From time to time I get on unbelievable “unlucky streaks” where I can go for long periods of time without logging a winning session. I try to change games, limits and switch between online and live but no matter what I do I find myself in a slump. This happens, all of the time to a lot of players. When it finally hits me that something needs to change I always revert back to the basics of poker. When I started playing I was a winning player at low limits, what I lacked in talent I made up for in discipline. The more my game progressed the more I diverted from the basic disciplines that made me a successful player from the beginning. This article will have little to do with actual game play. The foundation of a good poker game is built long before you hit the felt. Most books I have read had very little content on building a good foundation for your poker game. I built the foundation of my game by reading a free book on the internet called “The Advanced Concepts of Poker”. It is available on the Neo-Tech website, though it is hard to find. Try doing a Google search for “The advanced Concepts of Poker” and you will find it.
Poker Journal
This will be one of the biggest tools you will ever have in the game of poker. It is very important to keep track of how many hours you play, how much you win/lose. What time of the day you play. This may seem like a lot of useless information, the more data you can put in the more you can analyze your game, the better you can become. With that information you can find ideal conditions for your style of play. When you can find ideal situations you can make the most money.
It is also a measurement of growth. I can go back to my early days of poker and see where I started I can also track trends and if I start to run bad I can go back over my notes and see when I started to lose and see if something changed in my game. I often refer to the early days of my poker and am very grateful to see how much my game and understanding of the game has progressed.
You will also want to take notes on players. How they act, when they raise, did they win or lose? Pick names for them, real or made up, then when you have four or five sessions of play you can make categories for these players based on the information you collected. When you face similar players you will have a game plan against each one.
Goal Setting
Regardless of whether you are a recreational player, aspiring pro or play full time it is always a good idea to know where you are headed. My first goal in poker was to win The World Series of Poker. I knew that I wanted to do and had no idea on how to get there. If you can set attainable goals you can make a roadmap of how to get there. I like putting a timeline on goals so for this article we will use a three month timeline. This way you can see progress in your game and not get discouraged.
Current Bankroll
In order to figure out where you are going it is a good idea to figure out where you are now. Bankroll is a great “yard stick” for measuring growth in poker. You either need to start with a set amount of money or you need to have “disposable cash”. I am not talking about money to throw away; I am referring to money you can afford to lose without it affecting your lifestyle. No matter how great of a player you are, when all of your chips get into a pot and you are an eighty percent favorite to win the pot, your opponent still has a twenty percent chance to win. That is all of your money and it seems like the twenty percent comes when you don't have a lot of money.
To play in a No Limit game you need to have at least two thousand times the big blind as an active bankroll. If you are playing with disposable cash you should have two times the buy in. If you are going to play fixed limit you should have two hundred big bets i.e. if you are playing $5/$10 you should have a working bankroll of two thousand dollars, if you are playing with disposable cash you can get away with five hundred dollars or fifty times the big bet.
Bankroll Goal
This is the yard stick I was speaking of in the previous section and goes hand in hand with your next goal. Your bankroll goal should be in the neighborhood of two thousand times the big blind of the next no limit game you want to play or two hundred times the big bet in a fixed limit game. I personally like to be over bankrolled and playing well below my means. Great things can happen when you play below your means. At some point you will come to a realization that chips are just betting units and a way to keep track of progress. You can lose a lot of chips in a game, which does not mean that you played poorly just that you got unlucky. If you can stand to take the beats of a few bad sessions and live to play another day you can play with confidence every session. There is no feeling worse than having ALL of your money in a pot, trust me I have been there.
A big mistake that I see players make is when they make a big score or have a big win they immediately take money out of the game and buy frivolous stuff. As a matter of fact I once saw a friend run five hundred dollars into a bankroll that was big enough to play $25/$50 No Limit. He went on a terrible run, didn’t move down and ended up having to sell the dream car he bought out of his poker bankroll.
Limit levels
Moving up in limits seems to be a big deal to people when the truth is you probably won’t see a huge jump in your opponent’s ability unless you move up four or five levels at a time. If you find a limit that is comfortable for you, you can consistently win and you have the proper bankroll you should move up. Having a goal for limit levels gives you something to shoot at so grinding out low limits based on your bankroll doesn’t seem like a dead end job.
Play and ability
This is the true test of where you are at in your poker career and it is also the hardest thing to gauge. People can go on unbelievable rushes and have the proper bankroll to play well above their skill level so they take the jump. As a student of the game this is dangerous territory. If you are consistently sitting with players that are better than you, you will burn through a bankroll faster than you built it. A good way to see where you are is to refer back to your poker journal.
Pre Game
With the growth of poker over the last four years there are more games available than ever. A major part of the discipline is playing when you are most fit and prepared to play poker. Here are some steps that I take every session and help me to get in the proper state of mind to play a session.
Well rested
I suggest napping. When I sit down to play I don’t like to limit myself as to how long I play a session. I like to stay as long as the game is juicy and I am feeling good. I do not play fatigued so by napping I insure myself that I can play as long as the game is good. After careful observation I have found that my most profitable hours of play are between 9pm and 3am. I generally lay down somewhere around 4pm and get up around 8pm. If the game is juicy enough I am rested enough to play all night into the morning.
In a typical day I get up around 9am and run all day. If I sit at a table during my most profitable hours I will most likely be very tired by the middle of the session. If I can not nap I will wait to play another day.
Showered
Nothing will improve my state of mind faster than a nice shower. Living in the desert personal hygiene becomes an issue after running around all day, this will affect my play.
Clean Shaven
There is something to be said about the fresh feeling of shaving. This will help improve state of mind.
Well fed
This goes back to stamina. When I am playing a session hunger can be a huge distraction and if I get up to eat in the middle of a session I lose focus on the game.
Good state of mind
As I said earlier there are so many games available these days that there is no reason to play in a bad mood. That being said sometimes I like to use poker as a way to release stress; this is when I sit down at a super small stakes game and drink as much as possible but for the purpose of this article we are trying to achieve optimal conditions for play. The rule I use is if I can’t smile genuinely I won’t play.
During game
No food or beverage at the table.
Eating and drinking at the table can not improve your game at all. When eating you can make a mess on the table, cards etc. and drinking will distract you while you play. Food and drinks will also give off many tells that you could otherwise conceal. If you are taking a drink of water, relaxing and enjoying the game, you pick up aces, what do you do? That’s right you put the lid on your water, posture yourself in your normal game play position and try to play your aces well. Even the worst of the worst will notice the change in what you did.
Instead of drinking at the table you should order your drink and walk away when it arrives. This will allow time for you to clear your head and more importantly take notes. Most people are not blessed with a photographic memory. This will allow you to write down big pots that you played. When the session is over you can review the hands and figure out how to win more/lose less.
Do not swear or express emotions.
Part of playing poker against bad players is to make the game as comfortable and enjoyable for them. Without bad players the only winner in the game would be the house. Without bad or live players in the game all the money would cycle back and forth across the table and the house would be taking rake out of each pot.
I was playing at The Paris and we had just a great table going. Everyone was laughing and having a great time. Two of the guys there were pretty good poker players and we had a great conversation going about poker in general. They kept drinking and drinking and the progress of the word “Donkey” came up. They told me about how it progressed from “Donkey” to “Donk” to “Dink”. About 2am a player sat down who either has no idea what was going on or was trying to hustle us. I would guess it was the former. The guy played every hand and had no idea how to play the game. He was stacking his chips six or seven high and had a mess of chips in front of him. Finally he outdraws one of the poker enthusiasts I was speaking of earlier. The poker enthusiast, now extremely drunk, went on to call this guy dink over and over for about ten minutes. I help him stack the enthusiasts chips and get them racked so he can color up and have some more room to play. He hands the chips to the floor and says “On second thought I’ll just cash out.”
