Haters in Poker: Obstacle or Unwitting Helpers on Your Path to Success?

Types of Haters in Poker

Poker is a small but emotionally charged community where people who tend to hate are quite creative in coming up with reasons for their negativity. But why are they so persistent?

Well, according to the book “Haters” by psychologist Gregory S. Parks, the three main sources of hater’s motivation are insecurities, low self-esteem, and deep envy. So, to make their own feelings less unpleasant, haters channel them towards more successful, wealthy and satisfied people in forms of devaluation, belittlement or even humiliation.

We kept this in mind while making this classification of the most common types of haters in poker by the source of their hate:

• Pure Haters — express their hate in the form of direct attacks on the target’s personality. They often just irrationally dislike you without even knowing you as a person.
• Doubters — express their hate and despise towards others by sharing their doubts about the target’s abilities and skills, sincerity of intentions, thoughts and acts. They often struggle with a lack of self-esteem and project this onto others.
• Enviers — express their negative feelings in the form of diminishing others’ successes, even small or personal ones. They often want to have things that you already have, frustrated with their own lack of success, using you as a convenient target to project and express this frustration.
• Disappointed fans — express their emotions in the form of constant negative comparison of your current actions and other aspects of public behavior to them in the past. Some time ago they were your strongest supporters, who idolized your image in their head, but became disappointed when you acted in a manner inconsistent with this image.

Remember that these types of hates in poker can often overlap, especially regarding their motivational.

Notice! Not every vocally critical or skeptical person is necessarily a hater. The major difference between haters and dissent people is a constant devaluing approach to their target’s success, choices, words and behavior without obvious and reasonable motivation to act this way.

A good example of haters’ behavior is when Kristen Foxen wins an online tourney and an individuals suggest that her husband played for her, doubting her poker skills and ability to succeed. But when others doubt her play lines or strategic choices — it is just dissent or disagreement.

Negreanu’s and Hellmuth’ Somewhat Thankful Approach

Daniel Negreanu is one of the rarest examples of being openly loving towards his haters.

He consistently praises them for this strange way of supporting and thanks them for being around and helping him to grow.

His overall attitude from different interviews, podcasts and posts on social media is:

“I love my haters. The more haters I have, the more I realize I’m somebody. I’m on a pedestal, I’m a known person and people talk about me. If I was just some uninteresting pawn in the game, no one would even stumble upon me.

I want to give a very special thank you to my haters and doubters, you are a very special part of the ying and the yang that drives me.”

Phil Hellmuth’ case is similar. The WSOP legend is also thankful to them, stating: “Haters hate, but they are not worthless: they FUEL me!!”, but he also tends to ignore hate much more than Negreanu.

He uses blocking features on X (ex-Twitter) quite liberally, sometimes even punishes people for harmless jokes or light critique — seemingly because of his philosophy:

“Do not let anyone trample on your dreams!! It’s in our nature to listen to feedback, & easy to hear doubters/haters/friends who do not believe “you can do it.” For every Steve Jobs/Oprah, there are 100’s of folks in their orbit that did not believe they could do it. YOU CAN do it”

Haxton’s Humorous Approach

In the last five years, Isaac Haxton became one of the primary targets of strangely designed haters who dislike him because of safety measures at the poker tables. Yes, we are talking about face covering with special masks.

This hate isn’t funny yet Isaac finds a way to gain some positivity from it by making fun at the absurdity of the situation. For example, inOctober 2024, Haxton shared on X a compilation of screenshots with this caption:

“The support of my fans keeps me going. Whenever I feel the gentle tug of complacency, I think of them. You can run one more sim I tell myself. Do it for @gr8tixx”

By the way, you can use his compilation to easily identify haters:

Are Haters Really Useful Or Is It Just A Coping

While haters can sometimes give you a good laugh and extra motivation to reach your goals, their negative impact on your well-being outweighs the positive one.

Negative impact of haters:

1. Interacting with their hate is time-consuming
2. They bring additional stress to everyone
3. They cannot be reasoned with
4. Haters gonna hate no matter what
5. They can force you to doubt yourself
6. They spoil happy and funny moments

Positive impact of haters:

1. They give a free example of behavior you need to avoid to be happy and successful
2. They can motivate you to grow and develop
3. They can bring you joy in form of wiping their noses or just laughing at absurd hate content

Beware of the fact that you can’t stop haters from hating and that you don’t need to. However, you still can use the hate for your own benefits by using your reaction to their behavior as an indicator of internal processes and insecurities that you need to work through. Just remember this simple thought:

Haters’ actions tell the story about them and never about you. But you can learn from this story and use it to study yourself and become a better person.