When we all started with poker, there were so many ways to play, and we didn’t even know if it was good or bad. It also often worked because it was so unorthodox, and other players at the table didn’t know how exactly to react or had a pattern to read what we were doing.
But in the long run, unfortunately, unpredictability just isn’t enough to survive in the poker world, especially as today players can gather data on you if you are playing online, and realize you are doing crazy stuff, and call you down more in spots.
Importance of Data in Poker
Most amateur poker players don’t realize that poker is a game of data. This is one of the main reasons why most amateurs end up losing money in the long term, and they don’t realize what they are doing wrong.
For example, if you don’t have your frequencies right in crucial spots, you will just be leaking money without even knowing. To have correct BB defend frequencies, you will need to know the exact frequency for each hand. As some hands will both call and raise against opens, you will need to do it correctly, and you will need a random number generator tool + knowledge not to get exploited.
There are cases where you don’t need to randomize, as there will be players who can be counter-exploited. Most players don’t defend against 3-bets enough with 4-bet, but instead, they just call a lot. This is a big mistake as it encourages their opponent to 3-bet them relentlessly, especially when they are out of position.
Just by doing that, they will print money, as it is hard to realize your equity playing out of position with a capped range against an aggressive opponent who has an uncapped range. If you don’t have data, you can’t know if you are being exploited; you can just make speculative assumptions, which will lead you to being wrong most of the time.
Understanding the Big Picture
This is really unnatural for humans in general, and only a few have the talent to understand it right away, but there are a few ways to bypass the lack of this understanding.
First way would be to blindly trust somebody who is achieved poker player and just keep grinding and working on your game without having mental issues when you are in downswings and listening to your friend or a coach that it will balance out if you perform. This is also difficult for most people; blindly trusting somebody is hard, especially if you don’t know them well enough, and it’s natural that people learn best by their own experience.
This is where we come to second way of understanding the big picture, if you go trough enough downswings, and you beat them, catch another upswing, and repeat the process you will realize that if you were beating the games that your chart has been moving up and to the right, meaning you were making money in long there despite thing didn’t seem great in certain times.
Poker is like life; there will be ups and downs, and all we have to do is just focus on surviving the negative periods while doing everything we can to make our best decisions. In sports psychology, there is a concept that in a competition, you should try to beat other competitors, as it may affect your optimal performance.
All you have to do is focus and do everything you can to give your best performance, and if that was enough to win, then great, and if not, there is nothing you could have done more. In general, that kind of mental approach will give the best results for athletes, and I’m convinced that it works in poker and in life.
Taking Things Seriously
Amateur players will often try to cut corners and be lazy with the details or fail to do “homework”. When people are starting with poker, they just want to play all the time, as poker is a new, exciting thing to them.
This is a crucial period where they should be building good fundamentals (drills, study, review..) that they are going to use during their whole poker career. We have a poker player who watches movies on the side while playing poker, listens to loud distracting music, texts friends, drinks, smokes, etc..
All of these are distractions that can cost you your win rate. In cash games, in most environments, rake is really high, and it’s hard to have a high winrate unless you are an absolute crusher, but distractions can keep you in breakeven player status instead of a 2bb/100 winner. This is a huge difference, as 2bb/100 winrate + a good rakeback deal can give you a good living in most countries if you are playing at least NL50 and putting enough volume.
Most players don’t understand that missing a c-bet in a big 4-bet spot, or missing to see that our opponent in the BB is an absolute nit and doesn’t defend his big blind closely enough, and similar kinds of mistakes caused by distractions could be the difference between a breakeven player and a 2bb/100 winner.
Another thing is that having a higher winrate will reduce the length and the amount of downswings you will have. Dowswings will also impact players’ mental game and additionally lower their winrate and volume. Tilting often makes players make bad decisions, and punting, and this can also make players reluctant to play enough volume.
Conclusion
Approaching poker like an elite athlete would approach a sport is the only way to become successful in poker and achieve what you wanted when you started playing poker. Usually, poker results follow the lifestyle the poker player has and the effort he puts into his career.
Poker is a game, and some people are just taking it lightly, but if you think of poker as an athlete’s career, this might be a day and night difference in your overall results.
If you want to learn more poker strategy, you can read our article about 10 steps Doug Polk recommends for starting poker players.
