Poker New Year’s Resolutions

The new year is almost upon us, and it’s time for resolutions. Sure, you can drop 30 pounds and stop smoking, but that stuff is boring. What you really want in 2013 is to become a much better poker player, right?

If you would like to step up your game, here are a couple of suggested resolutions for you.

Resolution No. 1. After every session, write down two or three hands. Go home, dissect them, and for each hand figure out what the optimal play would be.
This is the most fundamental exercise a poker player can do. There is no better way to improve your game, and yet most players don’t bother.

After every session, write down a few notable hands. Then, when you get home, spend 20-30 minutes on each hand trying to figure out exactly what your opponent was doing. Let’s say I played the following hand.

A loose player opened to $20 from middle position, and I called on the button with Q-J. The blinds folded.

The flop came 10-7-3. He bet $25, and I called.

The turn was a queen. He checked, I bet $50, and he folded.

First I’d write down all the hands I thought my opponent might open raise from middle position. If it’s a whole lot of hands, I might just write down a frequency (for example, he’d raise with 30 percent of hands).

Next I’d write down all the hands he’d bet the flop with. This could be everything he raised preflop with, it could be only hands that hit the board, or it could be somewhere in between. It might include big hands like top set or it might not. This is a bit of a guess. I just make the best guess I can.

Next I’d write down all the hands he’d check the turn with.

Now comes the decision point. Bet the turn or not? And if so, how much?

First, decide what a bet would accomplish. Are you trying to get calls from worse hands or folds from better hands? (In this case with top pair, you’d likely be going for calls from worse hands.) Then go through each hand in your opponent’s range and decide how your opponent might respond to a bet.

Finally, compare your breakdown to your stated purpose. If you are trying to get worse hands to call, when you go through your list, do you in fact get plenty of calls from worse hands? Or do few worse hands call, and therefore is the bet too ambitious?

This exercise does two great things for you. First, it forces you to identify a purpose for your bets. Second, it teaches you how to break down your opponent’s hand range into its component pieces to get a real idea of how your bets work (or don’t work) to meet your goals.

A few tips for this exercise:

Don’t focus solely on bad beat or cooler hands. Yes, I know you ran your nut flush into a full house and then that jerk across the table cracked your aces with T-8 after getting all-in preflop. I’m not interested. These hands often don’t offer much to learn from.

Look at turn decisions. In my example hand, I bet top pair on the turn, my opponent folded, and that was it. These hands may pass by you unnoticed, but there’s a lot to learn from hands like this one. The turn is where you really start to make money in no-limit hold’em. Many players make “automatic” plays on the turn that are errors. This exercise forces you to justify every single bet you make. There’s no better way to find leaks than this.

Actually write the hands down. You will forget the details of a hand if you don’t write it down immediately afterwards. So suck it up, get out your pen and paper, and write it down before your memory gets hazy.

If you go through this process twice a week throughout 2013, I promise you will be a much better player at the end of the year than you are today. If you put in this type of work, it’s virtually impossible not to get better.

Resolution No. 2. Watch a select few opponents and really learn what makes them tick.
Most poker players spend their mental energy thinking about all the wrong things — willing certain cards to hit the board chief among them.

It’s not about the cards. It’s about your opponents.

You’ll get a lot better at poker this year if you spend the time to really figure out what makes your opponents tick. What plays do they make in what situations and, even more importantly, why?

I recommend you pick one player in your regular game. This should be a player you consider to be fairly good and also one who plays all the time. Stop watching everyone else. Watch only your selected player. Dissect this player’s strategy. Look at betting frequencies and raising frequencies. Look at how this player reacts to different board textures. What is their approach with top pair? How frequently do they slow play big hands? When they get raised on the turn and river, do they usually fold or call?

Take note of patterns. Say you notice that your opponent likes to play pot control lines with top pair. Also say you notice that this player makes a peculiar non-raise with a strong flush. Do these two observations suggest that your opponent irrationally fears getting money in bad?

The goal is to tie together a set of tangible observations with some inductive reasoning about why your opponent is making certain decisions.

Once you understand the patterns and you have some insight into your opponent’s thought process, you are ready to take advantage of it.

In general, I think it’s better to get deep observations on a few players than shallow observations (for example, tight/loose or aggressive/passive) on many. The deep observations are the ones that allow you to get the best of it in the big money decisions on the turn and river. And also deep observations offer insight into player psychology that may help you gain advantages over players you have never met before.

Final Thoughts

The coming year offers you a tremendous opportunity to improve at poker and profit. Online poker is coming to the United States soon, starting in Nevada, and more live cardrooms are popping up all the time.

You can improve significantly in one year, but only if you put in the work. If you pledge to keep these two resolutions all year, you will see your thought process improve. Your results will follow. ♠

Ed’s newest book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.