08-15-05, LearnTexasHoldem:
Taking Your Game To The Next Level
Top 3 Beginner Rooms
I have this burning question....... what do I need to do to take my game from the intermediate level to the pro level.
Or better yet, what skills / knowledge / experience does a poker player have to have inorder to be or become a Pro.
See my ultimate goal is to win the WSOP or WPT or at least make it to the final table but i just cant seem to find a way to do it. I believe that i need a mentor to guide me or someone to give me a step by step method to help me achieve my goal.
Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Ray. R.
Answer: This is a really good question. I'm just going to answer it in the format of some rambling thoughts.
Ok, first off, if the niche you choose in poker is strictly tourney play, you've chosen one of the hardest paths. Tournament poker is feast or famine. I would suggest you play mainly cash games and then mix in some tournament play as time and your bankroll permit. (I'm guessing if you play 15 hours/day you play cash games, online most likely.) I think being realistic is helpful because it keeps you motivated instead of discouraged.
Sure you can win a WPT event, but to do that a lot of variables have to be perfect. While you are waiting for your day in the spot light, you'll still have a life style to pay for. Play cash games and build. Get a house, good credit, savings, all that.
If you are asking me what the next step is, I can assume that you are stuck at one limit and if you try to move up you lose. The next step is always moving up in limits, until you reach your limit -- either by geography or skill or just because you are content. There are struggles at each step when you evolve as a player. The first hurdle is to figure out just how to play the game. Next in low limit holdem, you apply what you've read in books to win. By just playing better cards and folding more than your opponents you win. But as you keep moving up, this alone isn't enough.
Your opposition isn't just giving their money away anymore and it is likely that a good portion of the players are just as knowledgeable as you are. I had a very difficult time with this for a while. I kind of shot myself in the foot by giving too much weight to what I read. I assumed that when I lost it was because I was unlucky and when I won, it was what should happen. My brother showed me a paper over the weekend about financial behavior; different terms and what they meant. He wanted to know if any applied to poker. There were quite a few actually.
The one that stuck out the most to me, the term I've forgotten, is that we often disregard stuff that doesn't support our opinion and focus on stuff that does. This in poker is what I just mentioned when you lose you attribute it to unluckiness and when you win you think you did something right. That's not conducive of progressing as a player. Be critical of your play and try your hardest not to get an ego. If you aren't winning, unluckiness only can account for so much. Be honest with yourself and you'll keep improving.
Blind play: Holdem is all about blinds. Blinds are what makes the game move. These forced bets seem negligible at lower limits. As you move up to middle and upper limits, the fight now is over the blind money. You need to understand what this means at a fundamental level for your strategy in both defending and attacking. One thread through all of these tips will be to get down deeper. Understand what holdem is really all about, the "whys?" The lowest form of learning is memorizing something and regurgitating it. The highest form of learning is internalizing the information such that you can apply it to a new situation -- application. In poker each table and hand is a situation you have never been in before and you are constantly applying what you've learned (or haven't learned).
Value of hands: The difference between an intermediate player and the pro is that the pro can win pots that the other player can't. The intermediate player's best game is one that is very mechanical and predictable; this offers no opposition against the expert. One key to moving up in class is understanding the value of a hand based on how many players are in the pot, both preflop and post flop. By understanding how hands play, the expert can manipulate the pot in ways that benefit him/her. An example might be 99 in limit holdem.
That hand can be played in two ways, either trying to hit a set or by holding up on its own. How you play the hand preflop and your position relative to the other players (if they have played yet or not) directly affects your moves. You might limp in behind a few other players, hoping to hit a set, or you might raise if just one player has limped in, hoping to isolate him and cut off any other players from calling. One major tip I can give you is to play more shorthanded poker. You can do it at any site. Go on and put in a bunch of hours playing three and four handed. What this does is forces you to play more cards which gives you a deeper understanding of the value of a hand relative to how many players are opposing.
Being dynamic: I'm sure you have heard the term "switching gears." What does that mean exactly though? Switching gears refers to changing how aggressive/passive or loose/tight you are playing. Like I mentioned above, the intermediate player has just one gear. That gear is to play tight poker and catch other people with weak hands. One gear works fine for low limit play, but as you progress to middle limit and above, you'll need to have more than one gear. You switch gears based on your opponents play.
Let me give you an example. In about an hour from now, I'm going to play. The first thing I do when I sit down at a table is to watch the other player's play. What I'm looking for is how many hands they play, what hands they are, and how they play them. Based on that information, I'll formulate a strategy to beat them. If I see someone constantly raising, I'll consider the raise preflop meaningless and defend my blind more as well as play more hands preflop against their raise (possibly reraising with many hands I wouldn't normally). On the other hand if I see that a player is very tight and raises, I'll let go of most of my blinds, as well as avoiding them with potentially weaker hands. On the flip side, I might be more aggressive against them when they are in the blinds.
Also, if I see that there are a couple of very loose players at the table, hands that I might not raise with or play, now become playable and I'll get involved more. I do this because I can outplay them postflop and the implied odds they give me are high. I can invest a little preflop and then make it up postflop. If the game is tough and aggressive, I'll also need to be more aggressive when in position. Position really isn't that much of a factor at low limit but at upper limits it can be huge.
I'll avoid hands that won't do well in heads up confrontations like suited connectors and place more weight on little pocket pairs. I'll consider betting with position to be a key way of winning. Pace is important in tough games. You push some, then back off and wait for some good hands, push some, and back off. This makes it very hard for anyone to play well against you. I will also consciously switch up how I'm playing my good hands to confuse my opponents into making mistakes by calling. I will also throw in some hands that I wouldn't normally play, just to keep them guessing.
Also, understanding how the other player's perceive your play helps you manipulate them more. An example might be if they saw me previously raising a hand that was odd, most likely they'll call me more on the next one so I'll show them a good hand next. By no means am I going to be playing horrible cards, just mixing it up -- 90% regular solid hands, the rest mixers. I would consider a mixing hand something like 66 raising in early position -- solid hand but bad position, hence the "mixing." The key question you need to ask yourself is, "how can I beat these players and why?"
What my game consists of is playing, what I calculate to be, the right hands at the right times. While it is always right to play AA preflop, it isn't always right to play KJ or KTs. Ideally, I would like to sit there and wait for hands that I knew I had an edge in, but in most tougher games I can't do that. I'll be faced with decisions where I have to just make educated guesses based on previous information. This is a trait that you need to pick up.
You need to be able to pick up that K9s every now and then and play it well, while in another game, another session, another day, folding it like it had the plague. What I'm getting at here is context. To be able to put hands and play into a context allows you to be more dynamic and play less mechanically. (Mechanically is going by the book where you would think, "an early raise, I shouldn't play X hand against him.")
Objective thinking: What you are going to be doing when you play bigger limits or against better players is to be involved in more tricky situations. The problem is that we have a tendency to misplay marginal situations more when we get emotional. It is easy to play AA anytime, but how will you play your QTs when you flop a queen against a tight player who suggests he has you beat. Or how will you play your 99 against a J-8-4 flop with one opponent.
Hands like these, which there will be plenty of, require you to think objectively, not about how much you are up or down that day, if you haven't won a hand in a while, etc. What of the main reasons a pro is a pro is because even if they are kicked in the teeth all day by the poker gods, they still can make good decisions. This is very hard, but necessary for long term results.
Hope this helps some. The key to anything is to understand it completely. Get down to the nuts and bolts of holdem and you'll be a force.
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