To become a good poker playerfirst of all, you have to learn to think like him. But ideas are worthless if you don't have the experience and knowledge to talk about them. So the first step is to equip yourself with the language, the concepts, the perspective through which advanced poker players see the game.
If you want to be a high-level player, you have to change your attitude. Start looking at the game of poker holistically instead of simplistically. In other words, you need to look at the game as a whole, not pick it apart bone by bone.
The best example of this concept is hand analysis. It is the most important step in developing an understanding of the game of poker. There are three stages in developing a player's understanding of hands:
- Phase 1: Hand in hand
The first step is the simplest. You pick a hand that you have "scanned" or just predicted what the player has and decide what your hand should do against his. So, if you have top pair, you try to predict whether he might have a better hand than you and play accordingly. Most of the time, this is how beginners think about poker.
- Round 2: Hand vs. hand interval (range)
The next step is to think how your current hand can stand up to the full range of your opponent's hands in a given spot. You can think about how your top pair will fare against your opponent's sets, overpairs, top pairs with lower kickers, and possible straight draws, weighing each against the calculated probabilities. The number is only an estimate, but you can compare what your total equity is against the other player's hands and use that to make decisions. This level of understanding requires you to get a feel for the intelligence of your opponent's hands.
- Step 3: Arm interval before the next arm interval
The third and most complicated step is to see how your hand range fares against the other player's hand range. This skill requires not only that you are able to summarise the range you have, but also that you are able to visualise how you would play with all the other hands you might get in the course of a hand.
So how do you get from the first round to the third? At the beginning, the big gap is due to a low perception of values. The beginner has to assess how well his top pair will cope with an interval where 80% is the OESD and the other 20% sets. This is something that is learned with time and experience. Actually, learning the values is easy enough, the harder part is managing your mind so that you can play the hands you have efficiently and at the same time keep the dynamics of poker at a higher level in mind.
When you're a beginner, you're simply not capable of thinking about more than one hand at a time. What's in front of you is complex enough to keep your mind fully occupied. However, as you gain more experience, your mind starts to deal with individual hands subconsciously.
And once your mind starts to automatically process these individual hands, you won't have to put much effort into figuring out things like the combinations on the board or the betting patterns for most hands. Your brain will automatically instruct you to call, fold or raise, freeing up your conscious mind to work on higher-level ideas, looking at the connections between the intervals, the use of the cards and the flow of play.
Most people believe that you need to have a high intelligence or some kind of special ability to think about these things in a game. And that is completely untrue.
The only thing that separates people who can think it through from those who can't is the amount of experience. Once you've played a million hands of poker, your instincts will be so sharp that you'll just want to think through more complex actions. Focusing only on individual hands will seem like the biggest waste of time.
So experience is key. Gather as much experience as possible. And when you've accumulated enough, you'll allow your mind to reflect on holistic ideas during the game.
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