Poker With Presence

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.