How To Stay on Top With an “Alien” Perspective: The Case of Isaac Haxton

Pre and Post Tournament Routines According to Isaac Haxton

Poker players, especially seasoned ones, love to share secrets from their routine and give tips as “universal for success”. However, unlike most, Haxton goes the other way. Maybe, because his routines — especially, pre-tournament one — wouldn’t fit everyone:

“My poker tournament routine, for more or less as long as I can remember, is…I set my alarm for two hours before I need to be at the table. Sometimes I push it to 90 minutes if I feel like I could really use the extra 30. And when my alarm goes off I: 

1. Take a 200 milligram caffeine pill
2. Hit snooze
3. Fall back asleep for one to four snooze cycles
4. Roll around in bed for an hour
5. Meditate for twelve — sixteen minutes
6. Take a shower
7. Catch up on texts and organizational stuff
8. Maybe a quick studying one or two hands before play
9. Head out to play

Nothing outside of the room almost ever before the tournament — no breakfast.”

This routine became a standard for Haxton for over 15 years. The only thing changed was the amount of meditation — it grew from 8 minutes to 12-16 minutes.

Haxton explains the importance of meditation for him simply:

“Now I’ve barely missed a day since I got serious about it. I like multiples of two for some reason, I adjust it up and down a little based on my mood and how much time I have.

It’s just very basic — set a timer and pay attention to my breath for a little while. I find it really helps me kind of center my mind and be more intentional and less impulsive about everything I do, whether it’s like poker decisions or conversations I’m having with other people.

My life’s just gotten a lot better since I started doing it. I found it very useful and I really like it. At this point the idea of trying to go out about my day without having done it makes me nervous. I have to do it before I do anything else. Like, my apartment could be on fire — I’ll be thinking: “Can I squeeze in four minutes before I deal with it?”

If meditation counts as a pre-game ritual, post-game ones are a whole other story. For Haxton sleep comes before all else, prioritizing it before physical exercises. The second post-poker routine is satiety:

“I’ve typically eaten not very much throughout the course of a day of tournament poker. So just about 100% of the time I’m eating a big meal before I go to bed when I finish playing at the end of the night. That’s kind of always been my routine and I find I sleep better when I’m going to sleep with a full stomach.

It just sort of suits me. I know other people don’t find this at all appealing. I’m not trying to convince anybody to be like me but I don’t feel hungry early in the day and I find that eating very much even on dinner break like eight hours into my day or whatever makes me feel a little sluggish, makes my brain slower.

So I like to keep my food intake very light throughout the day and then eat a ton between the end of play and going to sleep.

And you know kind of by leaning into that I’m waking up still full — I ate a lot and went to sleep and I’m not hungry when I get up, I have plenty of nutrition to fuel my body through the day. And I feel good.

It’s not like I’m feeling hungry all day and struggling to not eat because I think it’s best like this. Is just the way of managing my nutrition during a busy poker schedule that I find most comfortable.”

What Helps Isaac Haxton Bear Poker Losses Easily

One of Haxton’s poker signatures is a stone-cold reaction to losses. Even Jason Koon praised him for that, stating that he has never met someone who takes losses as well as Haxton.

So, it’s only natural that host Johnathan Jaffe, also known for a emotional control during tough spots, wanted to know more about Haxton’s ability to get over poker losses.

Haxton explains it in detail with a disclaimer that he can’t surely remember if this trait was innate or something he cultivated by himself:

“It does strike me as a useful skill both from a perspective of optimizing your play — it is best to be unbothered by that stuff — and also optimizing your quality of life. As a person, who competes and gambles, to not be feeling bad about that stuff away from the table — it’s something I take seriously and work on.

But it’s also something that I’m pretty sure did come relatively easily to me for reasons I can’t take credit for. My dad mentioned this to me that it was conspicuous to him even when I was in my early teens playing sports.

Right up until the game was over I appeared to care as much if not more than anyone else out there about winning and then as soon as it was over I seemed to get over losses immediately and not be bummed out the way other kids would be. So I do think that that’s just a quirk of my personality somehow.

But it’s also something that I’ve tried to be really mindful of as a professional poker player. I see myself having negative thoughts about losing and immediately can call that out to myself and say: “Oh, I’m feeling bummed out about losing. That’s not useful. That’s not pleasant. Let’s not fight it but just notice it and not attach to it and let it go”.

Meditation, which Haxton mentioned throughout the podcast, can be useful for developing self-reflection skills and stopping yourself from getting too attached to one emotion:

“That whole practice of noticing feelings arise and watching them go away is a big part of what one does when meditating so bringing mindfulness to bear on that I think is helpful.

It’s so clear that doing the alternative of really latching on to those bad feelings and engaging with them it doesn’t go anywhere useful. So it feels relatively easy to just see that as some of the most irrelevant noise that your brain can generate and just not engage too much with it.

It helps to be at a point in my poker career where my confidence that I’m playing well is not easily shaken and the financial swings are not make or break for my quality of life away from the table in any way and there’s just no compelling reason to be super attached to results on a day-to-day basis. 

That’s the thing I prioritized for sure and that I do like to pride myself on a bit. I take a moment to feel good about it when I am getting crushed and it’s not ruining my day.

That is easier said than done but if you can actually put yourself in the mindstate of “I’m in for five bullets today. That’s hilarious. Today is a fun day in a silly way” — that’s just a fine way to react to that. There’s no downside to reacting that way. You don’t have to be mad at yourself for being in for five if you lost the first four playing well. But I don’t know if any of that is either useful or relatable. I do have a bit of a sense that I sound like an alien when I’m talking about this stuff.”

Why Ike Doesn’t Consider Solvers a All-In-One Fix

Unlike many pro-solver players, Haxton isn’t head over heels for this type of poker software.

Of course, this doesn’t mean he is completely anti-solver. It simply means he is rather skeptical to the “solver rush” that’s taken over the poker community:

“I think that’s been such a huge trap in the solver era that there’s just this absolute fire hose of information — more than you could possibly look at in a lifetime. And figuring out what matters is so important. I mean, this has gotten to be less of a thing as we’ve all gotten a bit more used to it but in the first couple years that people were working with solvers everyone was obsessed with figuring out the right bet sizes everywhere. And it never matters. It NEVER EVER matters. 

You take some spot — three bet pot or whatever or single raise pot — and the best strategy is 30% check and 70% bet 60% pot or whatever. And if you force the computer to bet 80% or bet 45% — it’ll adjust the frequency up or down accordingly and put about the same amount of money in the pot. And it will cost you literally zero EV — you cannot see the difference.

If you make it do something really silly — like bet 150% pot or check — maybe at that point you start losing like 0.2% of the pot relative to the strategy you were supposed to play. So, in all but a few cases getting the bet size exactly right is the least important thing in the world.

People put so much effort into trying to get that exactly right and it’s not very important. I think there’s an awful lot that falls into that category of not very important. And finding the things that are important and making sure that you understand those well is a difficult skill and it pays really big rewards I think.”