Patrick Howard’s Five Things Vital For Poker Success

#1 Acknowledgement of The Worst Downswing

Years of coaching and playing experience lead Patrick Howard to curious revelation — the worst downswing isn’t the longest or largest but coincided with other major negative life events unrelated to poker:

“I think when a lot of people think: “What would it take to really knock me out of poker — at least for a while if not forever” — a lot of players will jump straight to: “Oh, it’s going to be the 100 bi downswing”. In other words: “the existential danger to me is facing an enormous amount of variance just within poker”.

But I don’t think that’s really the existential threat for most people. I think the existential threat is getting hit by bad variants in a bunch of different areas of your life all at once. So, it’s the 40 bi downswing plus you go through a breakup plus Bitcoin crashes at the same time and you have a ton of investments in that or maybe you have some sort of health issue at the same time.”

As Patrick thinks, people often hope that really bad things that happen in our lives are going to be like spaced out pretty evenly but that’s not how random events occur:

“Random events are often clustered. So, I think whenever you’re thinking about the worst case scenario — it’s worth thinking: “What if a bunch of different things go wrong all at the same time in different areas of my life?”

So, if you’re looking at being successful in poker, you should be able to recognize the real downswings, accept the possibility of coming across them and try to either prevent or minimize their effects.

According to Howard, a major step towards this is simply dealing with things in your life before they grow to become a problem.

You may also find the book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” to be useful. It was written by former options trader Nasim Nicholas Talib and describes how even rare and unpredictable events can make and impact and how people tend to retrospectively rationalize them with simplistic explanations.

#2 Accepting the Impossibility of Playing Flawlessly

Even machines aren0t flawless in their work, so why expect people to be perfect all the time?

If you tend to perfectionism in poker, Howard advises taking a cue from Napoleon Bonapart:

“Remember that Napoleon’s definition of a military genius is “the man who can do the average thing while everyone else around him is going crazy”.

Now poker is not nearly as high stakes as actual warfare but it is still very mentally taxing and it is a high pressure situation. A lot of your results in poker are going to depend on how you handle that pressure, it’s not how well you play on your best days. What also matters is how poorly you play on your worst days or, to put it differently, what does your average session look like. What is the quality of your average poker session — that’s truly what is going to impact your results over long periods of time.”

The secret to constant good play is in creating a system for getting the most out of each session. There are infinite ways of investing time, money and energy into raising of quality, for example:

• Optimization of pre-session routine
• Effective usage of breaks during each session
• Keeping the workplace in good condition

The key point is constantly monitoring the areas you are struggling with and changing a behavioral pattern where it’s required. At the same time, don’t forget to be kind to yourself and don’t put additional pressure on yourself:

“Another important takeaway from this Napoleon quote is that maybe you don’t need to put so much pressure on yourself to make the sickest plays. It’s not really what is going to drive your win rate. It is really like finding those “Above the Rim” type plays because overemphasizing that type of performance is, I think, more likely to just lead to you burning out than actually make you tons of money.”

#3 Striving to Longevity Instead of Short-Term Benefits

As Howard emphasizes, longevity in poker isn’t about being better than everyone else. Longevity is about putting in a consistent amount of solid effort over long periods of time:

“If you’re the type of player, who only has poker in their life and spends 12 hours a day playing and studying poker, that may work for the next couple of years but you really want to be thinking: “How am I going to make this work over a 10-year period or a 20-year period” —  because not having a balance combined with the stress and pressure that comes with playing poker as a career is a pretty deadly combination. Maybe you don’t see yourself playing poker for 10 to 20 years but I think nobody wants to end their poker career, even if it’s in a few years, completely burnt out.”

One of the great role model for poker players who pursue longevity in the game is professional cash player Matthew Marinelli whose persistence and level of self-organization delight Patrick:

“Matt is one of the best players in the world at this point and he has been doing his morning hand review sessions for years now. He has a whiteboard on his wall behind him in his office with his tasks of things that he’s going to study that week. And he’s very organized about it.

He also has a lot of raw talent but I don’t think it’s a mistake that he’s gotten as good as he’s gotten because he just has this structure to his poker routine that a lot of the competition just doesn’t have. Over the years that I’ve known him I’ve seen that just builds and builds until it gets to the point where you look at his skill level and you think: “Well, I could never get there”. Well, maybe you could get there but it’s just going to take consistent effort and deliberate practice daily over the course of years which is something that a lot of people aren’t willing to do.”

