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I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I’m only doing this because I love you. You are not good at poker. You have a ton of huge leaks in your game. You occasionally make good plays and you know some basic strategy, but your thought process is bad and causes you to make a lot of mistakes. A great player would absolutely destroy you in the long run.
Are you still reading? Good. Maybe there’s hope for you. The fact of the matter is, the above paragraph is true for about 95% of the people reading this article. Probably around 75% of readers are saying to themselves, “Well, that’s not me.” (So, if you said that, you’re still favored to be bad.)
That’s your biggest leak: your ego.
Don’t worry, though. I’m here to help. Let’s get started.
As is the case with many self-improvement programs, the first step is admitting you have a problem.
Why do you think there’s so much money to be made in poker? It’s because of people like you who think they’re good. They don’t bother to improve themselves or to be careful about the games they play in.
Think about it. When a 300/600NL game is going on between two very good players, one of them is favored to win in the long run, and the other is favored to lose. Now people don’t get to playing 300/600NL without a lot of money, experience, talent, and intelligence (besides the occasional rich, untalented gambler). That means that many of the smartest, most talented poker players in the world overestimate their ability. And it happens all the time.
Since the smartest and best in the world routinely overestimate their ability, I’m urging you to consider the fact that you might do the same. Just say to yourself, “Maybe I’m not as good as I think I am. Maybe I have something to learn.”
If it turns out that I’m wrong and you’re one of the best poker players in the world, no harm done. You’re so good that it doesn’t matter what I tell you. But, if it turns out that you have missed opportunities to improve yourself as a player because you thought you didn’t need it, maybe you’ll take this as a wakeup call. If you’re serious about poker — or anything else in life — you should constantly be searching for your mistakes. When you catch yourself making a bad play, you should be happy. Now you can fix it and become a better player tomorrow than you were today.
So, hopefully you’ve come to terms with the fact that you may not be a flawless poker player. What’s the next step?
The best way to become a better player, for most people, is to search for leaks and fix them. How do you find those leaks? Well, it’s not always easy to find them on your own, so I have a few recommendations:
• You can hire a coach to look at your play and identify your weaknesses. Good coaches can be expensive, but they are a great investment if you’re serious about your game.
• You can make some good poker-playing friends, or talk to the ones you already have. Even if you are both average players, having indepth discussions or arguments about your thought process can help a ton.
• Join an internet message board/forum. There are dozens of places online where poker players talk about how to play poker. I learned much of what I know from
www.twoplustwo.com. If you take this route, I suggest reading the forum avidly for a week or two before posting anything. (Just trust me on that.)
• Review your play. You can save all your big hand histories and go over them later. If you play live, you can document the action in a notebook. There are plenty of programs that track results online; Poker Tracker is the most popular, but there are others. Look back at all of your biggest hands and see how well you got your money in. See if there were better ways to play the hand. Sometimes you lose a big pot but played perfectly, and sometimes you win a huge pot although you played it terribly. Keep that in mind.
Since I can’t be there to coach each one of you individually, I’m going to go over some of the most common leaks amongst mid-stakes players. If you have none of these leaks, perhaps you are more advanced than the average reader, but I assure you: You have leaks. Don’t give up on looking for them.
The first leak, and one of the most important amongst even very successful players, is simply the lack of a thought process. Maybe I should say the lack of a sophisticated thought process.
This is far and away the biggest leak amongst winning players. “What? Winning players? Must not be a very serious problem then,” you might think. However you’d be wrong. The fact that they are winning players makes it worse because they assume nothing is wrong.
I should get more specific before I continue. The problem is that these players play in a way that makes money in their regular game, say $5/$10, six-handed No Limit. However, they have no idea why they make the plays they make. They learned from a book, or from watching a friend play, or maybe they just happened upon a good strategy. They raise a good range of hands pre-flop. They bet a good number of flops, check-raise bluff a good amount of the time, etc. But they don’t really know why they do it. They just know that it works for them (so far).
I was playing in a 25/50NL game at the Wynn. At first it seemed like the play was okay. It was clearly a soft game, but I thought a few of the players seemed solid, from observing them the first hour or so. Then this hand came up:
Some Guy (SG) opened to $200 in late position. I had no read on him. He was new to the table. Older Guy (OG), who seemed to play well, called in the SB.
Flop is Q-J-3, rainbow. OG checks, SG checks.
Turn 4s, bringing two spades. OG bets $300 into the $450 pot. SG calls.
As an observer, at this point, I’m putting OG on some kind of pair or draw. He hasn’t really taken enough action for me to put him on a narrow range of hands. I’m putting SG on something like A-K to A-10 or something midpairish. Occasionally he might have a flush draw, too.
River is the 9s, for a board of Qs Jh 3d 4s 9s.
OG bets $900 into the $1,050 pot. A big bet for most live games.
I put him on either a set, a straight, a bluff, or a flush — with flushes and bluffs having the most weight.
SG thinks for a while, maybe 45 seconds, and then calls.
