Five Mistakes: Live Poker Cash Games

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Five Mistakes is an article series where we highlight simple leaks in various aspects of the typical poker player’s life that are (usually) easy to correct but sometimes tough to notice. In this installment, we cover live cash games.

Live poker is becoming an increasingly popular option for poker players. Once shunned by the internet-poker set, live poker’s current popularity is largely attributable to the increasing toughness of online games and the relative softness (and deepness) of the live poker alternative.

If you’re newer to live, or even if you’ve got a good amount of experience, here are five mistakes that you’re likely to be making.

IGNORING GAME SELECTION
Game selection is more important live than online, given that you can only play one table at a time, but live players often sit down in a game and glue themselves to that chair regardless of the quality of the game.

That’s a huge leak, and it’s easily corrected. Play an orbit at your table and if you don’t see an opportunity, ask the floor for a table change or consider getting on the list for a different game entirely. In live poker, the table next to you can be an insanely more profitable opportunity than your current table, so it’s worth the effort.

PLAYING TOO MANY HANDS
This one’s a huge leak for a ton of players, and it’s no secret why. Live poker can be terrifically boring. You average about 30 hands per hour playing live, so over the course of a long session – let’s say 10 hours – you’ll see 300 hands. If you’re playing a 20% VPIP, that means you’ll likely see somewhere between 60-80 flops over the course of 10 hours.

Yawn, right? Well, opening up, especially if you just call more instead of raising more, is possibly more exciting in the moment, but a real drag at the end of the session when you lose a bit or break even and realize that just by cutting out a couple of hands an hour, you could have made a profit.

In a 2-5 game, if you folded to a preflop raise with a marginal hand just once an hour (think of all the times you’ve called 69o from the SB just because there was a raise and four callers in front) and ditch one hand in EP that you should be folding anyway (think KJ), that’s $25 or so an hour, or easily a couple hundred bucks in a typical session.

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