Fedor Holz calls himself one of the least disciplined people he knows. The people around him call him one of the most. That gap explains why most poker studies fail.
Most players have the same version of the week. You tell yourself this is the one where you finally get serious, two study sessions, minimum. Monday night, you open a solver out of guilt, pick a random spot, and stare at the output for fifteen minutes. Your phone pulls you away twice. You close the laptop feeling like you did something. By Wednesday’s session, none of it is there. Someone three-bets your open from the small blind, and you make the same call you’ve been making for months.
So you decide the problem is discipline. You need more of it. A better schedule, a stricter routine, a checklist you follow.
What if discipline is the wrong word for what you need?
What Fedor runs on
In a recent conversation on the GTO Lab Podcast, Fedor described something that contradicts how most players think about improvement. He said he considers discipline “forcing yourself to do something”, programming yourself to execute a checklist regardless of how you feel. And he thinks there’s a real cost to it.
“When you practice that too much, when you apply it to too many things in your life, you just become very dull.”
That word, dull, is doing a lot of work. He’s describing what happens when you spend so much energy pushing yourself through tasks that there’s nothing left for learning. The sessions where you grind through solver reps because you scheduled them, not because anything about the material is pulling you in. You’re present in body. Your brain checked out ten minutes ago.
Fedor’s alternative is something he’s practised since childhood: finding the natural pull toward the work rather than manufacturing the push. He described sitting with something for ten hours without ever deciding to do it, just because the material was genuinely interesting. That’s his fuel. Energy that doesn’t need to be forced.
This is where most players mishear the advice. “Follow your curiosity” sounds like permission to study whatever’s easy or fun. It’s the opposite. Fedor spent years running one of the most demanding optimisation routines in poker, with quarterly blood tests, a full-time sports scientist travelling with him, and every biometric you can measure. He went deep into that world before arriving at the conclusion: “You do all this scientific study to then figure out you just got to do the basics right.”
Sleep and movement. Eating well. Spending time with people who matter and working on things that excite you. When those are in place, the focus shows up without forcing it.
The Brazilian reg everyone dismissed
Fedor talked about a Brazilian reg that everyone in his circle dismissed as a bad player. Everyone except Fedor. He looked at the guy’s results, saw he was printing money, and started digging into what he was doing. That curiosity led him to start opening hands like Ace-four offsuit under the gun, plays that looked insane by conventional standards but exploited specific tendencies no one else was paying attention to.
The edge came from genuine curiosity about something everyone else had already categorised and dismissed.
You’ve almost certainly dismissed some part of your own game as “fine” or “not worth studying” when there’s something hiding there. The question is whether your study approach leaves room to notice that, or whether you’re too busy checking boxes on a plan someone else wrote.
10 Hours of Poker in 18 months
Fedor runs a small mentorship group called “Soon”, ten players he hand-picked, mostly based on feel rather than results. One of them, Samuel Müller, won the 25K GG Millions for $2.7 million. They’ve worked together for eighteen months.
In that time, Fedor estimates he’s done maybe ten to twenty hours of poker coaching. The rest is about their careers and their lives. How to set up the right conditions around themselves. Who to work with. How to structure their time and energy so that the poker improvement happens almost as a side effect.
Why Is Unlearning Harder Than Learning?
Fedor described what it’s like for a 2014-era pro to try to compete at today’s top level. His estimate: two to two and a half years of full-time dedication, and even that might be optimistic.
The issue isn’t knowledge gaps you can fill with study. It’s habits that were once profitable and are now losing plays. Fedor was blunt about his own experience. He spent years playing aggressively in spots where the edge only existed because opponents were making specific mistakes. When those opponents improved, or the field shifted, the aggression that used to print money became a leak.
“Sometimes you have to unlearn things,” he said. His own students, who grew up studying with modern tools, are sharper than he is in many spots, because they don’t carry a decade of outdated instincts.
Forced study tends to reinforce what you already do. You open a solver, confirm that your line was reasonable, and close the tab feeling validated. Curious study does the opposite. It pulls you toward the spots where you might be wrong. The habits you’ve never questioned because they used to work.
If you’ve been playing for a few years and your results have plateaued, some of what you’re doing is probably costing you money.
Where the real work is
Fedor’s time management philosophy comes down to one idea: minimise the things you don’t want to do. He acknowledged that it sounds simple and that he found it “very hard for myself.” The hard part isn’t the concept. It’s the honesty required to admit which things you’re doing out of obligation rather than interest.
Some days you need to push through resistance to get started. Discipline has its place. But if pushing through resistance is your default mode for improvement, something is off.
Next time you sit down to study, check in for ten seconds. Are you here because you’re curious about something? Or because you feel like you should be?
If it’s the second one, find the question that interests you first. Even if it takes five minutes to locate it. Those five minutes will make the other twenty-five worth something.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Fedor Holz actually study poker?
Yes, but not the way most players imagine. Fedor follows curiosity instead of forcing study sessions. He spent years optimising every variable with a sports scientist before concluding that getting the basics right (sleep, movement, genuine interest in the material) outperforms rigid study schedules. His mentorship group spends roughly 90% of their time on life setup, not hand reviews.
How do I study poker with limited time?
Start with a hand that genuinely bothered you, not a random solver spot. Engaged, study-driven sessions driven by a real question produce far higher retention than guilt-driven sessions where you open a solver because your schedule says to. Even 30 minutes of curious, focused work beats two hours of going through the motions.
Is discipline bad for poker improvement?
Discipline has its place, but Fedor distinguishes between forcing yourself through tasks and finding natural pull toward the work. Forced discipline drains energy and makes you dull. The goal is to create conditions (sleep, health, genuine interest) in which focus shows up without having to manufacture it. The push should be occasional, not your default mode.
visualising
Fedor’s “Soon” group of ten hand-picked players spends the vast majority of their time on career and life setup rather than poker coaching. In eighteen months with student Samuel Müller (who won the 25K GG Millions for $2.7 million), Fedor estimates only ten to twenty hours were dedicated to poker. The rest focused on structuring time, energy, and environment.
Why do poker study plans fail?
Most study plans treat goals like checklists. Every missed session becomes a failure, and guilt replaces curiosity as the driving emotion. Fedor moved from rigid targets to directional intentions, visualising outcomes rather than grading himself daily. When the study is driven by a genuine question rather than obligation, missed sessions don’t break the process.
