Five Reasons You Should Not Game Select

Tougher competition forces you to improve (or lose)

With tough competition, you have to get better. You have to outthink, outplay, out-observe, and out-adjust a much better class of player. Everything needs to be at peak level. This means quicker and more accurate adjustments just to survive. Winning makes you go beyond that.

To use an analogy, imagine yourself back in school. You get an email from your friend asking you about your ten-page research paper. What research paper?! In a frenzied panic, you annihilate the assignment. You’ve never been more focused because you absolutely must be focused. Failure is not an option.

After surviving the assignment, you realize that optimizing yourself and your situation and potential for improvement is all about restrictions. You sit down that night to write the first ten pages of that poker memoir you have been putting off forever. Hey, you just wrote ten pages the night before. Just as you finish the first paragraph, you get a call from your buddy offering to buy you a fine soda to celebrate your accomplishment and completing your research papers. Screw the paper! It’s time to unwind a bit. Your memoir goes unfinished, yet again.

What has happened here? The two cases are the same. Ten pages. One day.

The difference is that the restrictions were not realistic. If you leave to grab a Dr. Pepper, then there are no consequences. Much like losing a large chunk of your bankroll in a situation that could be prevented with study, you’ll simply care less at your normal level. If you feel comfortable, then you aren’t restricted. If you aren’t realistically restricted, then in all likelihood, the same drive that had you crank out a ten-pager in an evening isn’t there. Apply the same idea to poker. Play a higher game. Play a game that your bankroll can just barely stand. Challenge yourself to stay in that field. Soon, you’ll be ready to celebrate…(just kidding, you keep moving up!).

You will make more money when you win

You don’t have to be Bill Chen to figure out that if you play higher, you have the potential to earn more profit. Every successful preflop bluff feels significant to you. The same winrate at a higher limit means more money. That money can be leveraged to win even more money. It’s exciting!

You are intrinsically motivated to win.

This doesn’t mean that you lose the sight of proper reraise bluffing frequencies. It means that you are so excited to learn how to maximize your expected value that you sign up for a training site that teaches you how to play more effectively. You spend the hour a day studying. You talk with poker buddies about the way they think about spots.

None of this happens without proper motivation and for many professional poker players, that comes in the form of money. Other players are excited by what the money represents: mental superiority.

You do not limit yourself to a particular earning potential

It stands to reason that if you stay at the same limit that your winnings are capped in light of a few variables, winrate and number of hands played per time period.

You might increase your skill set over time, but we know there’s no panic behind it. How quickly will a gradual increase at your normal limit help you to move to the next limit? How will those small upticks in your bankroll change your life?

If you are honest with yourself, then you see that they don’t.

The solution is moving up to where the play matters. If you can unlock a higher earning potential by optimally leveraging your bankroll, perhaps borrowing an algorithm like the Kelly Criteria, then you maximize your overall expected value.

Overall expected value (EV) goes well beyond a single session. The best poker player realizes that poker does not begin with each seating at the table; nor does a session end when you leave the table. A poker career is a constant fluctuation of bankroll and knowledge relative to your competition. Continually doing your best to maximize your earning potential is a fantastic way to make sure that you realize your overall expected value.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean playing a game wherein your bankroll is a single buy-in. Far from it.

What this means is that using your bankroll to its full potential is paramount to long term poker success. Anything else that is inherently complacent or scared limits you. Complacency associated with hyper-game selection is limiting you as a player and as a person within the game of poker.

If you have poker related goals, then not maximizing earnings potential is keeping you from them. It’s that simple.

Learn by doing, the poker version

Probably the scariest part of a poker player’s career is facing a nemesis. You know the player. He always seems to have the best of it when the money goes in and he always seems to know when you are check-raise bluffing the flop and responds with those annoying little flop reraises — with bluffs and with value hands! OK, you say. Let’s get him. You study his tendencies. You replicate his tenacity in pots. You put your opposition in similar difficult situations.

Wait. Did you just get better? Yup! Rinse and repeat. The idea is to not blow your bankroll at the same time. A great way to find better competition for a lower price is to try a heads-up table.

Heads-up games are chalked full of marginal spots and great players. If you do the sitting, as opposed to the predatory or game selecting method of waiting to play, then it’s much more likely you will encounter more talented competition. Even at the $100 buy-in level online, you are likely to encounter sophisticated play and better yourself.

Think of it like a personal poker lesson with an earnings potential. Sounds awesome. Embrace the challenge as a heightened form of the aggression you typically encounter and learn how to adapt. Better adaptations means a higher winrate and you can carry that idea to higher stakes games.

Test yourself

One theme tied to proper game selection is the fact that you should be continually testing yourself. Find the wall and figure out how to get past it. This “wall” appears in many forms: bankroll, poker knowledge, competition pool, the actual game and more.
Here’s a poker secret. You are always the wall. In some form, you are the limiting factor.

Therefore, it’s important that you test your limitations and begin to tear them down and to play past them. The quicker you complete each mini-test and the more you learn from it (take notes, review and repeat), the better you become.

The quicker you better your play, the more money you make.

You may ask yourself why everyone doesn’t practice these five simple reasons not to game select. The fact is that they’re all scary as hell. Sounds like test number one.
Good luck! ♠

Reid Young is a lead poker video instructor at TransformPoker.com. For more detailed (and free) information on game selection and other poker strategy, visit blog.transformpoker.com