NFL Legend Says This Is The Secret To (Poker) Success

“Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling.”  – Bill Belichick When it comes to poker, everyone enters the game with a bit of talent, even if they barely know the rules of the game. Sometimes it comes from experience in other 1v1 strategy games, such as chess, while other times it comes from a natural affinity for certain elements of the game, like risk assessment or the ability to separate emotions from financial outcomes. Beyond this somewhat intrinsic aspect of talent, there’s also the person’s ability to pick up the basic elements of the game – hand selection, general first-level strategies, and the aptitude for more advanced yet relatively easy-to-develop tactics, such as understanding when to 3bet, cbet, or check-raise. Together, these two sides—the innate and the relatively easy to acquire—make up what legendary football coach Bill Belichick calls talent. It is this talent that Coach Bill says “sets the floor,” or the lowest level of one’s potential. Whatever natural aptitude and ability to improve you bring to the game make up the lower bound—the floor—of what you can achieve. The thing is, everyone has a floor, and whether you’re talking about people who have made it to the NFL, as Coach Bill is, or those who have reached similarly high levels of success in the world of poker, the starting point—the floor—of talent is both incredibly high and, since all participants already possess a good amount of it, relatively meaningless on its own. According to Belichick, the thing that allows players to bridge the wide chasm between their baseline talent and their most actualized self is character. “A man’s character is his fate.” – Heraclitus Character can be defined as a collection of traits and qualities that manifest through a person’s behavior—simply put, the things inside us that drive us to do what we do, especially when faced with adversity. Although we don’t know which specific set of character traits Belichick values most, we can likely guess some of the most important ones: resilience, discipline, and adaptability—three traits as crucial on the green felt of the poker table as on the green turf of a football field. How resilient can I be when things are difficult? How disciplined can I remain with my effort and preparation, whether things are going well or poorly? How willing and able am I to adjust when the challenge calls for it? According to Belichick, this is what leads to greatness, this is what sets the ceiling, the upper limits, of one’s abilities. You might be able to throw all the perfect spirals you want, but if you’re not willing to put in the work to study the defense, if you’re not able to reflect on, and learn from, a five-interception game, the odds of reaching your fullest potential and making it as an NFL quarterback are all but none. Similarly, if you allow yourself to tilt every time you get sucked out on, if you don’t take the time to think about why and how that annoying regular always seems to get the best of you, and devise ways to turn the tables on them, you’re equally unlikely to make it to the poker big leagues. This is why, in both football and poker, character—not talent—is the true game-changer. Because while the skills themselves are the cost of entry, it’s in using them under pressure, in the learning from each attempt and refining future iterations, in continuing to fight through the inevitable pains and setbacks of that continual and endless process, that will carry players from their floor to their ceiling. And if that’s good enough for the greatest coach in NFL history, it’s sure as heck good enough for me.