Improve Your Poker Game
How to become a better poker player
by: Lou Krieger ©
Most poker players consider
themselves to be good to great at the game,
I don’t know about you, but when I hear “good to great”
spouting from the lips of just about every player I run across,
I’m assuming that nearly everyone at the poker table considers
himself or herself to be “…better than average.”
But
that can’t be. Average, by definition, places one
squarely in the midst of the pack, and if everyone were a
“good” player, the definition of average would simply be a
bit higher on some overall scale of poker skills than most
of us would be prone to place it. It’s an interesting
phenomenon, and one you won’t run across in many other
endeavours, particularly in competitions where the skills
are visible and on display for all to see.Try this if you don’t believe me. Pick
a tough line-up of poker players. Tournament champs, cash game players,
it doesn’t matter. Then ask any local amateur player ¾ perhaps he’s a guy who plays small limit games at his golf club or once
a week in the back room of the Elk’s Lodge ¾ how he’d fare against a tough line-up like that. “I can hold my own,” or
something similar, is probably what you’ll hear in response. But if
you’d ask that same guy about his expectations playing one-on-one
against a professional basketball player, or what his chances would be
in a round of golf against any touring professional, or how many rounds
he’d last with a professional boxer, he’ll probably offer a slim-to-none
assessment.
Even if you picked a game like chess,
where no particular physical skills are required, you’d probably get a
similar response. So why the disparity where poker is concerned? Maybe
part of the reason has to do with poker’s macho nature. After all, most
poker players are guys, and we’re supposed to be good at the game; it’s
one of the ways we define ourselves. But it doesn’t hold true with
chess. We’ve never talked ourselves into believing we are superstar
chess players, and haven’t vested the same chunk of ego into that game.
It is demeaning, we believe, to lose at poker. But if we were going
mano-a-mano against Kasparov, or anyone even close to his skill level,
we’d realize that we had no chance at all, and so there’d be no shame at
all in admitting it.But that’s only part of the
story. The other part comes from the iceberg analogy. You
know, only one-eighth of an iceberg is above the surface; the
remainder is below the water line. Poker is like that too. When
we watch good players, whether in a tournament or a cash game, we
only see a small portion of their skills at work. Good plays and
bonehead blunders alike are frequently obscured from view because
we seldom see our hero’s cards, or those of his opponent.
Moreover, many of the money winning and money-saving skills
demonstrated by superior players are neither as dramatic as a Kobe
Bryant slam-dunk, nor akin to a daring sacrifice that results in a
checkmate from a chess maestro. In chess, even if we can’t always
assess the viability of a move while it’s occurring, we have the
blessing of hindsight. Every move is recorded for posterity and
can be analyzed for years to come. So that grandmaster’s ploy,
which may have looked like the kind of blunder only a patzer
would make, might really be an innovation of major proportions.
But in poker we usually don’t see what’s going on, and there’s
generally no historical record to draw on.
But what if you could watch a terrific
poker player at work; what would you hope to see? In one situation he
might fold a hand like A-J under the gun. Two rounds later he might
raise with the same hand in the same position. What’s going on here; is
just guessing? Maybe. But maybe there’s more to his apparent whimsical
decision-making than meets the eye. After all, the mix of players at the
table might have changed. And even if the names and faces remain the
same, poker is always in flux. There’s a lot going on at the table that
we can never see, even if we had access to the cards being played ¾
and most of the time that’s a mystery to us too. This is poker’s “it
depends” quotient ¾ the seven-eights of the game that is difficult to discern from watching,
simply because much of it is obscured from our view. Even when it’s
not, the view from the table ¾ from the battle’s front lines ¾ is usually different than it appears from the rail.
So our amateur watches the pros and
doesn’t see much difference from what he witnesses in his home game. Oh
sure, the stakes may be higher, and he might notice that the games are
both tighter and more aggressive than his Tuesday night game back home,
but there are still pairs and straights and flushes, draws that never
materialize, and bluffs that work and those that don’t. And because so
much is hidden from view, our hometown hero has a hard time seeing the
relative differences in skill level, and as a consequence frequently
sees himself on a par with the best players in the world.
Something
like that’s just not going to happen when he’s watching Kobe Bryant take
off from the foul line and dunk the basketball, because our hero knows
he needs a trampoline and a stepladder just to reach the rim.
The truth of the matter is that most
players are average. Some are a little better, others a little worse.
