| |  Ingredients of a Poker Player
To be a successful poker player, online or offline, a person needs a certain mix of characteristics. These I like to call the ingredients of a successful poker player. With these ingredients, mixed in the right proportions, anyone can be a winning poker player. The majority of us have some of these ingredients, but not all of them. Or we have all of them but in the wrong proportions. In my effort to improve my own game, I’m constantly evaluating these ingredients in myself and making fine adjustments where I find I have too much of one and not enough of another.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, certainly there are other ingredients that make a successful poker player. Nor am I going to tell you exactly how much of each ingredient you need, like any great chef we need to mix the ingredients in the proportions that suit us best. The purpose of this guide is to give you a list of attributes that you can examine in yourself in order to find your own strengths and weaknesses, and by doing so improve your own game.
So let’s get to the ingredients that make a successful poker player.
Knowledge
Knowledge is one of the most important and least understood ingredients. Knowledge starts at the basics, you simply need to know which hands beat which hands. You need to know the basic rules of the game, when to bet, how much you can bet, how many more cards you’ll get, etc. This is the easy part. Anyone who has played more then a few hours of any type of card game can generally pick up the basics of any other card game in a relatively short period of time.
Knowledge also includes a deeper understanding of the game. You need to learn the strategies that can be employed to make you a winning player. You need to learn about position and bluffing and tells. This also is relatively easy, there are countless books available on every form of poker and most of them contain at least some information that you can put into practice successfully. I personally read everything I can get my hands on that deals with poker. I sift through the information that I find and pick out the pieces that I think I can use effectively and try to apply them to my game. Sometimes I’ll find that later I’ll have evolved more and some of the ideas that I dismissed on the first pass I can now employ to improve my game, so I’ll go back and reread those sections. Learning is a never ending process. When you stop learning, you will stop winning.
Knowledge is also about your opponents. You need to know who you are up against. If you are facing a well known player or a person you’ve played against many times before, you’ll have a lot of information to draw from when you are playing them. If you sit down across from someone you know nothing about, then you must collect information about your opponent as you play. And this is true of online play as much as it is in the real world. One of the biggest mistakes, in my opinion, that online players make, is they don’t try to learn about their opponents. They play their cards, or worse they play their style, and hope it carries them through. They play multiple tables or they chat on the phone and watch TV and sing to their MP3’s while hardly glancing at the table unless they are involved in the hand. When you aren’t involved in a hand is when you get the most information. When you are deciding to fold or raise or call, your concentration is on your cards and you are processing the information you already have gained about your opponents still in the hand. You aren’t gaining much knew knowledge because you are otherwise occupied. When you aren’t in the hand, you are much more free to observe how your opponents bet, how much time they take, how often they play hands, etc. All this is knowledge that you can put to use when you are in the hand.
So knowledge is about learning the game, mastering the game (something which you should never accomplish but should always strive for) and learning your opponents. Without this key ingredient, your success at poker is very unlikely.
Sure I can learn the rules of a poker game and read a couple of books, anyone can. But knowledge is only useful if you can successfully apply it. And that gets into skill.
Skill
Skill is an ingredient that everyone who sits down at a table thinks they have, and almost no one actually does. To be successful at anything, you have to be skilled at it. This is true of poker. If you can’t buy blinds and pull off the occasional bluff and get the big payout for your monster hands, then you won’t be successful. Skill is about taking the knowledge of the game and applying it correctly. Skill is about taking the knowledge of your opponents and using that to your advantage. Without skill, your knowledge does you very little good.
Skill is knowing when to bet big with rags and when to throw away your monster. If you can’t lay down your pocket aces when the board turns ugly, then you will lose in the long run. You see people, particularly online, who will bet their small pairs all the way to the river with a board full of overs and multiple callers and reraisers. This is a player with no skill. Skill is recognizing when you are beat and can’t win the pot and cutting your losses.
Luck
Luck always has been and always will be a big part of poker. If you are a tournament player, you already know that you just cannot make the final table without winning a few coin flips. And they are called coin flips because it basically comes down to luck as to who wins the hand, each player has roughly an equal shot going into the hand of winning. But luck is more then coin flips. Luck is about catching the miracle card on the river, it happens to our opponents more often then us, but that is because they are less skilled and don’t get out of hands when they should. But it happens to us as well. Maybe we think we’re ahead with two pair only to find out that our opponent has a set and we fill our boat on the river and end up with a bigger boat then his. Maybe we’re in the big blind and get to see a flop for free and hit it so hard that you feel like you are Mike Tyson delivering a knock out blow. That’s luck. That’s not about applying skill or knowledge to win, it’s about getting lucky. And for as long as poker has been around and for as long as it continues, luck will be a major factor in determining who wins and who loses.
