In Poker it Pays To Be Proactive

In sports like football and basketball there is an old cliché, “Don’t let the defense dictate what you do on offense.” One of the best examples of this is when a football team goes into the “Prevent” defense. Seriously, when your team is up by 5 points and you see them setup in a prevent defense, you just know they’re doomed! As John Madden so famously quipped, “the only thing the prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.”

The reason so many have such ire for the prevent defense is because you become reactive and not proactive. Well the same holds true in poker, you want to be proactive, and not reactive. Being proactive is when you dictate what your opponent’s options are; it’s about controlling the action.

Being proactive doesn’t necessarily mean aggression, but the two terms do tend to go hand-in-hand. The reason I say there is a difference is because aggressive players are not always controlling the action. Often time’s overly-aggressive players are being setup by the player(s) who are actually in control -the proactive ones.

A proactive poker player has a plan for every step of the way, and when things don’t go to plan they have a contingency plan. Proactive players understand what their opponents are likely to do, and what they should do to either take advantage of these tendencies, or to manipulate the situation to the point where their opponent has to move away from their comfort zone.

To really control your opponents, and therefore the action, you have to go into each hand with a complete plan, not just what you’re going to do pre-flop and then figure out what to do after you see the flop and your opponents act, that’s being reactive, not proactive.

Now, I’m not advocating you shouldn’t reassess what to do after the flop, but you should definitely be going into the flop with some idea of what you’re going to do on say a monotone flop, paired flop, AXX flop and so on.

One of the things that allow a player to think along these lines is having a very good understanding of their opponents, and understands which players they can manipulate and which players are harder to take advantage of.

I’ll end this article with another quote that I really like, not from John Madden, this time it’s from 19^th century American author Elbert Hubbard; “A goal without a plan is a dream.” And this is exactly why as a poker player you need to have a plan to how you are going to win the pot; being a good player or having a good hand doesn’t automatically insure you of victory.

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