There’s a moment in Mustapha Kanit’s episode on the GTO Lab podcast that touched me.
He’s talking about his early poker career – moving through the Italian scene, getting better, expanding his network. He mentions a player named Wu, a top-ranked sit-and-go grinder based in Germany. Mustapha went to study with him. And by “study with him,” I mean he sat next to Wu while Wu played. For days. Without saying a word.
Wu’s only rule was simple: “If you want to sit and don’t say a word, sit. But I don’t want anyone to talk next to me when I play.”
So Mustapha sat. Watched. Didn’t say a word. And he walked away understanding ICM at a level that shaped everything after.
No questions or debates. No “but what about this spot?” Only silence, attention, and trust that his brain would do the processing.
I’ve known Mustapha for years – followed his career, listened to how he thinks about poker. Hearing this story didn’t surprise me. It confirmed something I already believed: the best learning often happens when you stop trying to learn and start watching.
When the work is invisible
Mustapha has a reputation for creativity at the table. Wild three-bets from the big blind. Unconventional sizing. Plays that look like pure feel. People have watched him do things that make no sense from the outside and assumed he was winging it – talented but undisciplined, running on instinct and adrenaline.
You’ve probably experienced a smaller version of this. You make a play that’s off the standard line, it works, and someone at the table (or in the chat) calls it lucky. Or reckless. They don’t see the fifteen times you’ve been in that spot before. They don’t see the pattern you noticed three hands ago.
Mustapha has heard it his whole career. People saying he doesn’t work on his game. His response: “I worked more than anyone. I had an obsession for the game and it was the only thing I had.”
The gap between perception and reality is wide. He started playing at fifteen with nothing – no family behind him, no bankroll and nothing to fall back on. He describes waking up thinking about poker and falling asleep thinking about his opponents. But because his output looked creative rather than textbook, people assumed there was no process underneath.
That assumption is worth examining in your own game. When you see a player at your table making moves you don’t understand, the common reaction is “that’s a fish” or “that’s a maniac.” Sometimes it is. But sometimes you’re watching someone who has put in work you can’t see – in ways you wouldn’t recognise as study.
The read that took 2 days to build
One of the best hand breakdowns in the episode is a 6-5-5 board at a high-stakes final table. Mustapha holds a hand with backdoor playability. His opponent raises, and Mustapha clicks it back: a tiny four-bet that looks almost casual, but gets the fold.
From the outside, it looks like pure instinct. A feel play. The kind of move that confirms the “Mustapha just plays on vibes” narrative.
Then he explains what actually happened.
The night before, he’d noticed something – a physical pattern when this opponent was in a hand. Most players would file that away as a gut feeling and act on it next time.
Mustapha didn’t. He went back to his room and pulled up video of every hand the guy had played over the previous two days. He went looking for the same pattern – how the guy handled his cards, how he placed chips, whether the same thing showed up when he was strong versus weak, and he found it.
When the raise came on that 6-5-5 board and matched the pattern he’d been studying, he acted on it.
“I play with the guy, I saw this, I went to my bedroom, I opened the last two days of tournaments, went to every hand he played to see this.“
“Your instinct is just recognizing a pattern that you probably will see, but you see it before because you’ve been in that situation so often.“
That’s the difference between a tell and a read. A tell is something you notice once and hope it means something. A read is something you’ve gone back and checked.
Instinct is compressed experience. The patterns are real – your brain catalogues them whether you’re conscious of it or not. But the cataloguing only works if you’ve actually been paying attention. If you’ve been watching.
What are your study sessions missing?
Most of the study advice you’ll find online is active and structured. Open a solver. Run a sim. Do GTO trainer reps. Review your hand histories with a database.
All of that is valuable.
But there’s a second kind of learning that rarely gets talked about, and Mustapha’s entire career is built on it.
Watching. Genuinely watching.
Not passively – the kind of focused attention Mustapha brought when he sat next to Wu for days, absorbing how a top player acted in ICM spots in real time. The same attention he brought to reviewing hours of opponent footage, looking for a single physical tell.
You can do a version of this at any stakes. When you’re not in a hand, watch the players who are. Pay attention to how the regular in seat four handles his chips when he’s bluffing versus value-betting. Notice that the guy who always min-raises the button suddenly makes it three times the pot – what changed?
After a session, go back and replay a hand where someone made a line you didn’t expect and just sit with it. Don’t rush to a solver. Ask yourself what they might have seen that you didn’t.
Mustapha talks about the difference between his generation and the solver generation. His era had no software to tell you “correct or wrong.” You had to develop an honest, internal feedback loop: play a hand, assess it yourself, and figure out whether the logic held up.
That skill of self-assessment is still relevant even with the tools available. Solvers give you the math, but they can’t tell you anything about the person sitting across from you. Observation fills that gap.
The strongest version of your game uses both. Theory gives you the framework, observation gives you the information to deviate from it intelligently. Mustapha puts it clearly: to go beyond theory, you need to actually know something the theory doesn’t account for. And that something comes from watching.
Twenty years of watching each other
Mustapha thinks deeply about the people he’s competed against for two decades. For example, Ike Haxton went through five dry years without results and kept his game sharp the whole time. Adrian Mateos weathered brutal downswings that nobody saw from the outside. Ole Schemion’s live reads were so sharp that they compensated for being behind the field technically.
Mustapha’s framing is simple: after fighting each other for that long, he respects the minds of anyone who survived. No matter what.
That respect comes from seeing someone’s work up closeover the years and knowing what the journey actually cost, because you’ve been on a similar one.
I’ll admit something here. For years, people in my live games have called me Mustapha Kanit. Partly the glasses and moustache, but mostly because of the vibe – the intensity, observation and willingness to make a play that looks wrong until you see the thinking underneath.
Listening to this whole episode, the overlap was hard to miss. The belief that obsession looks different from the outside than it feels from the inside. My conviction is that watching can teach you more than asking a hundred questions. Poker rewards the people who prepare quietly and then act decisively – hearing Mustapha describe his process felt like hearing my own approach explained back to me.
You don’t need to be playing $100K buy-ins for any of this to apply. The player at your $5 SNG who always seems to know when you’re bluffing – they might just be watching more carefully than everyone else. The edge isn’t always in the solver output. Sometimes it’s in the silence.
Pay attention to your next session. Not just your own hands – everything happening at the table. The reads are there if you’re willing to sit with them.
