Imagine that the game of poker is a ship, and you are the shipbuilder. Your ship is not an extension of you. It is not something internal that exists only in your mind. So let's think of poker as an external object – of course, this object is the work of your hands. And yet, it is something that exists not only here and is ready to be analyzed, disassembled, and put back together. Since you are the shipbuilder, you have many choices in how you want to build your ship.
Best Poker Rooms
So, what kind of poker game would you like to “build”?
When you look at the “sea” of poker, you see hundreds, thousands of ships. They are all constructed differently, with the most diverse ideas and intentions. Naturally, you want to emulate the best ships. So you watch videos of the best players, read useful articles, and try to model your ship similarly.
But this is a fatal mistake: no matter how many ships you watch, whether it's hundreds or thousands, even if they are of the highest quality. No amount of studied ships will enable you to build your own ship. Because watching ships and building them are two different things. Even if you see hundreds of ships that have solved the problem of how to construct a ship, how to keep it upright, balance the hull and mast, you will still have to figure these things out anew when building your own. You need to know how to build a ship not only with your thoughts but also with your hands, placing plank by plank.
So that's all you need to know. When “building” your poker game, you will have to solve problems that other people have already solved. You will have to do more than just imitate other people's playing styles. You will need to figure out why their playing style is the way it is before you can create something similar. There is no shortcut in shipbuilding. No matter how frustrating it is, you will have to go through the entire construction process yourself.
Using Wood
Since you entered the world of shipbuilding, you received a pile of planks. You were told: “Here is your wood, maybe it's not a lot, but it's the same amount that the best builders get. From these resources, you have to build your best ship. Good luck.”
You might think this is silly. After all, you don't have the skills that the best players in the world have: speed, intuition, “reading.”
But remember, in this metaphor, you are not the ship. The ship is an external object; you are just the builder. Look at what is written in the metaphor: we all get the same pile of wood – hands. We all examine the same hands, with the same frequency, and over a long enough period, both we and the best players in the world will get aces, kings, or T9s the same number of times. The only difference is what we do with those hands.
The most limited resources are good hands. In the long run, everyone gets the same good hands, with the same frequency. It only depends on you how you use these hands during the game, turning the flop, turn, river, between your flat calls, raises, and slow play, making small or big bets, etc. This is the structure of the game.
Well, the real action in poker starts when you already know how to exploit. Exploitation is noticing the weak points of opponents' ships 
. But you can't exploit someone else without first examining your weaknesses. It's like shooting cannons – first, you need to make a hole in the ship, then you can fire. Of course, the opponent can easily hit that hole too. Attacking opens you up to counterattack. It's a natural process of offense and defense.
We have to decide how to allocate our hands to create a defensive structure in our game. This is the foundation of our ship, and we want it to be strong, well-fortified in all directions, so that no simple or medium strategy can hurt us. Once we create a powerful foundation, we can start opening up, making “holes” from which we can attack. We will choose those that are most advantageous against the current ship, consistently revealing other weak spots.
When you start playing poker, you face the decision of how best to use your hands. Will you use them to strengthen your defense, or will you use them to play aggressively? The best players skillfully exploit both strategies, both attacking the opponent and defending their ship. In the end, with each hand, you will have to use either one or the other action.
