The POKER Acronym
– The Mindset On Winning Consistently In Texas-Hold’Em
Poker
I have been playing poker for about 5 years now and I can honestly say I
am a profitable player. I don’t play for big money, so I am not here to
tell you how to become a pro, nor how to win the millions. I am however,
going to tell you that you can consistently WIN at Texas Hold’em poker.
Money is just the results indicator of whether you are winning or not
and is a nice bonus if you are playing for any real stakes. When you
play, you should not play to make money, you should play to win,
although paradoxically, you have to count your coin at all times to
monitor whether or not you are in the profit zone. I can’t guarantee you
will win every time with my tactics or advice, however, if you want to
play and not have to rely solely on luck, then I think you will find
benefits to my consistent winning strategies.
So here is how I have proven to myself that I am constantly a profitable
poker player. As I stated before it’s paradoxical because you should
play to win, but not play for money, but counting your earning and
losses is they way to monitor your progress. I have this generally
outline in my head that proves I am above even money over my last few
years of playing poker.
Online: I had bought in $40 and $50 dollars years ago, on two separate
poker sites, and I respectively have $220 and $180 in both accounts.
Mind you, I did build up those accounts playing low stakes over a long
period of time, and albeit I do just play for fun, but I always keep in
mind that I should be UP in money or what’s the point of playing?
In Local Games: with friends, we play cash games quiet often and I am
consistently up. On average we buy in for $20 I usually cash out with
$30-40 at the end of the night.
Casinos: I have also played at $1-$2 tables at a casino buying in for
$100.00 three separate times (total $300.00) and cashing out a total of
$640.00. That’s like 110% on my investment and that was in 6 hours of
play, hence I made about $57.00 and hour at the casino. Additionally,
once I played at a 33-man tournament and cashed out in second with
$200.00. Buy in was $20.00. That was the only multi-table tournament I
ever participated in that consisted of mostly players I did not know.
Okay, so hopefully you believe me that I am good to double money on most
nights. Let me warn you first; I will not be giving you any ‘secret’
hand strategies. It would be pointless for me to do so. You can find
thousand page books that cover poker theory and the math behind it all.
I do understand most of it, but only at a rudimentary level so I won’t
pretend I am an expert in being accurate in implied odds, pot odds and
outs to the exact number. I can’t show you that. You either know it, or
you don’t. What I am going to do is show you the mindset you need to
create a winning attitude, mentality and persona. Now, let’s get to my
POKER acronym. You need to think about these while you play at all
times, this is what POKER is all about.
§
Patience
§
Overall
Perspective
§
Killer
Instincts
§
Enjoyment
§
Resilience
Okay now, let’s further examine each one and see how
they help us become winning players.
Patience – I hope this one is blatantly obvious. Everyone should
know this, play a limited amount of hands and don’t get jaded when you
don’t pick up AA every 5 hands. In general, the more you limp in and
chase and try to hit big, the more you’ll lose. You see the problem with
gambling is that people get what I call SS - selective sight – people
only see what they like and don’t see the rest. Meaning that if someone
chases a 16% draw and catches it they remember it and are really happy
about it because they won a BIG POT. It sticks out in their memory. Or
maybe they saw a pro chasing a flush on TV and they won a big tournament
when they hit. Selective memory. People don’t like to remember pain. It
is a biological, survival mechanism. We seem to forget the other 86% of
the time that we miss our draw and discounted it as “bad luck” or “I’ll
catch it next time”… that’s not patience, that’s gambling idiocy. Being
patient does not only mean waiting for big cards, it means relaxing and
showing the table that you are discipline and can FOLD at anytime.
Folding and patience are one in the same in poker. When you have the
discipline to fold you accomplish the following three things, it earns
you respect, it saves you when you lose, it earns you when you win.
Being patient and folding is referred to as being tight. Being tight,
first and foremost helps you show your opponents that when you bet you
mean business. Since you fold often, you ‘must’ have a good hand when
you do bet. Let me describe to you one of my favorite plays in poker.
Fold as many hands as you can, then when you hit KK, AA, AK suited or
maybe even queens, you open up for a huge exaggerated bet. Likely
everyone will fold, then you reveal your hand and say, “aw shucks I
should’ve bet less”… If they call, all-the better, you are likely to win
and everyone will see when you raise, you have the goods. Even if you
lose by some bad beat you can still reveal your hand and everyone will
notice you had a big hand when you raised the pot. Later in the game
when you bet big even with bad cards in your hands and everyone will
likely fold. That’s the respect you earn from being tight and patient.