By the way, that’s how Patrick describe Matt’s principle of longevity in poker:

“The way that you get better than everyone else is not really about raw effort in the short term. It’s more about showing up every day and getting a little bit better every day and then compounding that over years and years.”

#4 Turning Mistakes into Productive Tools

The ways to view your mistakes are always divided into productive and unproductive ones. The former help you to learn and grow from your mistakes, while the latter lead to repeating the same mistakes and creating new ones.

That’s why Howard insists on leaning towards productive ways of tackling mistakes:

“When you make a big mistake, especially early on in your session but really anytime, you might think: “Well, I just blew my win rate for this entire session!”. It’s understandable to view mistakes as setbacks. But one thing that you have to remember is that you have always made mistakes and you’re always going to continue making mistakes.

Your win rate up to this point has mistakes that you’ve made in the past already priced into it. So in other words, if your win rate over your career is 4 big blinds per 100 — that win rate is the sum of all of the +EV plays and the -EV plays that you have made in the past. 

So, again — if your win rate is 4 and you make a 10 big blind error in the beginning of your session, you might think: “Well, it’s going to take me 250 hands to recover the error that I just made and only then can I start profiting in this session”. That ignores the fact that you have made many mistakes in the past and you were still a profitable player. So, you can be profitable even though you make mistakes. That is a fact.

What is going to make you progress as a poker player is not never making mistakes — that’s not necessary and it’s not realistic. Rather you should just focus on making smaller and smaller mistakes over time.”

Also, Patrick recommends to go a little easy on yourself when you make mistakes, especially if it happens in situations where you have not ever been put before. Your main priority related to mistakes is to cut their size and stop repeating them.

To reach this goal you can use Patrick’s “postmortem” routine for mistakes:

1. When a mistake is made you should mark it for review and move on
2. Start reviewing mistakes after session to figure out what happened
3. Try to remember your feelings and decision-making process in the situation
4. Highlight things that confused you
5. Highlight your assumptions that didn’t pan out
6. Create a system of mindset that will help you avoid this type of mistakes in the future
7. You need to make an effort to shift your mindset and it won’t be easy but benefits you greatly when done.

#5 Necessity of Being Different from Average Player

Trying to learn from other pros is a good way to grow in poker but you need to know when to stop before becoming just another copycat with an average strategic approach. Patrick is sure that without fundamental difference from average poker player you can’t be successful in a modern poker pool:

“If you’re not sure whether your approach is fundamentally different in some way then the answer is it’s not, you would know.

One of the ways that I sort of was able to separate myself from the competition. When I started playing poker early on, I was focused on my strategy against recreational players, when almost all of the training content that I saw out there at the time was focused on how to play against regulars, whereas I recognized the recreational players at my table are where the vast majority of my win rate is coming from. And therefore any gains that I can make against those players are going to be, they’re going to have an outsized impact on my total win rate.

So, I’m going to optimize my strategy against the recreational player first and then after that I will focus more on picking the higher fruit, the more difficult spots to get good at, which is, you know, getting that last bit of edge against the average regular.”

The conclusion follows from Howard’s past: to reach long-distance success in poker, you should carefully study your field and figure out weaknesses to adjust your strategy accordingly. With that said, you’ll also need to become tech-savvy since tools like poker solvers are widely available now:

“You would have to have the type of hardware to run all these simulations. And it’s time consuming, costs a lot of money, and requires a different set of skills from playing poker. Now GTO Wizard is sort of gifting a lot of this to anyone with a subscription, it becomes a lot more difficult to find ways that you can use solvers and technology to get above what the rest of your competition has access to. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible — it’s just more difficult.

I’m looking at GTO Wizard and I’m looking at what people have access to and I’m thinking about ways that I could separate myself, what is GTO Wizard missing that people might not be looking into. I think you can still exploit players but you have to do it in a much more clever and calculated way.”

Finally, the final way to differ from average player in Howard’s opinion is treating poker as a business rather than entertainment:

“[You should have] disciplined study habits rather than casual learning, setting clear goals for yourself and keeping yourself accountable to that. Of course, this gets harder and harder every year, I think as poker becomes more of like a serious profession and the easy money goes away. It becomes harder to just outwork the rest of the competition. But I do think that specifically in poker there is still quite a bit of room for just approaching the game more seriously and in a more professional way.”