In any competitive field, be it poker, sports, athletics, business, or whatever else you might be involved in, the ability to perform regularly at a high level is a fundamental building block of success. After all, if you have all the tools but don’t put them into practice, you’re rarely going to be able to deliver when it matters. You’re not going to get the results to match what might be a high-quality process.

It occurs to this writer, therefore, that the presence of so much variance in poker often contributes to obscuring the true nature of these two concepts. We sometimes get good results when we don’t actually perform well, and we sometimes perform exceptionally and get nowhere. In order to really figure out the relationship between these two ideas, we have to dig a little deeper into what we mean by each one.

Regular high level performance is a skill in itself

Knowledge in a poker context is a reasonably easy thing to define – it refers to the overall level of understanding a player has regarding the fundamental realities and structure of the game of poker, as well as the common behaviours and tendencies exhibited by poker players in a multitude of situations.

We might also refer to this as overall ‘poker skill’ or ‘experience’, but these concepts imply slightly different things – skill requires taking actions based on knowledge, and experience is really just the growth of knowledge over time. Performance is the act of playing at a high level – as close as possible to 100% of a player’s ability.

Referring to it as ‘knowledge’ is important because it implies a degree of confidence in the veracity of our understanding. This confidence, however, can be shaken, or a player’s mental or emotional state can restrict their brain’s access to the full extent of their knowledge, and that’s where performance might start to fluctuate.

A player with an incredibly high level of poker knowledge – millions of hands of experience and thousands of hours of study – might play in a way that isn’t much better than a novice if he or she is tired, distracted, sick, or even drunk.

It follows, therefore, that there is a specific skill required in order to translate a high level of poker knowledge into high-level performance on a regular basis. Two players with identical levels of poker knowledge might have wildly contrasting experiences of the game if one of them entirely lacks the ability to put his or her knowledge into practice effectively.

The mental game provides the gateway

So what is this skill we need in order to take what we know about poker and about poker players, and profit from it? You’ve heard the expression before – it’s the ‘mental game’. This is really all the mental game is – a process by which we do our best to break down the mental barriers that prevent us from turning our knowledge directly into high-level performance.

These barriers can take many forms – tilt problems, lack of confidence, lack of motivation, or even long-standing personal issues that require professional help and advice – but they all do the same thing. They prevent us from taking our existing level of poker knowledge and acting on it at the table in the most effective way possible. Our brains are constantly putting up roadblocks to the execution of knowledge, even when that knowledge is learned to a high degree of understanding.

In order to remove these roadblocks, we may have to do any number of things – change our bankroll management policies, learn to meditate, get more exercise, adopt a specific preparation technique before each session, or even seek counselling outside of poker. The root goal, though, is the same – to resolve whatever mental or emotional issues are preventing us from accessing the full extent of our poker knowledge while in the act of playing the game.

Knowledge + mental game = performance

We can surmise, therefore, that the act of performing regularly at a high level – of performing at 100% of our full potential as often as possible – is really a matter of two things. Consistent improvement in our level of poker knowledge through structured study and conscious experience, and consistent improvement in our mental game with a view to accessing a greater portion of our knowledge base while actually in the act of playing the game, i.e. consistent improvement in performance.

You may already have well-established processes for poker study that have served you well over the years, and if so there’s no reason to change those processes. However, if you’re finding that you don’t think your level of performance matches up to the poker knowledge you know you possess, then your mental game is probably the missing link.

Take a look at any high-level poker player – pick a random name from the list of pros who played the recent $102,000 buy-in World Championship of Online Poker event on PokerStars, for example – and you’ll find their high skill level is most likely supplemented by a near-perfect mental game approach. They’re not just some of the most knowledgeable players in the world, they have access to all that knowledge in-game because they’re not encumbered by mental baggage.

In fact, in the case of even lower-level pros, the players with extremely good mental game processes often succeed more regularly than the guys with a lot of talent who only perform at their best 20% of the time. So if you feel like your game isn’t moving forward because your knowledge has stagnated or your strategic game isn’t good enough, take a second look. That feeling might just be your mental game trying to convince you it doesn’t need to be changed.