But the vast majority of poker players are right there in that great,
gray middle ground. And you know what? When you are playing in a
casino, where the pot is raked or time is charged to sit in the game,
there’s always a bit less money coming out than going in. And those in
the middle ground will be, by definition, lifelong losers at poker.
It may not be a vast sum of money, and
it may be easily replaceable by income that’s earned elsewhere and used
to subsidize a player’s poker hobby. And at the end of the day, the
cost of playing poker for fun and recreation may well be a bargain
compared to other money draining hobbies, like boating or restoring
classic cars. Nevertheless, the majority of poker players ¾
particularly those who play in card casinos where there’s a cost of
doing business that must be overcome before one shows a profit ¾
will lose money. And even if the money doesn’t matter, the blows to the
ego that accompany it can hurt quite a bit.What can you do about it? You can
resolve to get better. Poker is a wonderful blend of skills, many of
which are difficult to come by, often elusive, and frequently hard to
grasp. Many have said that playing against the late Stu Ungar was like
playing with your cards face up and his face down ¾ he was that good at discerning his opponents hands. While you’re not
going to reach Ungar’s skill level merely through drill and repetition,
there are a raft of other skills that can be learned the way one learns
anything else ¾
by study and practice. And if you haven’t begun to learn them, it’s
high time you did. It’s the only way you will ever be able to lift
yourself above the vast middle ground that by definition is average.
And in poker, average equates to a money-losing player.
If you play hold’em,
it is really easy to learn most of the math you need simply
by memorizing the odds against making hands in certain
situations. Sure it’s nice to learn how to compute these
sorts of things, but if working out probabilities is not
your idea of fun, you needn’t worry about it. It’s already
been done, thank you very much, by others. Besides, in the
heat of the game, you scarcely have time, and certainly not
the availability of a pencil, paper, and pocket calculator,
to do these equations while trying to keep up with the game.
If you’ve flopped a flush draw, the odds against
completing your flush are 1.86-tp-1. How hard is that
to memorize? It’s about as tough as memorizing your
zip code, and that’s not tough at all. If you flopped
two pair and figure it will take a full house to win it for
you, the odds are 5-to-1 against that happening.
These are learnable by nothing more
complex than rote memorization. And if you want to become a better than
average player, you need to learn these basic relationships or else you
have absolutely no objective basis for deciding whether to continue
playing your hand, or whether you’d be better off folding and saving
yourself some money. This skill takes no mathematical ability at all.
All that’s required is the desire to ferret out these relationships, the
will to commit them to memory, and the curiosity to understand their
implications.
Mathematical skills aren’t the only
poker skills you can learn. But they tend to be a bugaboo for most
players, and many people seem to fear anything ¾ regardless of how rudimentary it might be ¾
that has to do with numbers. And the numerical relationships necessary
to play hold’em effectively are simple stuff. Look, it’s a lot
easier than memorizing basic blackjack strategy. Yet
many of you have done that. You didn’t calculate basic
blackjack strategies all by yourself. Someone else did
the hard work. We just have to learn the rules derived
from all those Monte Carlo simulations and apply them.
It’s the same with much of poker’s mathematical parameters.There are a lot of learnable skills in
addition to poker math. You can learn how to run a bluff, and how to
catch one. Which hands ought to be played from which position, given
the composition and texture of the game you’re in, is another requisite
skill, and it’s also easily learned. While there’s a lot of “it
depends” that goes into deciding whether to play your first two cards,
starting standards provide the benefit of the many theoreticians who
have proffered suggestions about which hands are playable from early,
middle, and late position. That you might have to deviate from that
“theoretical list” of hands is not important. Standards offer a point
of departure and you can tighten-up or loosen your requirements
depending on your interpretation of game structure. A play-or-fold
standard for starting hold’em hands is a stepping-off point. And if you
don’t have that you’re toast. You are flying blind,
playing by whim, and probably bleeding money as a result.
I’ve just touched on the kind of skills
you ought to have in your poker toolkit, and in future issues I’ll delve
more deeply into some of the specific techniques you can work on in
order to improve your game. And if the thought of being an average
player is depressing to you, and you feel that there are miles and miles
to go before you reach the superstar level, you can take comfort in
this. One of the grand and wondrous things about poker is that
superstar abilities are not required in order to make money at the
game. All that’s needed is for you to be somewhat better than your
opponents ¾ good enough, actually, to overcome their skills and the cost of playing
the game ¾ and you can certainly learn to do that, can’t you?
Download and play Littlewoods Casino Poker
