Becoming A BETTER Poker Player
Some people may find the title of this article ridiculous. After all, I'm posting this to a poker Internet forum in the "Strategy and Hand Analysis" section. Surely, anyone who has found this article is well on their way to being a better poker player, right? Wrong. And that's what this article is about.
First, let's start with a little journey into my poker playing career.
When I was younger, before Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP and the massive explosion of Texas Hold'em (and well before I was old enough to go to a casino), my exposure to poker was limited to just fun games of 5 card draw amongst the family with no money involved. My family enjoyed playing all sorts of card games when I was younger. I think this laid a good foundation for my familiarity with a deck of cards.
I first discovered online poker shortly before the 2003 WSOP won by Chris Moneymaker. I downloaded them, but only ever played with play money for the longest time. I was still only 13 at the time, but certainly interested in this game called Texas Hold'em. The 2003 WSOP came and went, and with it, everyone learned how to play Texas Hold'em. This was now the game that my family and I played instead of 5 Card Draw.
Shortly before I turned 18, I was invited to my first home game. It was a tournament. A $20 buy-in, with $20 unlimited rebuys for the first hour. I invested $40 and ended up winning the whole thing, a first price pay out of over $300, which is a lot of money for an 18-year-old with no bills to pay since he still lives at home. A month later, I went back to the same home tournament, this time with fewer players, and won again, a $200 pay out.
I thought I was going to head out to Vegas and win the WSOP the minute I turned 21. I'd played in two poker tournaments for money and won both of them.
Some time passed, and there really weren't many opportunities for me to play poker for the next year or so. Not until after I turned 20. That's when I got introduced to the home cash game. The first time I played in one, I lost three $20 buy-ins. I was disappointed and confused. How could I lose when I had won so easily before?
It was at this time that I had a few revelations about the game of poker. And these are the important lessons that inspire this post.
First, there is always someone who is better than you at poker--at least in some aspect of the game. I don't care if you're Daniel Negreanu, Phil Ivey, Doyle Brunson, Phil Helmuth, etc. It doesn't matter. There is always and will always be someone better than you.
Second, in order to be a master of the game, you must be a great student of the game. This sounds cliche, but it's meant in a different way from how people say the same thing about chess. Anyone can be a student of poker, and you'll learn enough to play all right, but in order to truly master the game, you must be a great student, and in order to to be a great student, you must love the game. It's the difference between Daniel Negreanu and Jamie Gold.
The point of all this is, all too often, I see people posting hand histories of a hand particular hand, and when constructive criticism is offered, the person who originally posted the hand continually replies with defenses as to why the way they played the hand is correct. This doesn't help you grow as a player. If you truly want to master this game, you should be obsessed with the things you do INCORRECTLY and use these forums to help people identify when something you thing you did incorrectly might actually be correct as well as help you avoid making incorrect plays.
EVERYONE makes incorrect plays. The better the poker player is, the fewer incorrect plays he makes (because perfect poker implies making no incorrect plays, and the closer to perfection you are, the better you are). But when you refuse to admit you played a hand incorrectly, you will continue to play that hand incorrectly in the future and you will continue to lose money in that spot. And perhaps most importantly, you fail to make yourself a better poker player.
I understand that many poker players are interested only in making money and nothing else. And that's fine. You may be only of mid-grade skill level, but you've found a way to make a profit at a particular level, and that's fine. But those people are not the people posting in this section of these forums. This section of these forums are for improving your own play.
And there are fewer great players than there are mediocre and bad players. Fortunately the few great players that we have here take the time to be extremely active in the forums and give everyone here plenty of opportunities to improve themselves. And that's also why I occasionally like to post my own hands here, because I know there are people here that are better at certain aspects of the game than I am, and I hope to learn from them.
But I certainly fill like I put more advise into these forums than I take out. And that's partially my fault, because I don't post my own hand histories that often. But I'm not here to complain that you guys are advising me enough. Nay, rather I'm here to complain that about the people who squander the resource they have available here.
If you don't care to take the advice of the better poker players that post in these forums, then what is the point of even making posts in these forums in the first place?
