Four Reasons You Need Poker Playing Friends

Organizing all of your poker resources is paramount to scratching the surface of all the brain-stuffing work a solid poker player needs to stay on top of the game. There is poker software, books, training sites, and (perhaps most importantly) poker friends. Talented poker friends are an invaluable resource when tackling that vast and ever expanding total body of poker knowledge. There are four main ways that a mutually beneficial relationship helps your poker game.

Players Think Differently About the Game

Much of the time, different players consider different options in different spots. Instead of checking back bottom pair and hoping it’s good enough to win you a showdown at the river, have you considered betting with it with the sole intention of inducing a check-raise bluff? What about over betting all-in for five times the pot?

If either of those options sound ridiculous to you in a given situation, then perhaps you have yet to analyze fully the scenario and the game. There’s more value in choosing the best possible play, but if you assume that the best play is one you are used to making, betting two-thirds of the pot, for example, then you will miss value and your game suffers — most of the time without you even realizing it!

Having another player in your corner who thinks differently about the game is a boon to your play, as the total analysis is even more likely to be fleshed out. The more poker friends you have discussing a single hand, the more likely the group of players is to arrive at the correct decision. Poker forums mimic this type of relationship, but they can be secretive. Find a poker friend and talk about all decision points in a hand, particularly if you believe them to be trivial. Just to start, consider your river bet size, how often you should continuation bet a particular hand on a particular board, and what hands you should be open raising preflop in a particular position.

Sharing Motivation

Studying poker is hardly the most glamourous part of being a professional. For people who aren’t as innately drawn to the nearly infinitely long and puzzling aspects of the game, there are always friends. Having a poker study buddy is like pairing up with another person to exercise. Invariably, one day is going to come when one of you just won’t feel like working to improve yourself. Those are the days when a friend can help push you beyond complacency. Those days have some serious value to your game. Instead of retaining your current level of study or regressing a bit (forgetting), you improve!

Set regular study times with your poker friends. That way you have an obligation to one another to study and to keep one another interested in studying. We just saw how having more players in the mix has a value above zero, and so you have motivation to keep your friends motivated. Creating and fostering a helpful situation that self-perpetuates study goes a long way to improving your poker game.

Assign reading to the group and make your meeting the bulk of the discussion. If people need to go to the meeting to get the most out of the group, then you will continue to meet and continue the success and improvement that comes with sharing motivations with your poker friends.

A Poker Player’s Understanding and Controlling Tilt

OK, so nobody (I mean nobody) wants to hear a bad beat story. However, there are times when you just run aces into a set on the bubble of a tournament three times in a row and feel like poker is out to get you. At any given skill level, your play might suffer from the emotional load of dealing with the bad side of variance. You might not make that crazy (and slightly profitable) all-in bluff that you would have made if you were up money on your session. If you can’t blow off some steam, then you might have trouble getting back to playing your best game.

Having a poker buddy to bring you back to reality and to deal with the sometimes sickening variance of the game is necessary if you have tilt issues. The sooner you get back to an even keel, then sooner you’re able to use all that knowledge from your studies to its fullest potential. Just remember, for listening to all that complaining, you had better treat your poker buddy to dinner!

Challengers!

Professional poker is always competitive. Every day you hit the felt, you are facing other players who, for the most part, are there to take your chips. That can be motivating in a way, but away from the table, that motivation might fade. My favorite way to work with a friend to better both of your poker games is using the “race to the top” mentality of studying poker. As your friend improves, try to be better, and if he sees you getting better than him, then he tries to get better, and so on.

This type of mentality usually occurs naturally, but make sure to emphasize the advantages of competition in your studies. Set up contests between you and a poker friend to have everyone reaching toward the same well-defined goal. For example, you might have everyone justify their 100 big blind preflop raising range from the cutoff against different subsets of opponent types. The goals should be a lot of work, but also a goal toward which you both strive. If you really want to add some motivation, then make a proposition bet about which of you will have the better strategy for a particular spot by the end of the week. The player with the best strategy wins a non-negligible amount of money from the other player!

Having a hard working poker friend against whom you can measure your rate of improvement is one of the best ways to keep yourself growing as a player, and it’s fun. The challenge of being better than your peers is low variance and highly profitable, a great source of motivation and a great return on your time investment. One of the best parts about working with a poker friend is that you know the other player is competitive as well and you can use each others’ competitive drive to better yourselves.

Bonus — Friends, Groups, and Brain Trusts

As you make more poker study friends and find more groups of players with whom you can study, you will want to curate your poker friends and organize the most motivated ones into a brain trust. After all, if you’re studying all day, that isn’t very profitable!
Find the hardest working, most motivated (and motivating) poker players to be around, and make sure that you hold up your end of the study. If you work to create a knowledgeable and motivational environment for your poker study, along with some friends, then you will rapidly improve your play. ♠

Reid Young is a successful cash game player and poker coach. He is the founder of TransformPoker.com.