Poker Articles

How to Fix the Flaws in Your Poker Game (In One Weekend)
by Lou Krieger
Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Tips for beginners, about assiduously applying your choices of starting hands, and adding to poker knowledge from there on.

Most recreational poker players realize they can improve their game but may be unsure about the best way to go about it. If you're a recreational poker player you might not realize that your game can improve dramatically in a very short time, even though poker "takes a lifetime to master", as Mike Sexton is so fond of saying during his World Poker Tour broadcasts.

The question of whether you have enough free time to make yourself into a better poker player and raise your game to a consistently winning level is always an issue that concerns most players--for whom poker isan enjoyable pastime, not a job. Most have families, jobs, and a host of other responsibilities that don't allow them to devote the same amount of time totheir game that professionals--guys who play every day of the week--can.

But regardless of your circumstances, you can take rather dramatic steps toward improving your game, and make dramatic changes in a matter of days, not years, months or even weeks. I'm going to show you how.

Learning starts with awareness. Everyone knows that. The critical flaw that hammers most recreational players is that they play too many hands--many of them are played on whim--without regard to starting standards, or even a good idea about which hands can be played profitably from various positions in the betting order and which hands figure to lose money when youplay them. Knowing when to release otherwise playable hands because of the action in front of you, and when generally unplayable hands may be profitably played by virtue of previous action and the game's texture, are issues many players never deal with.

You can begin to get a handle on where you fit on the hand selection spectrum by tracking how many hands you play when you're not in the big or small blind, and the game is full. (Things are different in short-handed games, and we'll ignore those games in this article.) If you're playing between 18% and 22% of your hands in full games, you're in the ballpark, and this number will change depending on the run of cards you're seeing and how aggressive the game might be.

In a game with frequent raises when you're not catching very playable cards, you should throw away a lot of the marginal hands you might play in games that feature lots of callers and very few raises. The percentage of hands you should play is not a hard and fast number; it is an approximation of where you ought to find yourself on the playability spectrum, all things considered. If you're way off the charts--suppose you're playing 40% of the hands you've been dealt, and you're not experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime run of big pairs and big suited connectors--you can assume you're playing too many hands. Youought to review starting hand standards to get yourself back on track.

Although everyone's recommended set of playable hands differs somewhat, that shouldn't give you any pause at all. It's not important because recommendations about playable starting hands don't differ to any great degree, and each poker theorist who proffers a set of starting standardstypically offers a caveat advising the reader that the list of recommendedhands should be adjusted for game texture, image, and a variety of other factors. What is important is that you use some standards--choose anyone's, but choose some--to give yourself some guidance about when to be in a hand and how to play it.

Over a lifetime, the difference in which standards you decide to follow won't make nearly as much difference as the difference between using starting standards and not using any at all. Once you decide to use starting standards, you will see your percentage of playable hands begin tomove down to a frequency of about 20%.

If you are assiduous in following the starting standards you've selected, you'll also begin folding otherwise playable hands in the face of a raise. You'll learn that a far, far stronger hand is needed to call a raise than to raise in the first place. After all, if you know that I'll raisewith any pair of 10s or higher, as well as with A-K,A-Q or A-J and K-Q suited,in order to call profitably you'll need a hand somewhere near the top portion of my range of raising hands. If not, you'll find yourself calling with hands like A-J and A-Tandy you'll either be below the range of any of my raising hands and behind from the get-go, or you'll be confronting me with a hand that's weaker than most of my raising hands and you'll only be favored over my bottom-tier hands, and most of the time you call, you'll be the underdog in the pot.

Never mind the fact that sometimes your A-J will run down my pocket pair of Kings and you'll win a pot when I was favored all along; in the long run I'll win a lot more of these confrontations than you will and I'll take your money in the process.

Once you've bought a book and begun to study it so that you have developed a feel for playable hands in given positions under specified game conditions, you'll dig into the rest of the book too, and expand your learning from there.

Two of my books, Hold'em Excellence: From Beginner toWinner, and MORE Hold'em Excellence: A Winner for Life both contain handy charts that make it easy to learn which hands are playable and when they can be played. The books can be obtained online at http://conjelco.com, or you can browse my website, http://loukrieger.com.

But it's not important that you use my starting standards, although it will please me if you do. What matters most is that you adopt starting standards that work for you and your style of play and follow them.

I've always suggested that starting standards should be viewed as the gospel for beginners, a guide for experienced players, and a point of departure for experts. But before you can or should depart from the "book" play, you need to know what that book play is, why it works most of the time, and when conditions are right to make it profitable for you to diverge from it.

So if you want to raise your hold'em game in a weekend, here are the steps to follow:

• Clock your play and see how many pots you voluntarily enter outside of the blinds in a full game.
  
• Choose a set of starting standards and follow them until you know they are working for you. Then, and only then, should you give any consideration at all to deviating from them.
  
• Continue to work on your game by readying and studying as well as playing. Books and study will provide you with all the poker theory you'll need. Playing allows you to convert theoretical knowledge into practical know-how, and you need both to play well. One without the other just won't work very well.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it is. There are few mysteries to poker that can't be unraveled by study, discipline, and an awareness of what you're trying to accomplish at the poker table.

Next time you go out to play poker, give this a try. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.