Basic thoughts - to be accepted and not debated
There are some facts in poker that should be acknowledged by everyone considering to play poker seriously. These are things that can raise questions, as your 'experience' might seem to prove the opposite, but you need to be very careful with this, as it can lead you to an outright wrong assumption without enough experience.
Poker Rooms Never Cheat
One of the basic mantras of losing players is this: "There must be something wrong with the software, as I keep losing all-ins where I am the 90% favorite." Well, if the money is already in the middle and your opponent is not drawing dead, there is a chance (greater than 0) that they will take down the pot in the end. If you are a 90% favorite, it doesn't mean you have to win the pot just because you have an advantage. This is not soccer, where it is a fact that the team leading by 3 in 90th minute will eventually win the match.
If you think that poker rooms cheat, there is no point in continuing reading this series. And if they do cheat, there is no point in playing, so it really is a waste of time if you continue reading. Spend your money on movie tickets or charity if you are concerned that the game is corrupt.
The best starting hand is AA
One of the biggest faulty assumptions in poker is this: "With AA, you either win small or lose big."
If anyone using a poker analysis tool (we will later talk about these in detail) looks up in the database which hand they won the most with, it will surely be AA, leading before KK by far, not to mention the other hands (given that you have enough data). Of course, it hurts when we lose big with AA, but as you gain more and more experience, you will get better at recognizing these situations, and be able to make it through without having to lose big. You will see when you are beaten and and fold in time, without risking huge amounts of money.
I have 100% responsibility
Our ego likes to work this way: if we win big, it was becaue we are so awesome that we outwitted everybody and if we lose, it happened because the nasty fishes got lucky on us.
You should accept this: you are 100% responsible for your gameplay and your development in poker. Do not complain about your bad luck when in a downswing. A downswing is a perfect opportunity to analyse you gameplay, learn and talk over the questionable hands with your poker friends.
A bit of psychology
This is a typical forum post and blog entry: "I get outdrawn 8 times out of 10, I am 30BI under EV after 300K hands."
If you got outdrawn 8 times out of 10, and during 300K hands, you would be 300BIs under EV, and not 30. The reason for this kind of thinking is rather psychological: when you get outdrawn. it burns deeper into your brain. If you win, you think of it as self-explanatory.
This is how our ego works. The process is called the reduction of cognitive dissonance, which is a natural reaction, which helps us get through the gap between the imagined and the actual reality. I am not a psychology expert, so this might not be the most typical case, but this is the main point of it all.
A very important thing to understand: there are no problems with this, this is a natural reaction, which has developed in humans through the course of evolution, and this protects us from becoming schyzophrenic every time our predictions get proven wrong.
What could be the solution to this problem then? Well, the first step is to acknowledge the simple fact that if you are the 90% favorite in a situation, you will not always win, only in 90% of the cases. This means, that your opponent always has a chance to win, no matter how small that is. It is also a common occurence that you lose many of these in a row, even though you were a big favorite.
If you can settle this in your head and it becomes part of your thinking, this will be the reality drawn by your ego, so there will be no need to manufacture conceptions to decrease frustration, as you will not feel frustrated at all. I know from personal experience that this state of mind is very hard to reach, but not at all impossible. Once you reach it, however, you will get much less frustrated when playing poker and you will also be less prone to tilt.
And with all this, you will create better circumstances for your own improvement.
Try out all the game types and find the one that suits you best
If you are just starting to get familiar with poker, my recommendation is to try out as many game types as you can, including cash games, sit&gos and multi table tournaments (MTTs). Through time, you will recognize the ones that suit you best. This is very important, because if you don't feel like playing, but you still want to make some money, you will almost surely fail.
If you have settled by a certain game type, devote yourself to it and read literature considering that specific game type. When in a downswing, do not start looking for another game type, as this jumping to and fro does not lead anywhere.
It takes time to master the winning strategy and gain enough experience. If you switch game types everytime you are in a downswing, you will never learn how to treat them. And without that, you will never become a winning player. I am not telling you to play only one game all the time, feel free to try out everything, but your main game that you play every day should remain the same throughout.
This is also important because this way the reviews on your gameplay and your results will be objective. In statistically measuring something, the main principle of testing is that we should only change one parameter to be able to draw conclusions concerning the outcome of the events. If more than one thing changes we won't be able to determine what caused the change and in what amount.
In poker, there are quite many quandary factors (your actual opponents, the cards you receive, your state of concentration etc.). Your pace of improvement adds up to this, which means that your gameplay changes at a probably quite fast rate. If you top this with jumping from one game type to another, you will lose all the chances to receive objective reviews of your gameplay.
I will try to make choosing a game type a bit easier with a few tips now. For beginners, I would definitely recommend cash games in order to gain experience and build a bankroll. In the beginning, it is very important to decrease variance (the fluctuation of your bankroll) to minimal, and enjoy the results of your development at a fast rate. MTTs, where our real winrate only comes to surface after thousands of tournaments, are bad for a start.
Improvement cannot be followed month by month. If someone playing tournaments gets lucky in the beginning and has a winning series after having read 1 or 2 poker books, it can lead to the $500 or even bigger buy-in tournaments. In the meantime, it is possible, that this player would be a losing one at the micro limit cash game tables. This trap should be sidestepped.
I consider it very important, that you learn the stabile winning strategy for 100bb deep cash games. If you don't play CG, you will very rarely face complex situations where you have to make a borderline decision on the river with a huge pot in the middle.
In MTTs, you are mostly a 100bb deep only in the beginning, where you have to play a very tight game, which means that you will not participate in the hands most of the time. At this phase you most probably would not risk your whole stack in a questionable situation, while in Cash Games, you would, as you are able to reload your chips anytime.
For the beginners, I would recommend to start with full ring (9-player) cash games, because this is the game type that provides the smallest variance and this is where you can easily master the most important feature, namely patience. You have nothing else to do in micro limit cash games, than to look at a tight starting hands chart, wait for the playable hands according to that table, and win the money from the fishes. This is almost too easy at micro stakes (NL2, NL5). If you cannot win at these stakes, you are definitely doing something wrong.
If a player has already played around 150,000-200,000 hands, and is a stable winner at at least six tables at a time, it is time to move on to short-handed (6-player) tables. Of course it is not a must, but if somebody would like to improve faster, and win more, it is definitely worth making the shift. In SH games, you will face borderline decisions much more often, and you will need much better postflop gameplay. As you will participate in more hands, you can win more, but it also means that you will face grater variance, so the correct bankroll management is even more inevitable at SH than at FR.
The series will soon continue with the fourth part.