Timing
For me, timing is the absolute key to poker. One hand your bottom pair can be the best hand and the next hand your full house can be way outclassed. Getting your money in with the best hand when someone else has a good, but not quite as good, hand is where you’ll really cash in. Getting your money in with a great hand when someone else has a greater hand is where you’ll really lose a lot. Bluffing at a pot requires timing, it must be done when no one has a hand they want to defend. Timing is about being in the right spot at the right time. Timing is being the person holding KK when two other players are both dealt QQ on the same hand.
Cards
Let’s face it, this is a game of cards and sometimes you just have to have the best hand. Cards can run cold and no matter how skilled or knowledgeable you are, when you don’t have any playable hands dealt to you, you are in trouble. You might be able to pick up a few pots, but sooner or later you are going to need the cards to back you up. This is especially true on the internet where players are likely to call you down with any two cards regardless of what the flop is. The good news is that no matter how cold your cards are, they eventually warm up.
Focus
You absolutely must be able to focus on the game to be a successful poker player. Players who make money at poker often play multiple tables at a time. They would generally argue that since they win, playing more hands at a time increases their win. I would argue that by not focusing on one game, they are decreasing their win rate. They are missing vital information about their opponents when their focus is on another table. Maybe that wouldn’t have helped them, but if saves them one big pot or wins them one big pot, then it makes up for the difference that playing multiple tables gives them.
Focus also means being ready to play when you play. If your lawyer just called to say that your ex is taking you back to court to get more child support or if you’ve just had a tequila chugging contest with your pals, you aren’t going to be focused on your game, and your game will suffer as a result.
Confidence
Confidence is a double edged sword, too much of it and you’ll lose, too little of it and you’ll lose. This is the one ingredient that it’s critical to have just the right amount of. You can’t win if you think your going to lose, you’ll find a way to lose. You can’t win if you think no one at the table poses a threat to you, they do, no matter how much better you are then them. You have to have confidence in your ability, but you also need to temper that with an understanding that no matter how good you are, there are better players out there and you might run into them.
Experience
Experience cannot be underestimated. If you’ve played 10 hands of Texas Hold’em, then you just don’t have the experience to play competitively. We learn better by experience and no matter what we read in books and magazines and forums, some things we just have to learn on our own. Slow playing pocket aces at a full table might be one of those lessons. When you look down and see those pocket rockets you want, and think you deserve, a big pay day. When you let 8 other people limp in to see a flop, you are probably going to be in for a big shock when your aces don’t hold up. Without experience all of your knowledge is just theory with no practical application. When you’ve seen thousands of hands played out then you can start to understand the theory and develop your own style that fits best with you.
Patience
Patience is rare quality in today’s online poker player. They crave action and so they come into pots when they don’t have the hands that make it the right decision. Sometimes the blinds are getting bigger and your stack is getting smaller and you feel like you need to make a move with any two cards. Maybe your next hand is going to be those pocket aces you’ve been praying for. Maybe it isn’t, but having the patience to wait out the bad cards is critical. Patience is a virtue, and in poker it’s an essential ingredient for the successful poker player.
Perseverance
Poker success is measured over the long haul. Anyone can get lucky and win a tournament with a big payout, but can they win over time? If you play poker, you will go through winning streaks and losing streaks. To be successful you have to persevere through the losing streaks.
Discipline
Discipline is another absolutely essential ingredient. This is about bankroll management as well as getting out of bad situations. When you hit those losing streaks, and you will if you play poker, sometimes it occurs to you that you can recover your losses quickly if you move up a couple of levels. This is a bad idea. Most likely you’ll compound your losses. You need to have the discipline to move DOWN a few levels until you get your game back. Without discipline it is easy to turn short term gains into long term losses.
__________________ Nobody is always a winner, and anybody who says he is, is either a liar or doesn't play poker. -- Amarillo Slim You say how could I make that call? How could you make that bet? We're playing poker, not solitaire. -- Doyle Brunson |
