A mental prep manual for poker players, built on principles from Judaism

This post is dedicated to a close friend of mine, Babi, who is celebrating her birthday this week.

For years, she has told me that one day I would "return" - the Hebrew phrase chazara b'teshuva, which usually means returning to religious observance. Over time I started to wonder if she had picked up on something I myself hadn't yet learned to name. I have never seen myself as a religious person, but I have always been drawn to religions, to philosophy, to psychology, and to questions of meaning. Throughout my life I've met people from across the full spectrum of belief - Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, secular and atheist - and discovered that despite their differences, most of them are wrestling with exactly the same questions.

How to live in a world of uncertainty.

How to handle disappointments.

How to build community.

How to manage emotions.

How to find meaning.

And how to live in greater peace with ourselves and with the world around us.

As I get older, I find myself less interested in who wrote the rules and more interested in why they survived for thousands of years. Customs, rituals and moral principles interest me as human mechanisms. They were built across generations to help people manage anxiety, create stability, build communities, and develop healthier relationships with themselves and with others.

Since I went out on my own and started building my consulting practice, I find myself working on two parallel tracks. On one side I develop services, workshops and coaching processes for individuals and organizations. On the other, I try to use the short window of attention that my poker results have brought me to influence the conversation about the game and the culture being built around it.

Poker will always be a competitive game, but for me it can be much more than that. It can be a place of joy, learning, growth, connection between people, and the creation of community. It can be a place where people from different backgrounds meet around a shared hobby, learn to make decisions under uncertainty, deal with successes and failures, and build relationships that wouldn't form anywhere else.

In a world where social media algorithms profit from polarization, anger, and separation between groups, the poker table presents an almost opposite reality. Around the same table you'll find women and men, religious and secular, right-wing and left-wing, young and old, people from different cultures and different classes. They often don't agree on much, but they manage to sit together for hours, compete, laugh, learn from each other, and develop mutual respect.

That reality interests me far more than the one reflected in the headlines.

Maybe that's why I started thinking: what would happen if we took a few principles from Judaism and translated them into a mental prep manual for poker tournaments?

Not as a religious guide.

As a human operating system.

As a set of tools designed to help us make better decisions, handle emotions more healthily, and build a better relationship with ourselves and with the people around us.

Kabbalat Shabbat - stop before you enter the game

One of the most interesting ideas in Judaism is Shabbat. Its meaning for me isn't a list of prohibitions - it's the creation of a deliberate pause inside a world that rewards constant motion. The modern world rewards endless availability, instant responses, high output, and a relentless chase after the next goal. Shabbat offers a different approach. It creates a moment in which we stop chasing, appreciate what's already been done, and let the whole system reset.

Poker players often struggle to do exactly this. They finish a tournament and immediately run to analyze every decision, finish a series and immediately think about the next goal, win a tournament and feel they have to replicate the achievement, or lose and feel an immediate need to fix it.

Before a big tournament, every player needs their own version of Kabbalat Shabbat.

A moment in which they set aside earlier results, the last mistake, the last bad beat, and expectations about what's about to happen. When the tournament is about to begin, the result doesn't yet exist. The past is already over. The only thing within your control is the quality of your next decision.

Prayer - a ritual of entry into performance mode

When you look at prayer through a psychological lens, it looks less like an attempt to change reality and more like a mechanism that helps a person organize themselves.

Prayers create routine inside a changing reality, provide a deliberate pause, and bring attention back to the present moment instead of to thoughts about the past or future. Research in mindfulness and emotional regulation consistently shows that our ability to make quality decisions is directly affected by the mental state we're in.

Most poker players don't lose because of a lack of technical knowledge. In many cases they lose because anger takes over the decision-making process, fear causes them to deviate from the strategy they planned, ego pushes them to prove something to themselves or others, the desire to win back losses replaces rational thinking, and exhaustion impairs accuracy at the very moments demanding the most focus.

That's why I believe every player needs a fixed ritual before a tournament. For some it will be meditation, for others walking, writing, breathing, or a short conversation with someone close. The form of the ritual matters less than the principle behind it - creating a conscious transition between everyday life and a state in which long hours of decision-making under uncertainty are required.

Niddah - knowing when to take distance

One of the recurring principles in Judaism is the principle of separation. Separation that creates space, allows renewal, and prevents burnout.

The poker world, like many other performance worlds, rewards volume. Another tournament, another session, more playing hours, more opportunities. But the most important skill of a professional player isn't knowing when to play. It's knowing when to take a step back.

There are periods when exhaustion accumulates, emotions are running the decision-making, or the desire to win back losses becomes the central engine behind the game. In situations like that, distance isn't weakness. It's a professional tool that allows you to return sharper, more balanced, and more focused.

