Creative ways to Learn Poker
If you’ve ever read any of my articles, you probably know that I have a great appreciation for how complex poker really is. I’ve always had a thirst for knowledge and have never passed up an opportunity to learn poker via a different approach. In this article, I'm going to explain the different ways that I have studied the game over the years. Hopefully you'll adopt some of these methods for yourself.
At the beginning of my career, things were pretty straightforward. Advanced Players by David Sklansky and Mason Mallmuth, which gave me a great foundation for Limit Hold’em, especially pre-fl op play. After that, I read Theory of Poker, which taught me a lot about many different fundamental concepts that are so important for every poker player to fully grasp. And of course, in between chapters, I put in long hours at low stakes Limit games online.
Through these books I found out about www. twoplustwo.com, the poker forum that made me good poker player. With any poker forum, the most important thing is to learn who you can listen to. There will always be people pretending to be experts when they aren’t even worthy of an amateur title, but they should be very easy to spot. If you decide to read and/or post on a poker forum, I suggest you pay a lot of attention to those who are well respected. Make sure you eat up the advice they give you.
Take advantage of the fact that online poker sites have easy-to-read hand histories. Copy and post them into a forum thread and you might receive some insightful advice. Some of the poker forums are more socially oriented. Try to fi nd one like www.twoplustwo.com that has plenty of strategy discussion.
Over the years, through old friends, online poker forums, and even some of the opponents I played against online, I was able to develop a huge network of poker-playing friends. These guys have been my best teachers. I understand that if you are starting off by yourself, it can be hard to develop a group like this, but if at all possible you should try to build one. I have spent countless hours in one-on-one discussions with my friends, discussing everything from specifi c hands in detail, to game theory and how it relates to actual strategy, to specifi c opponents and what should be done to adjust to their playing styles. Most valuable of all have been the times I’ve been able to watch my friends play in person, seeing their hole cards and what they do in every situation.
Not everyone will have a group of friends like this, but there’s a decent replacement in online coaching sites. For a monthly fee, you can subscribe to these sites and download videos of top online pros playing poker. They will discuss what they are doing as they make their decisions, and you get to learn the factors involved in every decision they make. Many of these guys are the biggest winners in the games they play, so their advice is spot on. If you decide to go this route which highly recommend), spend some time browsing all the different options. There are many sites, and most of them offer sample videos you can watch for free. Some of them focus on tournaments and others on cash games, so make sure you fi nd a training site that offers exactly what you are looking for.
In my opinion, the most underutilized form of learning in poker is simple algebra. I’m not talking about anything complicated like the calculus that Bill Chen uses in his book The Mathematics of Poker, but rather the simple eighth grade algebra that you can use in all kinds of poker situations.
I’ll give you one quick example. You have a draw. Your opponent bets the fl op, and you think calling is a bad option because you don’t think this particular opponent will pay you off if the draw hits, but he will put you all in if it doesn’t. Your options are to raise all in or to fold. There is $150 in the pot, and your opponent bets $100. If you were to move all in, it would be an additional $200 for your opponent to call. You estimate that you will win approximately a third of the time when you are called. How often does your opponent need to fold for raising all in to be better than folding?
Let’s split it up in two situations: x% of the time, your opponent will fold, and you will win $250; y% of the time, your opponent will call. Of that y%, 2/3 of the time you will lose your entire stack of $300. The other 1/3 of the time, you will win $450 (your opponent’s stack + the pot).
Your raise equity is x(250) – 2/3(y)(300) + 1/3(y)(450) if you move all in. That is the same as 250x-200y+150y = 250x-50y. Since x and y add up to 100% of the time (x = when he folds, y = when he calls), we can say that x+y = 1. That is the same as x = 1-y.