Secondly, other players won’t bet out at you too much when they have a
killer hand because they know you’ll fold and they don’t want you to.
This will save you a lot of money on pots that you’ll normally lose
because of the way the cards came. Example. Let’s say you have KQ and
your opponent is holding 66. The flop hits KQ6. This just sucks and most
people can’t get away from this situation. However, since you have
folded every time someone bet out at you, your opponent might just check
the flop and bet a small amount on the turn and river. You will lose,
but you probably will lose the minimum amount. If you were a wild player
(or perceived as one), your opponent would go all-in and you’d call in a
heartbeat and go home two heartbeats later. Lastly, being patient ends
up allowing you to win big, when you do hit your hands. Here is why:
Because you can assume with a lot of certainty your hand will be the
best. This means you can do whatever you like after the flop hit,
check-raise, slow-play, bet a lot, steady-bet, etc. Let’s say you play
KK and the flop hit K47. You know you are leading and asides from some
silly straight draws you could assume you are leading and you can take
control. When you play hands like 10-8 off suit, and the flop hits 10JJ
you put yourself in a lot of trouble. How do you know you are leading?
You can’t assume nobody has a 10 with a better kicker or any loose J in
their hand. Actually the odds are, in a full table, someone does have
you beat. So the first rule in poker is being patient. Be calm even when
you are beaten by bad luck, it’s normal and it is just fine because at
the end of the day you will win more often than not if you are playing
with the odds in your favor.
Overall Perspective – This is very important in poker. You need
to keep an overall view to become an overall winner. Winning in poker is
not a one-time event unless you win millions in a big tournament then
you are probably all set. For most people, to win in poker means being
up more times than being down. So keeping tabs in your head at bare
minimum, or even better on paper (or excel) is important. If you find
yourself losing all the time, you are obviously not doing something
right and changes need to be made. It could just be your competition is
better than you. When we used to play with my friends there was a player
who consistently won and they often won with big earning nights. I was
usually above average in terms of money. Let’s say I made $10 and $10
profit on back-to-back nights, and then I was up a total $20. He on the
other hand often had one big night because of his volatile style,
winning usually $100 one night and then the next losing $20.
Nonetheless, overall he was up $80, which was a lot better than my
$20.00. So I decided, I had to start playing better against them, change
some things up, maybe taking more risks with certain players since they
obviously took bigger gambles. Often really aggressive players are easy
to tame down simply by being aggressive with them first. Whatever the
case may be, overall he was a winning player. Now if someone only came
on the second night and saw that one guy lost $20, they would think he
were a weak player, which is obviously not true since he won $100 the
prior night. You see, overall perspective is seeing the BIG PICTURE; do
I win more often than I lose? That’s what is important. Forget about
specific hands
”Oh I lost with AA!!” The worst thing to say in poker is “if I only
stayed in that hand” or “I got so unlucky”. If you stick to looking at
the big picture then you’d less likely to be effected by the
fluctuations in chips or hands in any particular game. Although, in cash
games, I do like to set aside my winning piles once I grow my bankroll.
You have to do this in your head. Let’s say you buy in for $20 and you
build your chips up to $30. In your mind, try to only gamble with the
$10 you’ve earned. That gives you security that you’ll still be up even
if you lose and also allows you to still play tight because you have
forbidden yourself from dipping into your $20… meaning you’ll still play
tight. Plus, if you wake up with AA or KK in your hand or hit the nuts
on the flop you can now allow yourself to dip into your $20 also and
turn your $30 into $60, because you ‘lift the ban’ and can use it to
earn more when you are a sure shot favorite. Overall perspective means
winning overall, in the long run, not just that night. Remember that and
winning will be a progress, not a landmark.
Killer Instincts – “Know when to hold them and now when to fold
them”. Predators don’t just run around gunning at any prey they see,
that would be an ineffective method and a huge waste of precious energy.
Predators have killer instincts and in poker you need those same types
of instincts when you sense weakness or when you sense danger. Here is
my rule for myself: When you win, win BIG, when you lose, lose LITTLE. I
say that to myself often to remind myself that anyone can get a great
hand and everyone will at one point, so no matter how good you are you
can’t outplay someone holding a four of a kind. This is probably the
major area that average players lack in. Many players are ultra
aggressive and can win a lot because they often push in a lot of chips,
but this also has its downfall, you can lose a lot too. Killer instincts
is about reading the game, reading the players and reading the situation
at hand. Let’s say Johnny has AA and he raises the pot quite a bit.
Johnny is normally tight and has not played many pots, so you assume he
has a big hand. You decide to call because you are the chip leader and
your hand is decent JT, you are in position and you think you can
outplay Johnny. The flop comes down TJ4. You are convinced Johnny has QQ,
KK, AA or AK and you believe you are winning. Johnny likes the flop so
he bets. You know you have Johnny beat, so you re-raise all-in which
happens to be about 5 times what is in the pot and enough to put Johnny
all in. Johnny calls and you add another huge amount of chips to your
stack. These are killer instincts not because you pushed your chips all
in but because you knew Johnny would call, you made it look like an
exaggerated bluff, however it was really a please-pay-me-off bet. You
have to behave like a BIG CAT predator or like a SCAVANGER vulture, just
waiting for opportunities to pounce. Say a cheetah during a hunt, it
does not just try to kill just any prey it sees, it targets weak, slow,
unprepared prey, it can’t waste its energy trying to take down the
fastest fittest gazelle on the planes, sure it would be a nice kill if
it succeeded, but its odds are far too low. To ensure success, a
predator, such as a cheetah, targets its prey. Also it knows it has to
survive too. And when it sees a pack of hyenas and it is outnumbered,
tired and hunger it has to get out no matter how strong it my think it
is. Sure you might have TT, a pretty good hand. You raise the pot; you
are strong like a cheetah. Then right next to you Johnny throws in a
re-raise, and then out of nowhere Marty jumps in with a re-re-raise. So
the lion and the hyenas have entered the playing field at this point.
Don’t be brave, yes cheetahs are tough, like TT is, but it isn’t that
tough. Get out. Timing is everything is poker. Let’s say you are on the
button and 6 players limp in to you. You have been playing tight and
throwing out healthy raises when you do raise. So this time you raise 6
times the big blind with a really weak hand and everyone folds, you are
a vulture picking up scraps, because you know that most people probably
limped into the pot with a mediocre hand. Even decent hands know they
probably have you beat, but your huge raise make calling unjustifiable
unless they have a real big hand. It’s timing; you have to do it when
the situation is right. I have noticed that at most cash games, even at
casinos, people like to see cheap flops, so when you have position, you
should try to take advantage. However, raising 6 times the big blind
under the gun with a weak hand is like begging to be re-raised or called
by a stronger hand that will leave you trying to fire bluffs out on the
flop, turn and river. Dangerous. Killer instinct also means trusting
your gut. If you have that wretched feeling in your stomach where
somehow you know your beat, you have to learn to trust it. I’ve noticed
that when I feel confident that I am up, I am rarely surprised by a
bigger hand and usually win. When I have a great hand and just have a
feeling that I beat somehow, that feeling is correct, most of the time.
Often you can’t consciously pinpoint it, but your subconscious mind
picks up subtleties in your opponent or in the situation. Just recently
I had a king high flush and after the river I was re-raised the exact
amount that I raised. I just knew that I was beat and of course a king
high flush is great especially when there are no pairs on the board
(eliminating the potential for full boats). This means only 1 card in
the deck has me beat. But I knew my opponent had it, so why even call?
Well stupidly, I did, mostly because of pot odds and the raise was not
high enough to justify folding the second nuts. Nonetheless, the Ace
high flush did beat me and I lost. Through the whole hand I kept
thinking, “are they chasing with the Ace of Spades?” Low and behold,
they were. When my opponent revealed their cards, I gave myself the “no
shit, that was so obvious” muttering speech. The moral is: Trust your
gut. Go with your instincts and most of all, when opportunity knocks
think about how you can maximize your rewards. On the flip side of
things, when you are going to lose, try to put up the damage control.
This mostly is done through folding or assertive (“find out where I am
at”) bets.
Enjoyment – This is the easy one. If you don’t enjoy the game for
what it is: A game (that consists of A LOT OF LUCK), then you shouldn’t
be playing. Gambling for the money takes the fun out and statistics
show, most gamblers lose. Gambling is designed to make you lose. So play
for FUN and use money as a monitoring indicator of how well you play. If
you are always down in money, then you are either playing really bad
consistently and need to make dramatic changes (in fact play the
opposite of how you usually to just change the pace a little) or you
need to quit playing all together, for money at least. Going into debt
and losing your house and/or relationships does not sound enjoyable to
me. If you play for fun, you can lose with a smile on your face. Sure I
like to play for money, but the stakes are very low. Just enough to keep
it interesting, but low enough not to really affect anyone’s breadline.
