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PSO Sample Lesson 2 - Lou Krieger
Type: Article
Level: Basic
Subject: Strategy
Essential Strategic Considerations
Basic strategic knowledge is critical for any poker player. If you have no basis for making decisions about whether to call, fold, raise, or reraise, then you might just as well play the lottery. Sure, you'll win occasionally, but you'll exercise no control over your destiny as a card player.
Win money, not pots
The objective of poker is to win money, not the most pots. And that means tempering enthusiasm with realism by being selective about the hands you play. If your goal was to win the most pots, that's easy. Just play every hand and call every bet and raise until the bitter end. You'd win every pot you possibly could. But you'd lose a ton of money in the process. The very best players play relatively few hands, but when they do enter a pot they are usually aggressive, and out to maximize the amount they win when the odds favor them.
This is the essence of poker. While anyone can win in the short run, in the long haul — when the cards even out — the better players will win more money with their good hands, and lose less with weak hands than their adversaries.
Know your opponents
Some of your opponents will always call "...to keep you honest." Others are susceptible to a well-timed bluff. Winning poker players are always adept at learning the playing styles of their opponents. There's no mystery to this. The key is to keep your head in the game, particularly when you are not involved in a hand. That's the time to study your opponents. Observe their betting patterns. See for yourself whether they are aggressive or passive, whether they are "calling stations, or tight players, who will not engage the battle without a lot of ammunition.
When hands are turned over at the showdown, notice what your opponents are holding, and compare it with their betting patterns earlier in the hand. It is possible to characterize many of your opponents within the first 15 minutes — and certainly within the first hour — of sitting down in a game.
Strategy and situational dependency
Poker strategy is situationally dependent. Skilled players realize they need to be aware of the big picture while simultaneously paying attention to small details. Understanding strategic concepts is only part of the battle. How, and under what circumstances to apply them is equally important. If you are able to do this, you will find that you have become a better player and a more creative one too.
Preparing to win
Success demands preparation. Knowledge, plus preparation and experience, along with whatever innate talent one may have, equals know-how, and that's what it takes. If you have that knowledge and you're losing, or you're just not winning as much and as often as you should, here are some habits and beliefs you might want to consider changing.
Why some things are important in poker and others aren't
Imagine that Poker School Online could teach you a terrific tactical ploy that would require some real study and practice to perfect - but once learned, could be used to earn an extra bet from an opponent. What if we also guaranteed this ploy to be absolutely foolproof: it would work perfectly every time you used it. Have we peaked your interest?
But what if this tactic works only in very special circumstances that occur about once a year. Do you still want to invest the time required to learn it? Probably not. While your ability to execute this particularly slick maneuver might brand you as a tough player in the eyes of your opponents, the fact that you might use it only once a year renders it meaningless. In the course of a year's worth of playing, one extra bet doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It doesn't even amount to a can of beans.
Frequent decisions matter more
Things that occur all the time are important. Even when the amount of money attributed to a wrong decision is small, it will eventually add up to a tidy sum if that error is made frequently. Always defending your small blind in hold'em, for example, is a good example. You're faced with determining whether to defend your small blind every nine or ten hands - and that's frequent. If you always defend it, you are investing part of a bet on those occasions when it is wrong to do so. At the end of a year, those mistakes add up.
Costly decisions matter too
Decisions that cost a significant amount of money when they occur, even if they don't happen too often, are also important. If you can't decide whether to call or fold once all the cards are out and your opponent bets into a fairly large pot, that's an important decision. If you make a mistake by calling when you should have folded and your opponent wins the pot - that's an error, but not a critical one. It cost only one bet. But if you fold the winning hand, that's a critical error, since the cost of that error was the entire pot.
Now we're certainly not advising you to call each and every time someone bets on the river and you're unsure about whether you have the best hand, but deciding to call instead of fold doesn't have to be correct too often to render it the mistake of choice. If the cost of a mistaken fold is ten times the price of a mistaken call, you only have to be correct slightly more than ten percent of the time to make calling worthwhile.
