As a poker coach, I've had a wide variety of players ask me for advice. Some are middle-limit players who are trying to take their games to the next level. Some are regulars on the tournament circuit who just want to bounce ideas around. Some are rank beginners. I've found, however, that whatever a player's skill level, his strategy is largely formed by how he learned to play poker in the first place.
There are generally three methods that players use to learn poker. One method is to start by playing every hand. In all likelihood, this will initially result in a large loss of money. But then our player will begin to play fewer and fewer hands until, eventually, he hits the sweet spot, where he can actually turn a profit. A benefit of this method is that it forces the beginner to learn how to play with subpar holdings. A downside is that he may go broke before he ever learns how to play well.
A second approach is to start out playing extremely tight, probably taking a small loss or grinding out a small profit almost every session, with very few swings toward the extremes. As the new player gains experience, he gradually adds more and more hands until, eventually, he becomes a tough player, and is not just a rock playing only the nuts. This is the approach I took, and consequently I wrote about it in great detail in my book
The Making of a Poker Player. The best aspect of learning in this manner is that a new player is likely to stay in action long enough to become quite strong. The downside is that he needs a lot of discipline to pull it off, and then after he does pull it off, he must learn to then shed the overly tight tendencies that have been ingrained in his system in order to become truly great. As Yoda said, he must unlearn what he has learned.
The third approach is probably the least common, but it just might be the best of all. The new player learns poker by trying to play well from the very beginning. It sounds so simple, it's a wonder that more people don't go this route. Just imagine a player sitting down to his first limit hold'em game, and seeing the action fold to the cutoff, who raises. Now, our new player looks down at K-Q offsuit. Most of the books, including mine, recommend that a beginner fold this questionable hand to a raise. But what if the new player decides that he wants to gain the experience of playing effective, aggressive poker from day one, and he's willing to accept some losses in order to make this happen? Then, he will reraise in this situation, which is clearly the correct play for a knowledgeable player. Would that really hamper our novice's development very much? If he is smart enough, and ready to stomach a lot of mistakes early on, especially after the flop, maybe aiming for perfect play from the start is indeed the way to go.
One advantage I can see in aiming for perfection is that it might help a player put results in their proper perspective. Let's say a player reraises with that K-Q, and ends up flopping a king and losing a whole bunch of bets to the cutoff, who happened to have A-K. A beginner who's trying to play tight would take the results of that hand as evidence that he was playing too loose, and will revert to the "beginner's book" of reraising with only premium hands. A beginner who's playing very loose may look at those same results and adjust by cold-calling future raises with his K-Q (probably the worst of the three options), instead of reraising with it. Or, he may just chalk up his lost bets to running into his opponent's big hand and not think twice about what other options he might have had on the flop and beyond. If the new player is trying to play perfect poker, however, he'll look at the results and rethink his strategy. He'll go over all of the reasons for three-betting cutoff raises with K-Q and other hands, and he'll also study the various maneuvers required to save and earn extra bets after the flop. In short, he'll think about all of the things advanced players think about, for all of the right reasons. He might not have the thought process to match an experienced player's right away, but he'll have an excellent chance of getting there quickly.
Any method of learning poker that consists of "trial and error" is going to prove difficult. This is because the results of individual "trials" tell almost nothing about the quality of a person's strategy. If a player loses with his K-Q after three-betting, that doesn't mean he played badly, just as a player who happens to win a hand when playing 9-2 offsuit from under the gun didn't necessarily play his hand well (and, in fact, almost certainly played it poorly). Real trials would have to include hundreds of thousands of hands. A far better method than trial and error is to actually think about how to play various hands in various poker situations; in other words, to sit down and try to work out poker strategy with pencil and paper. Though this is not the way I, nor most people, learned, the method seemed to work pretty well for Chris Ferguson, Bill Chen, and others.
Yes, I recommend in my book that beginners play extremely tight while they're learning the game. I still think this is a valid approach, as I mentioned above. But, if you're a confident beginner - confident in your aptitude to learn a complex game like poker - I recommend trying to play correctly from the outset. Try to make all of the tough decisions, and spend some time evaluating their soundness later. Actually, spend a lot of time before you even sit down at a table, and work out what you think is an ideal strategy. Buy the book
The Mathematics of Poker and put it to use. I now give my full recommendation to playing strong poker from day one. If you even come close to succeeding, your earnings will surpass what you'd get from playing tight, and you'll probably learn a lot more along the way.
Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at www.CardPlayer.com.