Resilience – When I think of this word, I think of strong and
flexible, like Plexiglas. In order to be a long-term winner you can’t be
predictable. So you have to be willing to gamble at times when it really
makes no sense mathematically or by any other poker logic and at other
times you need to fold when you really shouldn’t. Resilience means
hanging in there because you believe you are playing correctly and
knowing in the long haul it will work out (as discussed in Overall
Perspective) simultaneously being able to make major shifts on a moment
by moment basis. Be strong, yet, flexible. I remember playing a friendly
low stakes in-house game. It was someone’s birthday. No names here. But
there was quiet a bit of drinking, and 12 players in all. Some
experienced, some just loose gamblers and lots of seriously silliness
going on. I know that’s an oxymoron, serious silliness. At any rate,
let’s say I had my pocket tens run down by k-6 off suit (which called a
huge pre flop raise) hitting a flush. The chip leader and the birthday
person were siblings and they just kept raising and re-raising every pot
making it impossible for smaller stacks to call, and even if they did to
make stand, their hand would likely get run down because on this table
getting multiple callers was the norm.
I lost my first buy in completely on two big hands, which I was leading
in both pre-flop and was run down. With that said I bought in again and
just could not get back in the game because the fluky chip leaders kept
raising like 10 times the big blind as a standard. Once this got out of
control, I made a decision along with an announcement. “I will call any
raise with anything.” Now the reason I made up my mind to do such a
silly thing was because I knew I had far more cash in my wallet then
anyone else. I mean WAY more. Most people were floating with about 100
bucks I had about 25 times that amount for various reasons. My tenant
just paid me rent in cash and I had a lot of cash on me for holiday
shopping. Regardless, I knew that if I just keep calling, luck would
eventually hit me once or twice, and it did. After a few losing hands, I
woke up to pocket 8s in the big blind. The short stack made a small
raise, I guess as a play for the blinds but the chip leader re-raised
(as always) claiming, “I have to, I have big hand”. What’s new? I
thought, but I believed I was beat this time, I just had that feeling,
but I thought I have to follow my rule 8s are a decent hand. So I called
anyway because of my decision really. The original raiser called too.
The flop came down 6-8-3. Perfect I hit trips and hopefully someone else
hit something too. Small blind (chip leader) checks so do I and the
small blind goes all in. Then the chip leader goes all in also. I looked
perplexed, but said thank you and I call. The chip leader had TT and the
small stack was bluffing with 2-4. I did win with the trips and made a
truckload on that hand. Enough to make up for everything I had lost
before and then some. Now by my typical playing rules after a raise and
a re-raise, I would likely fold the snowmen. 8-8 is a good hand in short
handed game, in position maybe, sometimes, but normally I would just lay
it down with a raise and re-raise, but in this case with such a loose
table and the IMPLIED odds of actually hitting the hand on this type of
table was so good that laying it down made no sense. In fact, calling
with anything might be justified on this table, added with some KI, you
will hit big at least once, and then you can start putting your patience
and overall perspective game into play and keep your stack in the green,
once you are up in money again. I showed this as an example of how and
why being strong and flexible often prevails. I was playing online the
other day and lost $80 within an hour. Nothing was going my way, so I
joined a 20 man sit and go that cost $10 to enter into. I came in first,
won $80.00 back and logged off for the day. Sometimes just changing it
up might do the trick. Obsessively trying to recoup yourself on the same
table is called being an addict and you will probably just lose more and
more. The best predictor of the future is the past. So if you keep
losing on a certain table, with certain people or playing a certain way,
why do you continue to do so? I know I sound contradictory, since I said
that if you play properly then, stick with it, you’ll win in the long
run, but I am not contradicting myself. I am talking about when you call
with KK and you lose to AK, you made the right call. Stick with it. That
is different than joining a $20 sit and go on the same site all the time
and not making it in the money more than 25% of the time or more (which
is about what you need to be profitable). If you keep doing the same
thing and it is not working then by Einstein’s definition, ‘you are
nuts’. Or maybe you are just an addict. Gambling should be fun, but you
need to be resilient if you want to be a winning player. Be strong, know
when to quit, but be flexible and gamble when you know you can risk your
money and the rewards (POT ODDS and IMPLIED ODDS) are really good.
Being a resilient player, that enjoys the game, who exemplifies killer
instincts and an overall perspective, with a bit of patience and you
will likely be a winning player. The only type of player that I know of
that can compete with this type of player is, a Persistent player will a
lot of Oversight and Knockout power, who is Excited about the game is a
solid as a Rock and as flexible as Rubber, but that’s a whole new story.
You get my drift hopefully. Poker is not really about LUCK more then it
is about PERSONALITY. The only way to change your game on the felt is to
change your inner game; in your mind and emotions.
Happy winnings. |
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