News: Where should your study focus be in poker?

ICM, mental game, health, volume or heads-up? That is a question Patrick Leonard has asked which provides some very useful insights.

I may have won Twitter user of the year at the Global Poker Awards (Sorry, I am contractually obliged to mention it once a week) but if there was a social media user of the year award (which I believe the Twitter award will become next year) then I think Patrick 'Pads' Leonard should win. His Instragram and occassionally his Twitter account are a gold mine of useful strategy insights.

The latest being this simple thought experiment:

This way probably more fun... You are playing a video game where your goal is to create the best poker player. You have 100 gold coins and have to assign them to the following 5 things. How do you allocate?

1) Studying heads up
2) Having a strong mental game
3) Optimised… https://t.co/SthRGfWuBH

— Patrick Leonard ðŸ«¡ (@padspoker) May 1, 2025

He later framed it as assigning values to each, which Bencb had some very interesting views on.

40 coins ICM
25 coins mental coach
18 coins Volume
12 coins Nutrition
5 coins Headsup https://t.co/wsHr033ejd

— bencb (@bencb789) May 4, 2025

ICM is everything in MTTs

poker — ICM accounts for frequent high equity decisions

Pads and Ben are genuinely two of the best online tournament players in the world, I am not.

I do, however, have a unique perspective on this because I have co-written two books on topics that were mentioned - ICM and mental game (Thanks Pads for giving me an idea for three new books).

I'm largely where Ben is on this, but I would place the coins as follows:

40 coins ICM
25 coins volume
18 coins nutrition
12 coins mental coach
5 coins heads-up

We agree completely on heads-up. It will account for the biggest single results in your poker life but it does not come up very often and the edges are slim.

We also agree completely on ICM (please buy my book). ICM accounts for most of the biggest money decisions you will make and ICM decisions come up all the time. I, and my co-authors, are big proponents on prioritising repeat situations in poker study and ICM ticks both the frequent and the high equity boxes.

It's no surprise we agreed, Ben and I did a fun ICM quiz video together:

Everything is mental game

I have put mental game lower on the list, despite having a book on the subject, for a few reasons.

First of all, some people are lucky enough not to have any major mental game issues. Secondly, and we wrote this in Mental Game of Poker, the best single mental game fix you can make is to study the technical side of poker more. Knowing what to do alieviates a lot of the uncertainty that creates mental game issues.

I put volume higher because this also has a positive impact on mental game issues. Downswings seem to get over quicker (they don't but it feels like they do) and you have a frame of reference for what to expect with them. Broadly speaking the more volume you put in, the better you get, and thus the less mental game issues you have.

Finally, I put health ahead of mental game. This is in part because, and we also wrote this in Mental Game of Poker, physical health has a direct link to mental health and one of the best mental game fixes is to eat better and exercise more. Physical health also contributes to longevity in poker, which contributes to volume, which improves mental game. Now that I am in my 40s, I can no longer get away with a crappy diet, so I am seeing first hand how important nutrition is.

If you have specific and significant mental game issues, I'd put the rankings pretty much where Ben has, but our point of difference is simply that I think volume and good health will improve mental game by default.

Please still buy The Mental Game of Poker though.

What is your ranking for these five traits? Let us know in the comments: