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Poker Articles: Keeping the mistakes you make under control; This is where the difference between an average player and a high-profile professional player is made. The problem with keeping your mistakes from building up is that unlike any other challenge at the table, it is a high-wire balancing act. You will make mistakes. Everybody makes them, even the best pros. The key is to keep these mistakes from escalating. Let’s see a few examples. Let’s say you hold Ad,Qs and put in BB size preflop raise. You get called and the flop comes 8c,3c,9c. This kind of flop is the last thing you want to see. Your hand doesn’t really beat anything at this stage, but you haven’t made your mistake yet. Folding is the only option for you here, yet still sometimes players will decide to call a bet under such circumstances. That’s a mistake already. The turn comes another blank (or possibly another club making it all the more possible for an opponent to have made a flush). Even though the mistake has already been made, what our rookie needs to do is fold it right there, as soon as the opponents lay another bet into him. Many will feel pot committed though, and start chasing after a hand, regardless of the fact that even if they did improve, they probably couldn’t beat the opponent’s hand. The river is a blank and our player makes that last call, just to see what the opponent has basically. Piling up additional mistakes on top of an initial one is how lots of beginners play the game. The initial mistake needs to be recognized, and the hand needs to be mucked right there, regardless of how much abuse you’ve previously taken from the opponent involved, and how much of a revenge you’re itching to exact on him. Getting emotional is never an option. Mistakes can pile up not only on a street-to-street basis, but also from one hand to another. I played in a $50+$5 MTT the other day, and got dealt a pair of Qs about midway through. I went all in hoping to either just nick the blinds (which were pretty substantial by then), or to get called by someone with a lower pocket pair. Sure enough, guy on my right calls me and turns over a pair of Jacks. The flop and turn lands blanks and the river brings another J to give him the pot. I must admit I got truly pissed. My next hand was an As,5s and I hit all-in on it. The same guy called me down with Ac,10c and made a pair of 10s to bust me out. The first move I made was obviously a correct one. I managed to trap an opponent on a worse hand. Through a perverted twist of fate though – as it’s often the case in poker – I ended up losing the hand, and that pissed me off. The call I made on the following hand was the direct consequence of the bad beat I’ve suffered, and it was a mistake which cost me my tournament life. Professional players are able to treat each hand independently, and thus none of their decisions are influenced by anything that may have happened in a previous hand. This is one of the fundamental things everyone has to learn if he/she intends to be a poker player. Much like in roulette, no outcome influences any of the subsequent results in any way. You will go on bad-luck streaks and lucky runs too, but as a poker player, your aim should be to minimize the role luck has in the outcome of the hands you play. Always focus on this basic truth: regardless of how bad a beat you take, the outcome of the following hand has nothing to do with your previous bad luck whatsoever.
Make sure you only play with rakeback. A rakeback deal will give you a nice little additional EV on every single hand that you play, an edge which is not subject to your good or bad luck runs.
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Poker Articles