So do decisions that influence subsequent actions
Choices can also be important because of their position on the decision tree. Those that are first in a long sequence of subsequent choices are always important, since subsequent choices are usually predicated on your initial selection. Make an incorrect move up front and you run the risk of rendering each subsequent decision incorrect, regardless of whatever else you might do. That's why the choice of which hands you start with in poker is generally a much more critical decision than how you play on future betting rounds. If you adopt an "...any cards can win" philosophy you have set yourself up for a disaster that even the best players could not overcome on later rounds.
Be Aggressive, But Be Selective
Winning poker requires selectivity and aggression. Every top player knows that, and every credible poker book emphasizes this concept. If you have any doubts, consider the need to be selective. Picture someone who calls every hand down to the bitter end unless he sees that he is beaten on board. His opponents would soon discover that it never pays to bluff him. Of course, every time they had the smallest edge, they'd bet, knowing that he will call with the worst of it. These value bets would soon relieve our hero of his bankroll.
If selectivity is clearly correct, what about aggression?
Consider the passive player. He seldom bets unless he has an unbeatable hand - and they don't come around all that often. More often than not you'll find yourself in pots where you believe, but aren't absolutely certain, that you have the best hand. Even when you are 100 percent certain that yours is the best hand at the moment, you might recognize it as one that can be beaten if there are more cards to come. This occurs more often than you might realize and you can't win at poker by giving your opponent a free card. If they have to draw to beat you, make them pay the price.
Patience
Patience is closely related to the "be selective" portion of the "be aggressive, but be selective" mantra. Few players dispute the need to be selective. Nevertheless, most aren't very selective about the hands they play. After all, poker is fun, and most aficionados come to play, not fold.
When the cards aren't coming your way it's very easy to talk yourself into taking a flyer on marginal hands. But there's usually a price to be paid for falling off the good-hands wagon.
Sometimes it all boils down to a simple choice. You can have a lot of fun, gamble it up, and pay the inevitable price for your pleasure, or you can apply the patience required to win consistently.
Position
In poker, position means power. It is almost always advantageous to act after you've had the benefit of seeing what your opponents do. Their actions provide clues about the real or implied values of their hands. This is true in every poker game, and is particularly important in fixed position games, like hold'em and Omaha. In these games position is fixed for the entire hand, unlike stud, where it can vary from one betting round to another.
Coping When All Goes Wrong
Unfortunately, there's no magic elixir that eliminates the fluctuations everyone experiences at poker. But it's little consolation when you've been buffeted by the vicissitudes of fate to realize that you're not the only poor soul tossing about in the same boat. When all seems lost, you need to remember this: There is opportunity in adversity. In fact, losing provides the best opportunity to examine and refine your own game.
Let's face it. Most players do not spend much time in careful self-examination when they are winning. It's too much fun to stack the chips and revel in the money that's rolling in. But when we lose, we pour over each decision we made, wondering how we could have improved it. "What could I have done differently," we ask over and over. Losing turns us from expansive extroverts into brooding introverts whose inner-directed thoughts dredge us back over the same ground time and time again, in search of reasons and strategies that will prevent losses like these from ever happening again.
Gearing down
While no guarantees about future losses are available, there is one course of action we'd recommend to any player mired in a losing streak. Just change gears. We all change gears during a poker game, sometimes consciously, as a planned strategy, and sometimes we just wind up playing differently than we did when we first sat down.
When you're losing, consider gearing down. Way down. This is a time for lots of traction and not much speed; a time for playing only the best starting hands. Not marginal hands, not good - or even very good - starting hands, but only the best hands. That means you'll be throwing away hand after hand, and it takes discipline to do this, particularly when some of these hands would have won.
Narrow the target
Gearing down also prevents your opponents from kicking you when you're down. When you are winning, your table image is quite different than when you're losing. Win and you can sometimes bluff with impunity. It's a lot tougher when you're losing. After all, your opponents have watched you lose hand after hand. They believe you're going to keep losing. When you bet they'll call - or even raise - with hands they might have thrown away if you had been winning steadily.
Nest time we'll cope with an issue that strikes fear into many beginning poker players, though it really shouldn't — venturing into a cardroom or casino poker game for the first time. Get ready.
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