The Secret Is…There’s No Secret

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Recently, a few people I’ve spoken to in a variety of different formats have asked me a question that I find really difficult to answer. They tend to phrase it in a specific way, and it tends to come during a conversation about strategy, from someone who’s looking to make the step up to playing poker tournaments professionally. It’s a question I used to ask of people pretty often, too, although maybe not so directly.

“So, what’s the secret to winning at MTTs?”

On the face of it, it seems like a question that should have an answer. Any question that asks what the secret is, implies the universally acknowledged existence of said secret. It implies that there’s some piece of information, some technique, some strategy that once it’s discovered, will lead to continued success and untold riches. It implies that there’s some knowledge that’s being kept from you, something other people know but you don’t, some privilege that they have over you. It implies that if you could gain access to that secret, you’d immediately become part of some ‘inner circle’ of poker, the select group of players that have found the formula or the recipe for long-term success.

In reality, however, anyone who tells you that there’s a secret to winning at poker – whether in MTTs, or any other format of the game – is lying to you. It’s no different than all those weight loss books published by hack writers that tell you how to lose 10 pounds in a week but don’t contain any actual science, or the websites that tell you how you can make $1k per week working from home if you just follow their ten easy steps. It’s somebody else telling you something you want to hear, because it’s in their best interests that you believe it.

Why is it in their best interests? That’s a surprisingly simple answer – because it makes you a worse poker player. If you believe there’s a secret, you’re directing your energies towards finding that secret, which is an ultimately pointless quest. You’re not focusing on more productive areas. Every player who spends time and energy looking for something he or she is never going to find, can’t be spending that time and energy actually getting better at poker. Every player that’s not getting better at poker contributes to the improvement of the ROI of all the players who are. Thus, it’s actually a +EV move for a fellow poker player to completely lie to you about the things that are necessary in order to succeed at poker in the long-term. Obviously, I’m a TPE coach, so I’m not going to do that.

What I want to do is deconstruct the ‘secret’ myth and show you that the closest thing to a ‘secret’ that exists, is merely to continually focus your energies in the right places and constantly optimise each and every decision-making process that forms a part of your game, both on and off the table. That’s a long-winded way of saying that the only real route to success is to work hard, to keep working hard, and to never stop working hard.

Think about the process of improving one specific weakness in your poker game. Say, for example, you don’t think you pick the right spots to 3-bet light as often as you should. Do you look for some kind of guidebook that tells you exactly which spots to 3-bet in? No, or at least I hope not. You look at different situations as you play, and try to work out if it’s a good spot to 3-bet light. You watch training videos and check out examples of relevant hands. You talk to other players and take note of what kind of factors they consider when deciding whether to 3-bet light or not. You experiment, and try out these ideas for yourself. Over time, your ability to discern good spots to 3-bet light improves, and your Evbb/100 statistic for 3-bet pots where you didn’t have a top 5% hand probably goes up.

Did you go into that learning process expecting it to all instantly click together? No. Did you expect there to be a decision matrix you could follow to its conclusion every hand that would tell you if it’s a good spot for a light 3-bet or not? No. Did you expect your overall tournament results to skyrocket in the space of a week? No, but I bet you expected it to improve your overall poker game, and that’s exactly what it did. Furthermore, I bet you also recognise that improving your overall poker game will make you more money in the long run.

This concept applies just as much to in-game decision-making as it does to off-the-table improvements and changes in your game. One of the things I was very guilty of during a big downswing in 2012 – and something I’ve had to work very hard not to be guilty of during the big downswing I’m in the middle of right now – was changing too many things about my game in an effort to find that one thing that would suddenly make everything click. I would play 24 tables one day, then 12 the next; MTTs one day, 180-mans the next. Every combination of table layouts, hotkeys, HUD configurations, mental game mantras, post-it note reminders and pre-session rituals. None of it worked, at least not in the way I wanted it to. Nothing changed my game overnight or doubled my ROI.

The reason for that, however, was that I didn’t understand the difference between something working, and something helping. Between a thing that was the reason why I was making money, and a thing that contributed to me making money. The reality being, nothing works, but everything helps. If your goal is to make the most money possible playing poker, there’s no one way to do it, no one thing that works better and faster than any other – but if you’re willing to put in the hard yards and recognise that it takes time, it takes effort, and it takes volume, then there are a million and one things you could be doing that will help you to get where you want to go. You could be working on hand ranges, equity calculations, postflop play, or any other specific element of your game that will contribute to making you a better player. All the guys who are already making good money playing MTTs, there’s not just one reason for that – in each case, there are a multitude of positive attributes that contribute to their success.

Perhaps the greatest futility in trying to find the ‘secret’ to achieving success in poker lies in the assumption that after a certain point, everything is easy. Once you’ve ‘made it’, you just have to keep doing your thing and you’ll keep making money. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you’re not improving your game and constantly working on it, you’re going backwards relative to all the guys who are. If you’re not putting in volume and trying to overcome whatever obstacles variance is putting in your way, you’re going backwards relative to where you’d be if you were putting in more volume. I’ve been guilty of this over the last six months – taking time off to focus on things outside of poker, grinding 3 or 4 days a week instead of 5 or 6 – and poker has punished me for it with a $40k downswing. Make no mistake, poker will punish you too.

Asking the question, “what’s the secret to winning at MTTs?” as someone seeking to play professionally is more or less equivalent to going into any one specific tournament and asking “how can I win this tournament?” – it’s a question with no answer, because the only way you’re going to win that tournament is by continually making the correct decisions, staying focused, and getting lucky in the right spots. Similarly, the only way you’re going to succeed as a professional MTT player is by continually playing well on the table, staying hungry and motivated off the table, and yep, you guessed it, getting lucky in the right spots.

Still not satisfied? How about this – just win more coinflips. It helps.