One Thing You Can Do Right Now to Raise Your Game

Sometimes the truth is so self-evident, so obvious, and so clear as to lack any sense of profundity at all. It's just there and all we need do is grab it and hold fast to it with all of our might. I'm going to share one of these truths with you today, although I know that many readers will shout out that this is something every player knows even if he is just beginning to play poker.

And, they're right. Each and every poker player should know this, and I'd be shocked to find more than a handful who lack this ability. But there is frequently a big disconnect in life between information we may have gathered and what I refer to as know-how, which Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines as "knowledge of how to do something smoothly and efficiently."

If you can truthfully answer "yes" to the following question, there's no need for you to read any further. Just skip over the remainder of this column and pay me a visit next issue, when I'll be talking about something else entirely. But if your answer is less than an unequivocal "yes," stick around and keep reading.

Do you play your best game all the time?

There. That's as simple and unequivocal a question as I could hope to ask you. But if you don't play your best game all the time, you should ask yourself why, because if you were somehow able to measure the difference between your best game and a lesser level of play from time to time, you could calculate the money you are giving away by playing less than your best game.

If you want to raise your game, you have to play your best game, and not slip from that high pedestal you're perched on when you're playing well. This, after all, shouldn't prove too difficult to do. No new skills are required. You don't have to learn any new ploys to spring on your unsuspecting opponents, and you needn't have to train your mind to perform a single statistical calculation in the midst of a poker hand. All you have to do to upgrade your game is to play as well as you can. And why wouldn't you want to? Aside from any social gratification the game provides, if you're playing poker to win money, shouldn't you want to play your best?

Authorities say a winning professional poker player can expect to win one big bet per hour in a midlimit game. But suppose you always played your best – never faltering – while your opponents played the way they do right now: Some play well, and some never play as well as they can for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from drinking at the table, to a kind of boredom that sets in and gives way to fancy plays as a way to keep themselves entertained, to trying to impress the cool redhead across the table. A few otherwise skillful players even believe in hunches and will cold-call a raise with 9-7 suited because … well, they just have a hunch. Never mind that most of the time the flop is not going to hit their 9-7 at least twice – as it probably needs to – and when they gaze up at a board that just kicked them to the curb, they'll eventually realize they cold-called a raise with 9 high. Ugh!

Now, if you're playing very high limits, that one-big-bet-per-hour guideline goes right out the window. Let's assume you're playing $2,000-$4,000 Texas hold'em against a group of opponents who know everything you do about poker and possibly more. But suppose you never played less than your best, while they slipped every so often. Let's imagine that they slip off their best game very infrequently, maybe once a week, or less. So, if you play perfectly and they play just a micromeasure off center, you might be able to beat that game for one big bet a week, or maybe even two. If you could maintain that razor-thin edge, you'd win somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000 annually. One of the interesting things about poker is how razor-thin edges can turn into large sums of money at the end of the day.

In a game like that, you aren't allowed the latitude to play a hunch hand. If you do, you're toast. You can get away with it in low- and midlimit games because many of your opponents are also playing less than perfectly enough of the time to underwrite whatever off-center adjustments you make in your own game. In essence, they're giving back the money you gave to them.

Players who stick with their best game have an almost invisible edge. It's one you'll never even see, no matter how closely you watch the game. You won't be able to assess that Joe plays perfectly all week while Tony made one error early Tuesday morning, and that's the reason Joe makes $400,000 a year while Tony is frantically dog-paddling to keep his head above water. One bet a week won't make or break you in a low- or midlimit game. The edge there is not that close, and most of your opponents play below their skill level a good portion of the time, too. But that's the very reason you can significantly increase the amount of money you're earning without any additional arrows in your quiver at all. Just play well all the time, and never, never go off line.

The choice is yours, just as it's up to me and every other poker player you run into at the table. And when it's fully and completely our choice – when we have no one to lay the blame on but ourselves, when we can't deflect the results we achieve because at the end of the day we either played up to our potential or we didn't – there's nowhere to run and hide when we scurry through the dark and secret caverns of our minds and think about what we achieved or why we failed.

But we never have to go into that dark side – never. All it requires to keep the light shining is to use our desire and force of will to turn knowledge into know-how and apply it. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Raise your game with Lou Krieger at http://www.royalvegaspoker.com. His newest book, Winning Omaha/8 Poker, is available through Card Player.