Poker is a game of cards and betting. If you have better cards than your opponents then you win. You can also win by bluffing. Both of these strategies have risks and rewards.
Some people have a genius for poker and have the talent to play it well. But the vast majority of winning players are not poker savants. Poker is an eminently learnable skill. You don’t need to be Van Cliburn to play piano or Picasso to paint. You just need discipline and a solid plan to study the game.
To develop your meta-skills you need to learn to recognize profitable games in the first place and find entry points into those games. Then you need to cultivate and protect your sources of relative advantage at the table. Finally, you need to execute well under pressure and maintain decision quality.
You’ll also need to know how to manage your emotions. Getting too excited or allowing fear to influence your decision making can be devastating to your profits. You’ll need to know how to read the table, and you’ll need to develop a sense of how much your opponents are bluffing. You’ll also need to be able to adjust your play in the face of changing odds. This is called exploiting asymmetric information and it’s a critical element of GTO strategy.