Separating dairy and meat - not everything should mix

The Jewish separation of dairy and meat always struck me as an interesting metaphor for a broader idea: there are things that benefit from separation.

Many poker players mix process and result, loss and mistake, victory and quality play, and emotions created in one tournament with decisions they make in the next.

One of the most important skills in poker is the ability to separate facts from our interpretation of them.

When a player succeeds in separating the quality of a decision from the result that actually came out of it, they create for themselves a much more stable foundation for learning, development, and emotional stability.

"Do not boil a kid in its mother's milk" - winning without losing humanity

You can find many interpretations of this verse, but the one I connect with most addresses respect and responsibility toward others.

Poker is a competitive game, and competition is a significant engine for growth and improvement. That said, there's a big difference between competition and humiliation. You can win without diminishing the person in front of you, take a pot without celebrating at the opponent's expense, and identify others' mistakes without disrespecting them.

Precisely in such a competitive environment, the way we treat the people around us becomes part of our identity as players and as human beings.

"Love your neighbor as yourself" - and disagreement for the sake of heaven

One of the most common misconceptions about unity is that people need to agree with each other in order to live together. Judaism offers a much more interesting model. On one hand, it commands "love your neighbor as yourself" (v'ahavta l'rei'acha kamocha). On the other hand, it is full of disputes, debates, and competing interpretations. In fact, some of the most famous discussions in the Talmud are based on people who disagreed on almost everything, and still continued to learn, work, and live alongside each other.

The idea of machloket l'shem shamayim - "disagreement for the sake of heaven" - isn't about trying to win an argument. It's about trying to understand, to learn, and to get closer to truth, even when different people see reality in completely different ways. "Love your neighbor as yourself" doesn't require me to adopt the opinions of the person in front of me. It requires me to remember that they too are wrestling with fears, hopes, ambitions, and failures - just like me.

In my eyes, a poker table is one of the most beautiful examples of this idea. Around the same table sit religious and secular people, women and men, right-wing and left-wing, people from different countries, cultures, and backgrounds. Some of them won't agree on almost any topic outside the game, and still they manage to share a common space for hours, respect shared rules, compete with one another, and continue to see each other as human beings.

In a world where every disagreement quickly becomes a battle and every difference of opinion is perceived as a threat, there is great value in places that remind us it can be different. We can argue without hating, compete without humiliating, think differently and still respect, and even learn something new precisely from those who see the world differently than we do.

Maybe this is one of the deepest meanings of community. Not a group of people who think the same thing, but a group of people who manage to live, learn, and grow together despite the fact that they don't think the same thing.

Forgiveness - a mistake management mechanism

Most players I know don't suffer from a lack of self-criticism. They suffer from an excess of it.

They keep analyzing mistakes for months, carry old decisions with them, and have internal conversations they would never have with another person they respect.

In Judaism, forgiveness isn't erasure of responsibility. Responsibility stays. The lesson stays. The learning stays. What changes is the ability to stop punishing ourselves for something we can no longer change.

Forgiveness is a mechanism that lets us move forward without carrying unnecessary weight.

Self-compassion - a performance tool

The term "self-compassion" sounds to many people like something soft or too spiritual. The research tells a completely different story.

People who can treat themselves fairly after failure show higher resilience, higher persistence, and a better ability to improve over time. They recover faster from setbacks and manage to learn from mistakes instead of getting pulled into self-blame.

In poker, where even excellent decisions often lose, this isn't a nice trait. It's a critical performance skill.

Accepting reality

This might be the most important principle.

Both Judaism and poker distinguish between responsibility and control.

Our responsibility is for preparation, effort, and the quality of our decisions. Our control over the result is far more limited.

In poker you can play excellently and lose. In life you can work hard, prepare well, and make excellent decisions and still hit a reality that doesn't align with your plans.

Accepting reality isn't giving up ambition. It's understanding that fighting what already happened produces no value, while the ability to learn, adapt, and keep moving forward is what enables growth over time.

The universal practices table

Here's how basic practices that recur across all religions translate into concrete poker actions.

In the end

I still don't know whether my friend was right when she said I would return to religion.

But I do think I've started to appreciate more the wisdom accumulated across generations. Less as religious obligation and more as a system of ideas designed to help human beings live better with themselves and with their environment.

If there's anything poker has taught me, it's that most people are looking for far more similar things than we realize. They're looking for a sense of belonging, meaning, community, security, and a way to deal with a world that has never truly been predictable.

Maybe that's why both poker and belief systems continue to exist over time. Both remind us that life isn't a test of total control. It's a test of adaptation, community, decision-making, and the ability to keep playing even when the cards we've been dealt are completely different from the ones we hoped to receive.