Now OG makes a very disappointed face, and is reluctant to turn over his hand. “I guess he was bluffing,” I think to myself.
OG takes a few more seconds and hesitantly turns over Q-10 of hearts as if he’s embarrassed. SG looks surprised and mucks his hand.
This is the point where I realize that the players I thought were decent had no idea what they were doing.
A man in the three seat (3S), who had been playing fairly well and made it clear to everyone how good he was, says to OG, “Wow. I bet you didn’t like that call.” OG shakes his head no, in agreement.
WHAT!?!? ARE YOU GUYS SERIOUS? YOU DIDN’T WANT TO BE CALLED!?!?!? AM I PLAYING 25/50? DO YOU GUYS REALLY HAVE $15,000 ON THE TABLE? THIS IS A JOKE, RIGHT? WHERE’S ASHTON?
I couldn’t believe that these guys had fooled me for so long. I really thought they knew how to play.
I realized then why I was fooled. They made plays that were correct most of the time. They had experience in this live 25/50 9-handed game, and they’ve been winners in it for a while. The problem was, I couldn’t tell why they were making seemingly good decisions. I couldn’t hear the thought process behind each decision.
See, the river bet with Qh 10h there is actually a good play. I would make the same bet against most thinking opponents. My reasoning would be that I have the best hand most of the time. My opponent likely wasn’t drawing, so won’t bluff if I check. So the only way for me to make money on the hand is to bet if I think he will call with a worse hand enough of the time (If he won’t call enough with worse, then I have to check and fold to a bet). Now I can decide on a bet size. I would choose a large bet for a couple reasons, mostly because I want to make my opponent make a bad decision. I want him to put me on a different hand or hand range than what I have.
So, looking at it from his standpoint, he might think something like: A large bet by me means a flush 30% of the time, a straight or set or two pair 25%, top pair 10%, and a bluff 35%. That’s what I’m trying to make him estimate with my bet sizing. If he believes this, he has to call with his mid-pair, since he has over 2:1 pot odds and has the best hand over 1/3 of the time.
If I make a small half-pot value-ish bet, he might put me on a range of 70% top pair, 10% straight/set/two pair, 5% flush, 15% bluff. Then he would correctly fold his mid-pair.
If I were bluffing this river, I might choose the smaller bet size to represent a thin value bet, and make him fold his mid-pair. You have to consider what your opponent might have before you make a bet, so that you can decide how big or small a hand you want to either push him off of or get him to call with. If I put my opponent on two pair in this hand, I wouldn’t ever expect him to fold to my halfpot size bet because it’s not representing a strong enough hand. If I wanted to bluff, I would have to bet bigger, or check-raise bluff, which is probably the best bluff vs. two pair on this board.
Another benefit to value betting big and bluffing small is that you make or lose more or less money respectively when you are called.
Anyways, that was a bit of a tangent, but I wanted to show you what a real thought process on that river should look like.
OG showed a huge leak in his logic when he thought his top pair was no good after his big river bet was called. Why did he bet, and why such a large amount? If he thought he had the worst hand, he clearly wasn’t betting for value. To bet for value, you should feel you have the best hand over half the time. So was he bluffing? Bluffing with top pair in this spot seems pretty terrible as well; any better hand would be unlikely to fold in that position.
I honestly believe that OG had no idea why he was betting. He just knew he had top pair. And I think the real reason he bet so big was that he didn’t want to be raised. I actually think he was trying to represent the flush so that low flushes wouldn’t raise him. (Hopefully you realize how dumb it is to try to represent a flush when you are value-betting top pair.) Unless you’re in a tough game against smart tricky players, which we weren’t, you don’t have to be worried about being bluff-raised on that river after that action. He only bet big because he was scared, not taking the expected value of his play into account at all. And 3S agreed with him. He agreed with OG’s almost nonexistent thought process.
The truth is that players like OG and 3S make money in the game they are used to playing. And as long as the game stays easy and the dynamic stays similar, they’ll continue to win because they happened upon a strategy that beats that particular game.
However, if players start to become more aggressive, or more passive, or tighter, or they start to check-raise more, etc. etc., OG and 3S will no longer be able to win, because they don’t have the mental tools to properly adjust. If they want to play in a heads-up game, or sixhanded game, or they want to move up or down in stakes, or play in a tournament, they’ll be screwed. All of these new games require adjustments, and making proper adjustments to different game situations and opponents requires the ability to reason well.
Everyone has this leak to a certain degree. I’ve actually never sat there and thought about why I open-raise A-K suited on the button. I just do it.
The way to improve your game is to ask yourself, especially when reviewing big hands: Why did I make that play? What are some reasons for making a different play? Even in hands you aren’t a part of, think to yourself, “Why did he make that play? Would I make the same play? Why would I/wouldn’t I?”
If you end up getting a coach or some poker friends to talk to, make sure you discuss the reasons behind your plays. And please, operate under the assumption that you have a lot of leaks. Be on the lookout for them constantly. You’ll be better off that way, whether you actually are a bad player right now or not.
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