Stoicism & Taoism in Poker with Jason Koon

Koon’s Stoicism

If you have ever sat at a poker table, you know that the game is a test of endurance, patience and resilience. If live poker is hours of boredom punctuated moments of sheer terror, then online poker is a test of your mental sturdiness, regular bad beats eroding your spirit, murdering you by a thousand cuts.

Bigger pair? Try this 2-outer out for size. A 70/30? Watch your opponent spike that kicker. A 60/40? You never win those. Time after time, the perfect river card arrives to send your stack to the abyss. It is as if the universe has its own sense of humor, and you are the punchline.

And yet, through all the swings, the emotional highs and lows, one player has figured out the ultimate balance between poker, life, and the universe. Or, at the very least, he found the right words and put them in the perfect order to convey a Taoism that Lao Tzu would espouse, cut with a stoicism that Zeno of Citium would champion.

Jason Koon is one of the most successful players in modern poker. A fixture in the high-stakes tournament scene, he has accumulated millions in earnings and gained a reputation for his deep, analytical approach to the game. However, recently, Koon offered an insight that goes far beyond the felt, a statement that could apply not just to poker, but to life itself:

“The great test of poker - and life: accepting that randomness shapes outcomes, while dedicating your energy only to what you can control. It’s an incredibly difficult practice, but our only path to freedom.”

Koon’s words, tweeted on August 22nd 2025, rang with profound truth. In fact, if there is a core philosophy that can help you navigate the complexities of poker and life, this breed of quasi-stoicism may be it. It is a reminder that we often focus on the things that we cannot control and with good reason.

He discussed his discipline and anger management in the Paul Phua Podcast a few years back:

The Nature of Randomness in Poker

Whatever we want to call it - variance, luck, serendipity or happenstance - it is the far bigger determining factor in the short term. It primarily decides if we run deep in a live tourney or have a profitable Sunday. Koon’s message is that true freedom can only come from de-shackling yourself from the outcomes and instead focusing on the process and the things that lie within our control.

Advice of this nature has been bandied about down the years in a poker context, lip service paid to it by wannabe mental game coaches who revel in and profit from the pseudo-psychological. However, there is more than a kernel of truth to Koon’s insight, which if unpacked and onboarded the right way, can lead to a much healthier perspective in poker and a more productive approach to the world around us.

If there is one concept that poker players are universally familiar with, it is randomness. Most of us shed the belief in ‘meant to be’ quite quickly, if we even had it in the first place. The hand you are dealt has absolutely no bearing on the decisions you have made, nor the skill that you have employed to get yourself into a favorable situation. You can make optimal decisions all day long and still get battered by a capricious run-out.

Good poker players will always make their decisions based on incomplete information. They will also likely have made peace with the brutality of a hand where the best possible play is rendered meaningless by an unpredictable sequence of cards. No matter how well you prepare, how disciplined you are, or how many hours you have logged, studying solvers or working with trainers, the randomness inherent in the game will always be there.

Koon’s statement acknowledges that uncomfortable truth, that poker outcomes are shaped not just by skill, but by something fundamentally unreliable. Realizing that is an important first step. Recognizing that you are forever married to a fickle bedfellow is true wisdom.

However, that is only half of what can be unpacked from Koon’s sage words. While more than an element of stochasticity dictates short and even middle term results in poker, our decisions still define how we play the game. The fact that luck plays a part does not mean that we nihilistically throw our hands up in the air. Instead, we focus on that which is within our grasp - our preparation, our composure, our execution and how we react to adversity.

Mental Game

Even in a sea of variance, even within a probabilistic framework, there is still such a thing as the right play at the right time. There is also making the right decisions consistently over time. Great players like Koon focus on making optimal plays based on the information available. They don’t tilt after a bad beat or cooler. It’s the difference between reacting to the outcome of the hand - someone who is emotionally attached to the result - and a player who is reacting to the process.

In the ‘The Tao of Pooh’, Benjamin Hoff said “you would be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are”. Understanding the nature of reality is crucial and Koon’s version of Taoism here is not just a philosophical outlook. It is also the pathway to a strong mental game.

To truly succeed at poker, and in life, we must develop the mental fortitude to detach ourselves from outcomes. There is a release that comes from accepting uncertainty without becoming enslaved by it. From pacifiers to comfort blankets, from games to unrequited love, growing up is about recognizing and ultimately accepting that which you cannot control. That acceptance leads to a ‘letting go’ and that detachment is a kind of freedom.

Worry or anxiety about that which we cannot control is wasted energy and it is an unhealthy psychological perspective. If you are obsessed with short-term results, it will be difficult to see the wood from the trees. Poker tournaments tend to be feast or famine so you will either have too high an opinion of yourself or too low. Both are dangerous. Over-confidence can lead to hubris, vanity and a sense of entitlement while under-confidence can lead to meekness, execution issues and imposter syndrome.

If you instead become process-oriented, you will see consistent progress and emphasise that during the good times and take solace in it firing the bad. Another super high-stakes professional Seth Davies recently talked about why the top players tend not to overly celebrate their victories. They have learned how to walk the middle path, the one between elation and devastation.

Parallels With Life

Poker can sometimes provide us with life lessons. If you have ever tried to bring your A-game to a session only to be thwarted by a series of misfortunes or circumstances beyond your control, then you have certainly experienced a microcosm of life. Randomness is all around us, whether it is an unexpected occurrence, a decision made by someone else that directly impacts us or how the Heisenberg principle ensures that chaos reigns at the sub-atomic level.

We are constantly bombarded with opportunities to make decisions and unless you subscribe to some fatalistic (albeit internally consistent) hard deterministic view of the world, those decisions are our small but rippling contributions to how our lives and the world writ large moves forward. Wisdom ultimately comes from not just understanding this limitation but embracing it.

This is where the true profundity in Koon’s statement reveals itself. If we spend all our energy trying to control the outcome whether it is winning a hand of poker or achieving a life goal, we will burn ourselves out. Instead, we should focus on our actions, responses and attitudes. True freedom comes from the acceptance that we can’t control everything. In poker, that means making good decisions, embracing the variance and letting the chips fall where they may.

To quote once again from the ‘The Tao of Pooh’:

“We don't need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified Spiritual Superman, or sit around and wait for Fate to come knocking at the door. We simply need to believe in the power that's within us, and use it. When we do that, and stop imitating others and competing against them, things begin to work for us.”

David is a professional poker player, writer and commentator. He has written over 750 blogs and articles on poker; including news, opinion and strategy. He is the producer and host of the 3-time GPI Global Poker Award winning podcast ‘The Chip Race.’ In 2025, he was nominated for the GPI Global Poker Award for journalism. David was a brand ambassador for Unibet Poker from 2017 until 2025. He is currently a brand ambassador for WPT Global.