8 Poker Lessons
Nick has published an article series that I wrote, called 8 Poker Lessons, that instead of discussing strategy, focuses on how to become a better poker player. It’s aimed at people who want to take the game seriously. If you have a look, don’t forget to let me know if you have any comments; fredrik.paulsson at gmail com.
The outline of the series is this:
Chapter 1: Beating Poker Takes Time
Learning how to beat poker takes time - a lot of time. In fact, likely more time than you can imagine. Being a fast learner is imperative, but even if you are you still will need plenty of time to soak up all the information you can in order to move forward. There are natural talents (Stu Ungar comes to mind), but they are very few and far between, and the likelyhood of you being one of them is diminishingly small. The rest of us - myself included - have to work hard to reach a real understanding of how to play.
Now, the exact numbers here aren’t important, but I want to give you an idea about the scale of what I’m talking about in terms of experience and understanding:
- Playing a hundred thousand hands.
- Reading ~3000 pages of poker books, some of them several times and a few of them many times.
- Spending about an hour for every three hours played analyzing the way you played certain hands.
Almost certainly, there will be someone reading this article who will think “100k hands is nowhere near enough!” and this person is probably correct. My point is that if you think 100k hands sounds like a lot, you have to brace yourself for the fact that it will likely take even more - and probably a lot more.
Even now that I read that myself, I’m thinking “100k hands is nowhere near enough,” so I guess that particular prophecy became ironically true.
A milestone, a term simply borrowed from long distance running, is a point in progress where you can say to yourself “now I’ve come THIS far.” If your goal is to build a bankroll of $10,000, for instance, you could have milestones every $500. It wouldn’t make much sense to make each dollar a milestone, because reaching a milestone should be a time for a small celebration of some kind. Instead of focusing on the goal - which may be months or even years away - carefully spaced milestones present you with something that is attainable within the not-so-distant future. It’s easier to work towards a goal that will be reached soon. This is a psychological fact for most people; “instant gratification,” getting our rewards quickly, is a powerful motivator. If we were computers, setting milestones would be useless. But people need a pat on the shoulder every now and then, even if it’s our own hand that’s patting us.
And this brings us to a hugely important factor in setting goals: They should be measurable! If any of you work in larger corporations or have taken courses on the topic, you should be familiar with the idea. Setting goals that cannot be measured in numbers is unwise. I was originally going to say “useless,” but on second thought I disagreed with myself. All goals serve some purpose, but it’s the measurable ones that we can use to our advantage. Non-measurable goals I’d like to call “ambitions,” which can be useful as well, but not act as milestones.
Using measurable goals is something I learned in my “real” job. Ambitions are good and all, but goals can’t be hazy. Know where you want to be; know how to find out when you’re there.
Furthermore, we must realize that studying doesn’t end at some point; we don’t graduate. The money that we make in this game come from the mistakes of others and our job is to make fewer mistakes than our opponents - or more specifically, less costly ones - which is how we show a profit. Competition at its finest. But our opponents aren’t dumb - well, not all of them at least, and the dumb ones become fewer and more far between as we move up in limits - and they learn more about the game for every day that passes, too. In order to keep our win-rate where we want it to be, or even keep winning at all, we need to stay ahead of the curve. We need to know more about the game than they do and we need to work harder than they do so that we can keep outsmarting them. For this reason, there’s no end in sight, no light in the tunnel, no day when our job of studying is done. Learning is a continuous process in poker.
‘Nuff said.
But this lesson is about taking into account that building a bankroll is, or can be, a slow and tedious process as well. Some people take a shot and win a (relative to their bankroll) huge amount of money in a tournament which allows them to move up very quickly. Many more people take shots and lose their stake; hopefully they realized that this was the more likely outcome. Some other people refuse to take shots and simply grind their way up, moving up in the ranks no sooner than their bankroll is good for it. I’m one of those people, although I wouldn’t presume to say that it’s the only - or even necessarily the best - way to work one’s way up. Different things work for different people.
What’s clear to me, however, is that unless you’re an exceptional player who just happens to be a bit short on money right now, the average time it will take you to reach higher limits will be about the same regardless of if you take shots or grind yourself up. If you know that you’re a lot more skilled than the opposition, playing higher games than you’re technically bankrolled for is alright, and so you may be able to save yourself some time by taking shots.
But if you move along the usual path of progression, learning as you go and therefore ensuring that you’re ahead of the curve already before moving up (and thus keeping a solid win-rate), I have some interesting numbers to show you:
Fast-track to riches, my ass. Grrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiind!
In school and in the office, someone is - generally speaking - watching over your shoulder and making sure you’re doing what you should be doing. You can get away with slacking when they’re not looking, but you still have to report to someone at the end of the day, or the week, or the semester. For most, this is a strongly contributing factor in doing what you’re actually supposed to be doing. But this factor is non-existant in poker: You won’t have anyone to report to, there’s no one who expects or requires that you do anything. You are, for better and - in this case - for worse, your own boss. When the only one you have to answer to is yourself, it takes a fair portion of discipline to actually do what you set out to do.
One of many reasons I’m not playing poker professionally.
I’ve kept repeating that setting goals is an important way to motivate yourself to work hard, but there’s no motivator as powerful as having fun.
You should want to keep track of your bankroll, you should enjoy studying and you should have fun while playing. Why would you bother doing this, otherwise? If you’re a discplined and intelligent enough person to be successful at poker, you’re very likely to be able to make more money working for a company from 9-5, because people like you are highly sought after in the job market. Playing poker in order to make money is only worth it if you enjoy it, because it takes extreme talent to make it to the highest echelons where the big money is at.
How is this not obvious to everyone? Well, anyway.
But reading, while practically a necessity to become a good player, is only a small part of how you’ll spend your time with poker. Your long hours will be spent at the table, playing hand after hand after hand. The more you learn here, the better, that goes without saying. But how do you maximize your learning while playing? Again, there are many things you can do and ultimately you’ll have to figure out what works for you. But here are a couple of pointers:
The entire idea behind this series is to speed up the time it takes to reach poker proficiency. Using our precious time wisely is a big step, and learning the most we can while playing is huge.
No one really knows how they’ll react to losing half of their bankroll playing solid poker against poor players until it happens to them, I’m guessing. What happened to me was, and I think this is pretty typical, that I started questioning whether or not I was a winning player at all, if I had just had luck so far, or perhaps if I had suddenly become worse at poker. I got sick of the game for awhile, hovering with the mouse pointer over the PokerStars icon and then deciding to watch TV for awhile because I didn’t want to lose even more. Bad beat, after bad beat, set of aces cracked by a runner-runner flush, big pots lost because no one ever folds, etc. I’ve since been through a couple of more downswings, and I know I’ll keep running into them. They’re inevitable. Knowing that they’re inevitable is a big step. Understanding why they’re inevitable means you’ve come a long way. Accepting them for what they are - and thereby accepting poker for what it is - means that you’ve reached the point you need to be at.
See you there!
