I've coached 400+ MTT players. Here's what I learned.
When I first started taking poker seriously, I assumed the formula was simple:
Play a lot + study hard = keep getting better.
Maybe eventually I could even give up the day job.
But after 14 years coaching more than 400 tournament players, I’ve seen talented, hardworking players get stuck for the same reasons again and again.
They study without knowing what is actually holding them back. They judge themselves by short-term results. And they learn strategies they can explain away from the table but struggle to execute under pressure.
Here are 18 lessons that can help you avoid those traps.
Watch the full breakdown here:
Find people who understand tournament poker.
MTTs are difficult enough without improving entirely alone. Find a study group, community or a few serious players who can challenge your thinking and provide perspective during inevitable downswings.
Diagnose before you prescribe.
Don’t buy a course or study a spot simply because it looks interesting. First identify the leak actually costing you EV, then choose the training that addresses it.
Separate knowledge leaks from execution leaks.
If you don’t understand the strategy, study it. If you understand it but still make the mistake in-game, you probably need deliberate practice rather than another explanation.
Work on one meaningful leak at a time.
Identify it, understand the strategy, train it and keep working until it is no longer one of your biggest problems.
Decide what to study before the session starts.
Finish each study session by writing down your next specific action. Your next session should begin with work, not 15 minutes wondering what to do.
Schedule study like an appointment.
“Whenever I have time” rarely works. Block 30–60 minutes, remove distractions and give the session one clear objective.
Train more than you consume.
Videos and courses teach ideas. Training makes those ideas accessible under pressure. Close the video and practise making the decisions yourself.
Don’t copy the solver. Learn from it.
Instead of asking, “What does Pio do?”, ask why it does it. Look for principles and patterns that still help when the exact board, stack depth or opponent changes.
Simplify without destroying the strategy.
More detail is not always more useful. Build heuristics and overarching strategies you can actually recall while playing.
Train a strategy you can implement.
A theoretically perfect strategy involving countless bet sizes may be impossible to reproduce while multitabling. A slightly simplified strategy you execute reliably can be far more valuable.
Recognise diminishing returns.
The first hours spent fixing a major leak are usually far more valuable than the final hours spent chasing tiny frequencies. Once a spot is reliable, move on.
Treat every tournament as data.
Your final £20 tournament matters just as much as the first. Mark difficult hands and look for recurring mistakes. If fatigue regularly destroys your decision-making, adjust your schedule rather than relying on willpower.
Measure skill, not just profit.
Your bankroll is an extremely noisy scoreboard. Track things closer to your actual ability: training accuracy, recurring errors, reviewed decisions and whether trained concepts appear in-game.
Think in years, not sessions.
Tournament poker produces failure far more often than visible success. Don’t rebuild your strategy after a losing week—or assume you’ve solved poker after a big score.
Compare decisions, not graphs.
Someone winning more than you doesn’t automatically make them better. But dismissing their success as variance can protect your ego from useful lessons. Get curious about what stronger players do differently.
Focus on what you can control.
You cannot control the river card. You can control preparation, bankroll management, game selection, sleep, attention, study and the quality of your decisions.
Learn from stronger players without becoming them.
Great players often approach poker very differently. Borrow their principles and ask how they reach decisions, but develop a thinking process that makes sense to you.
Keep completing the improvement loop.
Diagnose the leak. Prioritise it. Learn the strategy. Train the decisions. Play. Review what happened. Measure whether it transferred. Then repeat.
The Biggest Lesson
After working with hundreds of tournament players, I don’t think most serious players get stuck because they lack poker information.
They get stuck because their improvement process breaks down.
They jump between topics. They consume instead of train. They measure results instead of decisions. Or they stop the process before the learning has transferred to the table.
The goal isn’t to study everything.
It is to create a repeatable system that steadily turns your biggest weaknesses into strengths.
One leak. One training cycle. Then the next.
Do that consistently for long enough, and the small improvements start to compound.
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