1st Sign: You stopped playing hands just to end boredom A constant problem for amateurs is that they play differently when they are bored than when they have just finished playing. Almost all low-limit players have the boredom factor. In live poker, hands come slowly and gradually, and it is not common to get 20 or 30 bad hands in a row before the flop. This can mean 1 hour or 1 and a half hours without action. After giving up hand after hand, and after realizing that they could have spent that 1 hour doing something better, this type of player starts to get anxious. They start looking for reasons to play a hand, like "They think I'm conservative, so this is a good opportunity to bet", or "Sometimes it is necessary to force the action", or "You can't wait for the nuts" and so on. None of the above phrases have any logical reasons for playing a hand. At the moment it is no longer about profit, but boredom. Random cards are, of course, random, and if you take a long, bad straight, this is how it works.
2nd Sign: Do you find good reasons to stay in post-flop hands that you missed This is an important one. There are players who remain in many hands after missing the flop. They think that by paying more bets the saving card will be able to come and win the pot for them. Sometimes it works, but usually you end up losing money. However, that is not what I am talking about here.
What I mean is to be in the hands for the right reasons. Good poker players win more pots than average players, and the way they do it is by staying in the pot after the flop and finding ways to win them. However, this requires some judgment, as normally, in these situations, giving up will be the best choice. This way, you can know that you are getting better when you start to clearly see the types of hands you should stay in and in which you should fold.
3rd Sign: You have a clear idea of the reasons behind the size of your poker bets Bet size is a very important tool in No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker to help us lose less and win more. Almost every bet or raise you make, especially on the turn and the river, requires some consideration for size. When you're not so good at the game, those decisions will seem confusing. “Should I bet high? Low? Maybe something in between? ”. Right now, your sense of understanding still offers you little sense of direction in that direction. When you start to realize that you are fully aware of why you are making such bets the size you are making, you can know that you are improving. This is especially true if you are able to abandon fear as an integral part of your decision-making process (most amateur players will bet small in certain situations just for the fear of losing chips, this is an extremely weak and exploitable trend, and also quite ordinary). So, if you realize that you are placing bets of different sizes on the turn and on the river, and that you are fully aware of the process that led you to choose those sizes and not those, you will definitely be improving.
4th Sign: You are more focused on playing your hands well than making money This leads to another trap that catches many amateur players. If they lose a big hand, they will already try to think of ways they could have played better.
Well, so far this is the process common to all poker players, good or bad. However, weaker players tend to focus on the wrong thing. They ask themselves, "How could I have prevented this great loss" or "What could I have done differently to prevent you from losing all that money?" Invariably they decide that they should have folded at some point in the hand, or just checked. When you are focused on figuring out how to not lose money, you tend to decide that you shouldn't put your money at risk. This leads us to conclude that you should have played your hand more passively than you did, and this conclusion is usually not the most correct one. Good players know that sometimes losing a lot is the result of playing a hand well. This is true not only for coolers that you "can't escape", but also for other hands, such as when you lose everything on an unsuccessful bluff or are surprised by a monster hand trying to catch a bluff. You can be sure that you will be improving when you revisit those hands that have caused you losses, and instead of assuming that putting money at risk was the problem, you ignore the results and try to figure out the best way to play the hand next time. situation appears.
:deal::deal::deal: