not—they've just reached a higher level of emotional congruence than you have. Fix this, and you can play your game the way you want.
Nothing is more damaging to your long term success than avoiding the emotions that come with the swings of the game. To play your best in big moments, you've got to learn how to feel it all as it comes.
We all love the idea of truly reaching our full potential, and we've all caught glimpses of it—but the way to make it happen may not be what you thought.
When we have unresolved issues about our own lives, it can quickly get in the way of creating connection with others, and also get in the way of being able to see and think clearly at the poker table.
To reach your highest levels of performance, you need to understand that certain situations require you to stop thinking, and start feeling.
Entitlement isn't something you rise above, it's something you learn how to be with and redirect into higher levels of performance.
If you're still getting tilted and making mistakes at the table, the problem isn't your mind and you don't need anyone to tell you what mental framework you should be implementing. You know everything you need to know, and what you actually need is a reliable way to become the person who executes these mindset principles when everything's going wrong—what you need is presence.
There isn't always enough time to figure out why you're having the experience you're having—but no matter what's going on there's always an opportunity to create presence, and shift your state back into connection and flow.