This gentleman just won four huge pots in the last fifteen minutes, he was gambling it up and ready to start dumping the chips back to the table. If the “poker enthusiast” hadn’t berated him for drawing out on him the whole table would have benefited. Instead he chased off the first live player we had sit down in a few hours.
Antonio Esfandiari is a great example of how to conduct your self at a table. On one of the last episodes of “High Stakes Poker” he took two sick beats where he was a huge favorite. On the other side of the table sat Phil Hellmuth who was stuck in his own right but not playing very well at all. Phil was sitting there talking, mumbling and whining. He even went in the hallway to let off some self inflicted steam. Antonio was calm and took the beats as they came understanding that bad beats happen. If there were a perfect example of how to handle your self at a table Antonio would be it.
Memorize hands
Take notes if you need to, when you need to take a drink is a great time to do it. A large part of my success in poker is being able to analyze hands that I have played and figuring out was to extract the most money out of them as I can. Also when reviewing hands from a session I am able to remember mannerisms from my opponents and pick up tells even after the session is over.
Unfortunately televised poker does not give us a chance to see how the pros play hands and what they do in certain situations. The difference between cash games and tournaments is huge and the way they do play hands is not always appropriate for cash game play. Use the tools of the internet. You can post hands and get feedback from many different forums. The group I use the most is rec.gambling.poker. If you are not familiar with usenet news groups you can always access “r.g.p” through Google groups. There is a lot of spam there but I am willing to trade that off to interact in a group that is not moderated or censored.
Form a process for betting and looking at your cards
Do this the same way every time that way people won’t be able to pick up the strength/weakness of your hand. The way I do this is by putting a chip on my cards, hold enough chips in my hand to raise and watch my opponents as they look at their cards. The reason I hold enough chips in my hand to raise is if I find myself in a position where I have a big hand I do not want to fumble my chips and give off any information to my opponents. Good players make this mistake all of the time and this is an easy was to avoid this problem.
Another huge tell that I see at the table is how people put chips in the pot. One of my biggest tells for a while was when I was on a draw or bluffing I would toss my chips in the pot when I bet. When I had a made hand I would neatly cut my chips in front of me. Thankfully a good friend of mine was the dealer at the game I was playing and pointed it out to me. Form a process for putting chips in the pot. Do it the same way every time and people will not be able to pick up on the strength/weakness of your hand.
Do not play many hands for the first half hour that you play
Free information is everywhere. I always used to study my opponents when I was in a hand with them and try to pick up tells. After a while I figured out that these people have the same tells whether I am in a pot or not. They will do the same thing over and over telling you what they hold. By not playing many hands for the first half hour you can pick up this information and put a profile on your opponents.
Table selection
There is nothing that is more important to a winning poker session than selecting the game that best fits your style of play. There has never been a better time in the history of poker to be able to find a game that best fits your style of play as well.
There are games going twenty four hours a day seven days a week. If you look you can find a game that fits your style. After a while you will be able to adapt to multiple situations but why try? I play for money and want to put myself in the best situations possible.
I used to run a game in Toledo Ohio. We had the best action of any game and the most money in play by far. I had a regular customer who would come in, sit down and watch the game for up to an hour. He would then sit in for a half hour and left if the game was not right for him. He was one of the best players in the city. He had been playing poker and living off of it for the last ten years or so. He makes his money by putting himself in good spots and make good decisions because he plays for money not action.
When looking at your success in the game of poker it is important to look at your overall wins/losses, not just one session. That being said it is important to make sure that you are prepared for each session and play each session at your best level. It is really easy to become complacent when you are running well and keep bad habits when you are not running so well. I have many times found myself to be the best player at a table but so undisciplined that it doesn’t matter how good I am because I am not applying the principles that have made me a winning player from the beginning.
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Contributor's Note
I wrote this as a magazine article that got published in poker the magazine which went out of business shortly after the government added anti on line gaming laws to a port security act (figure that one out)
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