So now we substitute for x: 250x-50y = 250(1- y)-50 y = 250-250 y -50 y = 250-300 y. Re = 250-300y. Let’s set Re to 0 to fi nd out when a raise is break even: 0 = 250-300y. 300y = 250; y = 250/300=5/6; x = 1/6. That means that if our opponent folds just 1/6 of the time, we have a break-even play. Any more than that and we will show a profi t. Let’s check our work to make sure it’s right. So 1/6 of the time we win 250 and 10/18 of the time (5/6 x 2/3) we lose 300; 5/18 (1/6 x 1/3) we win 450. Let’s see if that adds up to 0. (1/6)(250) + (10/18)(-300) + (5/18) (450) = 41.667 – 166.667 + 125 = 0. The math is correct.
To some people, that answer may seem extreme. There is enough money in the pot that, with just a 33% chance of winning, our opponent has to fold only 1/6 for an all in semi-bluff to be the correct play.
Generally this math is too complicated to do at the table, but I like to do a simple calculation like this every now and then when I am curious about a situation. The math may seem hard if you haven’t done it in a while, but it’s all straight out of your eighth or ninth grade algebra text book.
I fi gure that if a 14-year-old is responsible for knowing this math, a successful professional poker player should be responsible for the same math if he wants to be able to claim that he knows the fundamentals. Tools like www.pokerstove.com or www.twodimes.net/ poker can help you fi gure out your equity to plug into a formula.
Another thing I love to do, especially when learning a new fi xedlimit game, is to deal out a bunch of hands face up, and play them all myself. I’ll go step by step with you through a simple No Limit hand so that you understand what I mean.
Sitting by myself, I shuffl e a standard deck and deal out ten groups of two cards face up. In order, they are: J-2 off-suit, 6-2 off-suit, 10-4 suited, A-7 off-suit, Q-8 off-suit, Q-Q, 7-5 off-suit, 9-4 off-suit, J-6 off-suit, and 8-3 off-suit. The fi rst two hands are the blinds. How would 10-4 suited play under the gun? Obviously that’s an easy fold. The A-7 and Q-8 should fold as well. The queens should open with a raise. All the rest of the hands are garbage, so they should fold to the raise.
This hand of course was very boring, but that was one if the most important realizations I came to when I used this activity for Limit Hold’em. Basically, if everyone at the table is properly tight and aggressive, very few pots will be contested by more than two players. This helped me realize how constantly my opponents were making mistakes and where my profi t was coming from.
Recently I learned to play Badougi. I had a terrible feel for hand values, so I started dealing out six or seven hands and playing them all out for myself. I quickly learned how often you can draw one card three times in a row without getting that single heart that your hand desperately needed. I also learned how valuable four-card sevens and eights were, and that they should generally be strong enough to raise for value on the end.
Before the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. last year, I used the same method, this time with a few friends standing around. We dealt out ten Omaha H/L hands for example, and discussed how every hand should play out. Pretty quickly we realized that I was valuing high hands like K-Q-J-10 stronger than everyone else, and in the coming months I adjusted this part of my game. This method works best for Limit games, although it can be used for anything from fi nal table tournament situations to learning Chinese poker, or even how to bid properly at spades. If you have never done this, please give it a try, and you might discover a thing or two.
Since I am always playing against new opponents, in different games, in different locations, I fi nd it is extremely important to make sure I am constantly improving my game. I still regularly use all of the methods listed above, and I attribute virtually all of my success to those methods. Thanks to learning from so many different people and so many different techniques, I have gained an invaluable amount of knowledge over the years. If you are trying to learn poker, please give a few of these methods a try, and please don’t underestimate the importance of math and logic just because you are someone who “plays by feel.” Lacking any fundamental is a huge disadvantage in poker, but more importantly, it’s an unnecessary disadvantage because of all the educational tools that are out there.
If you are serious about learning poker and you only take away one thing from this, it’s that you need to be proactive with your learning. You can play poker all you want, but if you aren’t learning the game properly, it won’t do you much good. There are all kinds of ways that you can learn the game and, if for some reason some of these methods don’t appeal to you, be creative. I suggest you fi nd any way you can to improve your thinking process.
And if you still fi nd it hard to think like a professional, give my blog a read. At Justin- Bonomo.com you will fi nd hundreds of blogs that I’ve written discussing exactly what is going through my head at the poker table. Of course, none of that would have been possible if I hadn’t been so diligent in learning the game over the past years.
