Visualizing Victory: Inside Jason Koon’s Relentless Mindset
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Jason Koon is currently battling at EPT Barcelona, where he just finished second in the €25K PLO High Roller for €268,400.
Jack Stanton caught up with the PokerStars Ambassador a few weeks ago, not long after he took down his second bracelet at the 2025 World Series of Poker, to discuss how visualising success has helped him achieve his goals, and why he feels he has no choice but to be the best.
As one of poker’s greatest and most successful players, you’d think Jason Koon would be used to the feeling of winning poker tournaments. And in many ways, he is—even if it never feels real.
“Every time I win one of these things, in the moment it feels like you’re in a dream because you’re in such a heightened state,” he tells us just days after he won his second WSOP bracelet: a $50,000 buy-in with a first-place prize of $1,968,927.
That surreal sensation Koon describes—usually the culmination of days of mental warfare and intense focus—is all part of competing at high-stakes poker’s elite levels, where small edges are painstakingly carved in the lab then executed in front of hundreds of thousands of armchair analysts.
Victory isn’t just a matter of skill for Koon. It’s something he’s visualised for years. Something deeply embedded in his identity.
Despite being one of the most respected names in the game for years, the 40-year-old has never lost his drive or vision, which started with a list of goals on a vision board back in 2010.
Next to goals like “Be a better friend” and “Be a better son” were dreams like “Buy my mum a house”, “Own a vacation home in the mountains”, and, when it came to poker, “Win a World Series of Poker bracelet.”
All of those dreams have become a reality. But how?
The Power of a Vision
For Jason Koon, visualising success isn’t about superstition. It’s about direction.
“I highly recommend people think about the story that they want their life to become,” he says. “Not even just in a poker tournament or a poker session, but just zoom out and see yourself and what you want in your life, then really imagine it happening for you.”
Koon’s idea of manifestation isn’t about controlling variance or avoiding bad beats. “Envisioning yourself winning a poker tournament isn’t gonna make your aces hold against kings,” he says. “It’s not about that. It’s about having the true belief that you can do it.”
That belief has carried him through dry spells and long slogs of doubt. “I had this mental block in, say, 2013, where I kind of felt like I would never win a big live tournament,” he recalls. “And then once I started winning them, those useless thoughts kind of went away.”
The transformation didn’t happen overnight, though. Koon earned through years of refinement, both in mindset and skillset. It was also supported by his friends, many of whom are also top pros. He frequently credits peers like Ben Tollerene, Seth Davies, and Stephen Chidwick for helping him stay grounded and focused.
“We never want to be too woo-woo or too metaphysical,” he says, “but every single edge that we can find, we try to find. And the guys that I’m surrounded by are just incredibly in touch with themselves.”
Dialling In
When Koon is deep in a tournament, the outside world disappears. “The more dialled I get, the more everything else kind of just fades away,” he says.
But that heightened state comes at a cost, and he often finds it hard to switch his brain back to normal. He describes it as a “war state of mind”.
It’s not uncommon for Koon to feel physically ill after a major run. “You almost like you’re coming down with a sickness,” he says. It’s his body that pays the price for the mental toll of competition—especially now, when Koon is increasingly mindful of time spent away from his wife and two kids.
“If I’m going to sacrifice my energy, my time away from my kids, and my health… I get pretty frustrated if I don’t give it everything,” he says. “The tournament or [cash game session] doesn’t necessarily need to be worth the money, per se, but I need to know that it was worth it in the amount of effort that I gave.”
Koon has learned that success at his level demands more than just technical excellence. He also needs to do everything he can to be present and immersed in the game, all the while visualising the best possible outcome.
“Even in cash games, sometimes the stakes are really, really big, and I’ll go in with a very casual mindset,” he says. “And I’ll walk away thinking, wow, I left a lot of money on the table there.”
Revisiting the Dream
Poker’s ecosystem has changed massively since Koon first started to play in the 2000s. There are hundreds more WSOP bracelets on offer each year, and the biggest buy-ins have increased not by thousands, but by hundreds of thousands.
Still, Koon feels a deep, nostalgic reverence for events like the WSOP and European Poker Tour. “There’s no feeling like it,” he says. “The energy in the air, the nostalgia… it made such a lasting impression on [guys] like me who turned 40 this year.”
Every time he plays a WSOP event or heads across the pond to play an EPT Main Event, it’s a nod to the younger version of himself—that hopeful guy who dreamed of a different life and dared to chase it with everything he has.
“I like anything that I do where I get to get in touch with a younger version of myself,” Koon says. “It just makes you feel like a kid again.”
No Plan B
You don’t become one of poker’s all-time greats and amass more than $66 million in earnings through sheer luck or by happy accident.
For Koon, it’s the result of his relentless mindset, which refuses to compromise on effort or accept any other outcome. From the second he set his mind on becoming one of the world’s best poker players, there’s been no plan B.
You could say it’s this unshakable belief and unwillingness to stop that defines him.
“Things in life oftentimes don’t feel like I have a choice,” he says. “It’s just like, I’m going to be this thing.”
