Ordinary Things, Extraordinary Outcomes

You could read 100 poker blogs and never find a piece of advice better able to help you make money at the poker table than Alex Hormozi’s recent tweet up above. In fact, if you’ve reached this point in the article, I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve most likely already read the best part (don’t worry, I’ll do my best to keep it close!). That’s because poker is nothing if not a vast collection of “ordinary things” that require extraordinary periods of time to have their true value actualized.

When you spend years of your life playing poker, consuming poker content, and having the game infiltrate your thoughts in one way, shape, or form, you are technically fulfilling Hormozi’s requirements for success. But if it were just that easy, you and I would have both made a whole lot more money at the poker table by now. So, what’s missing? Where is the bridge between repeated action and long-term success? And how do we make sure we’re one of the few who cross it into profitability?

The philosopher Lao Tzu offered insight into these questions by advising to anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

In poker, we often spend our time anticipating the thrill of the big play, the triple barrel bluff, the dramatic three way all-in, but these moments mean very little – perhaps even nothing at all – to what Hormozi calls our extraordinary outcomes. Instead, Tzu urges us to focus on simplicity. If he were a poker player himself, he would likely advise us to focus on the “easy” stuff where even just a little effort can make drastic improvements to our bottom line. Learning how to calculate pot odds quickly, for example, or having a clear idea of which hands to continue with (and how) in a blind vs blind 3-bet pot. These are the ordinary things – the experiences that will continuously, unavoidably pile up session after session, for as long as we play the game.

When we develop an acute understanding of all the simplest, most common experiences of each of the foundational aspects of the game (position, street, and opponent type), we allow the ordinary things to become the architects of our success.

And so where does the bridge between consistency and progress lie? It’s in our ability to become aware of how things work at their most basic level, in working to develop the skills necessary to maximize our efforts in those situations, and in putting our intent squarely on optimizing how we put in our repetitions.

Once we do that, we only have two ordinary things left to focus on: patience and the ability to persevere through the inevitable hardship we’ll face along the way. As Hormozi’s full message reads: Hard people don’t come from easy times.