4 Things You Don’t Understand About Poker

1. How good your opponents are is often times more important than how good you are

Unless you have risen to your failure point -which basically means you are able to beat numerous games, but are currently playing in a game where you are the fish-your opponents’ level of play is much more important than your own.

The easiest way to explain this concept is this way: In poker your level of play is relative to your opponents. In poker you don’t have to be the best player at your table to win money; you simply need to be one of the better players at the table. Furthermore, if there is a truly horrendous player at the table you could be the second worst player and still come out a winner!

2. The slightest change can make situations that seems similar, totally different

This is why as a poker player you have to be able to think on your feet and constantly make adjustments, because there simply isn’t a static strategy that works in poker above the micro-limit games. If you were to give 100 different poker players 67s you will get numerous different results. The reason for this is because even players of similar ability will do things differently: One player may raise with 67s, one may fold, and one might limp. They may play flush draws totally different post-flop: The scenarios you could possibly face are practically limitless.

3. Your edge is a lot smaller than you think

Guess what? No matter how good you think you are at poker, and how much of an edge you believe you have, it’s smaller than you realize. The reason for this has to do with the game itself: Yes poker is designed to separate bad players from their money, but it is designed to do it slowly! If your opponent will push with any 2 cards and you have AK it seems like a no-brainer, but you are only a 65/35 favorite: would you take those odds to cross the street without getting hit by car? And this is an over-simplified example that would rarely be the case!

Barry Greenstein once stated that a good poker player has about a 3% edge over his opponents: meaning for every $100 of your money that finds its way into the pot, you will get a $3 return on your investment. Like I said; “your edge is smaller than you think!”

4. How long, the Long-Term really is

The word long-term gets kicked around quite a bit in poker circles, and while most players have some type of understanding of what it means; very few poker players really grasp just how long the long-run really is!

Long-term is not a few weeks of playing cards at your local casino, or 50,000 hands of Online Poker: Long-term is your entire poker career. It doesn’t matter how much you have won, or how good your skills currently are, the long-term in poker means good decisions, past, present and future.

What good is it to crush the $200 NLHE games for 5 years if in one drunken night you decide to test yourself against durrr or Phil Ivey, and lose your entire roll? So you see the long-term in poker is a paradox: It is both your entire poker playing career, and every individual decision you make all at the same time.