On Being (a) Professional — Part II

Last time we talked about my ideas on how time management have changed over the time I’ve been a professional poker player. I went from being very carefree and lackadaisical with my time to scheduling more often and holding myself to the schedules that I set with my family. In addition to that skill that I’ve learned, I’ve learned some others throughout my time as a professional poker player. One of those is learning how to study.

One of the best things that the online game introduced to the poker world was an academic approach to poker. Because of immediately available hand histories, it became possible to quantify the game in a much deeper way. Before online poker, players had a pretty good idea of what kind of hands to play from which position. You could follow that or not, but there were some guidelines developed. You could also know how often a flush draw would hit or how your hand would fare against other hands.

After online poker, you could gather so many statistics that you could only guess at before and that made a huge difference in the academic approach to the game. For instance, if I asked you, pre-Internet poker, how often you check-raised the flop after you defended your big blind in a heads-up pot, you could maybe guess at it. Now, if you are using PokerTracker or Hold‘Em Manager, you have that information at your fingertips at any given moment. In fact, you could even see how often you’ve done it over your lifetime, your first 100,000 hands, your last 100,000 hands, etcetera. In addition, you could see what your winrate is in those hands and if you have different flop check-raising percentages for the first 100,000 hands as compared to your last 100,000 hands, you can compare those win rates and perhaps extrapolate an optimal flop check-raising range from those statistics. Truly, if you have enough hands with any given player, you could generate optimal ranges in very specific situations against that particular opponent. For instance, you could discern what hands you should three-bet on the button versus their cutoff opening range, or what hands you should four-bet when they have three-bet your under-the-gun (UTG) open. All of this information is powerful if you know what to do with it.

Unfortunately, this was never my strong suit. I’m not a very good number cruncher, and I generally used the data collection for more broad strategy choices instead of very specific tactical ones. This isn’t to say that I didn’t put in work away from the table. I would discuss hands with friends and on forums, but I was less sophisticated in my analysis than many people and that led to my falling off a bit on some of the more technical aspects of the game. In addition to that, there were definitely times in my career where I was more lackadaisical with my off the table work than I should have been. It’s not hard to do. In fact, I would guess that most people, when they are running well and having great results, tend to fall into the same pattern. If everything you’re doing works whenever you do it, why would you consider changing anything you’re doing. Conversely, if everything is going wrong and you are losing consistently for a little while, you may just think that you’re going through a streak of bad luck and there’s nothing you can do to fix it. Truthfully, though, the times when it’s most necessary to put in the work away from the table are precisely those times when you’re crushing the game or getting crushed. The highs of running well and the lows of running poorly can obscure mistakes that you’re making at the table. Only when you can properly divorce yourself from the results of a hand or session and look at it in the sober light of day can you get a true idea of how you’ve been playing. In addition, anybody who tells you that he “played perfectly” is feeding you a line. They might not know that what they said is nonsense, but it is. Poker players make mistakes all of the time because it’s an incomplete information game. We can try our best to make perfect decisions with the information we have at our fingertips, but it’s impossible as of right now to play perfectly in every situation.

This is where the off the table work comes into play. Looking back at the hands you’ve played in a session, especially the few key hands that came up, won’t take that long and can go a long way towards improving your play in the future. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to gather the type of data you can gather in the online game when playing live, requiring you to rely on your memory or your notes when recalling hand histories, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The insights you gain into your game when you take a serious look at the tactics of the hands you play and the overall strategy you’re applying go a long way to helping you be a successful poker player and, therefore, a successful professional. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG.