Don’t get great at poker, just get good

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If you’re an avid consumer of sports media, you’ll have noticed that over the last year or so there’s been a bit of a growing backlash against sport giant ESPN for what some have awkwardly coined the “highlitization” of sports – in short, that the cable giants focus on highlights has been one of the major factors that have moved sports toward an ethic of individual performance being valued over fundamental team play – the home run over the infield single, the slam dunk over good ball movement and so on.

I think there’s a similar phenomenon happening in poker – TV focus on spectacular bluffs, look-into-your-soul level reads and fantastic lay downs is training a generation of players to think the definition of a good player is one who can perform the extraordinary.

On some level where players are already masters of most fundamental skills, jaw-dropping plays are no doubt the yardstick that measure the difference from talented to transcendent. For the rest of us, however, the quest to pull off jaw-dropping plays can be more of a hindrance than anything else, as it takes energy and focus away from a more basic task – becoming a fundamentally better poker player. It’s my belief that 95% of players, myself included, would do a lot better if they targeted simple leaks in their game and corrected those rather than expending energy trying to pull off the trickiest plays known to poker-kind.

To that end, I propose a simple plan for those looking to improve as poker players. Don’t worry about developing your strengths so much as plugging your weaknesses. Try a simple experiment over the next month and see if it doesn’t produce some tangible, positive results for your game and your bankroll.

1) Play for a solid week or so and build a list of the mistakes you find yourself making most often. You want a general list, e.g. “calling on the river when I know I’m beat.” Get the hand histories for the hands where you made the mistakes and keep them in a folder where you can get them later. Remember, mistakes come not only from you making bad decisions and being on the losing end of a hand, but also from not maximizing your win when you’re on the winning side of a hand. If you’re having a hard time finding the mistakes, buy a poker friend lunch and have them watch you for an hour or two.

2) Note the frequency and the cost of each mistake. Ok, this is a bit tricky, since each play exists within a larger session, and sometimes your mistakes can actually be useful to wins later in the session [and sometimes the mistakes will produce a win themselves], but try to lock down a general number for how much each class of mistakes is costing you. A rough estimate will do – the point is to assign some kind of concrete number to your mistakes, as they’re a whole lot easier to correct when you start to draw a real connection between your play and your bankroll. After a week or so of play, go over your list and try to narrow it down to the top 3 or 4 mistakes, based on both the frequency of the mistake and the cost of the mistake. Don’t delete the other mistakes – you can use that list later, but for now we just want to focus on 3 or 4. Fact of the matter is, trying to improve your entire game all at once is a counterproductive strategy – it’s a lot more efficient to zero in on a few manageable components and start from there.

3) Weigh these 3 or 4 mistakes against their potential benefits. Be realistic in your assessment. Yes, calling loose preflop in NL is a positive leak in the sense that it gives you a loose image and makes it harder for players to put you on hands, but is that really outweighing the cost? Go back over the hand histories associated with these mistakes and draw up a simple list of what you could’ve done differently.

4) Play for the next two weeks with a SOLID commitment to avoiding these mistakes entirely. We’re going to have you go to the other extreme of your style for a bit. It will be a little frustrating, but it’s the only way to really help you find the correct level of utilization for marginal plays. For example, if one of your problems is that you bluff too much, not bluffing for 2 weeks will give you a clear picture of how bluffing fits into your game, image, and EV. It will also confuse the hell out of opponents who have taken good notes.

Hopefully after those two weeks, you’ll be able to more confidently and accurately reinsert marginal plays into your overall game, having a better understanding of the actual balance between the cost and reward. If you repeat this process every three months or so, you’ll be on your way to dramatically improving your game within a year. True, you might not be pulling off million dollar bluffs on ESPN, but chances are you’ll be watching those bluffs on a nice TV from a very comfortable chair or couch.

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