Goals: Part 3 - Improving Technical Skill at NLH

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Although the start of New Year is long past, this column will continue to focus on goal setting. It is often effective to set up annual goals, which are then broken down into monthly chunks. The monthly chunks can be further divided into smaller bites for each week or even each day.

In the previous column I recommended the use of SMART goals. This acronym states that your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time sensitive. While it is a useful exercise to set life goals, my focus in this column will be on improving your technical poker skills. Assuming that you are like the vast majority of current players, you will focus on no-limit hold’em. (I have always advocated learning other games as well… more on that in future columns.)

Unless you are a virtual beginner, don’t think that improvement will be easy. It will demand a commitment to regular, focused study. There are a variety of good sources of information. These include printed materials (books and magazines,) videos and podcasts, websites, computer programs and solvers, and your fellow poker players.
Let’s examine these briefly.

Card Player is the best of the magazines and also has a good website. It is available for free in many casinos and cardrooms. (Full disclosure: I have no direct involvement or investment in any of the products or sites I will recommend below, however, I do write for Card Player and am happy to see them flourish.)

Many of the best books generally come from the publishers TwoPlusTwo and D&B. These publishers also have good websites, with a lot of free content. I won’t try to select specific titles since they cover a variety of topics at a variety of levels. Top authors include Dan Harrington, Jonathan Little and David Sklansky. I love printed material because it is easy to review, highlight and annotate. Unfortunately, it can also become dated fairly quickly. Techniques that might have been considered cutting edge 10 years ago, are now well-known and will be met by clever counter measures.

There are a seemingly endless stream of videos and podcasts. I generally find those by (in alphabetical order) Jonathan Little, Doug Polk (ably assisted by Ryan Fee and others) and Alec Torelli provide excellent hand analysis. Other good commentators, like Ali Nejad, Mike Sexton, Nick Shulman, and other superstars also review interesting hands. They and other interesting candidates can be found on YouTube, PokerGo, Poker Night in America, WSOP on ESPN, and Live at the Bike! This quantity of high-quality analysis of hands played by real players in tournaments and cash games was totally unavailable during the time I was first learning poker.

Lastly, there are a variety of poker solving programs. I can’t claim too much familiarity with them, and their various features. The list includes Piosolver and PokerSnowie, which are both said to be excellent. You can also attempt to work out solutions on your own. Doug Polk talks about how much he learned doing this.

Jonathan Little has some webinars that walk you through specific situation. Here is an example that will get you started with analyzing specific situations. For example, you are the hijack, in a nine-handed cash game with 100 big blinds. You make your normal raise, say 3.5 big blinds, and only the big blind calls.

Deal a flop at random or specify one that interests you. The BB checks. Now note down your entire hijack preflop raising range. (If you don’t have a reasonable idea of what this range is, many of the above sources have free preflop tables available for you to study or print out. It should probably include about 25 percent of starting hands.) You have a choice of betting a variety of amounts or checking behind.

Try to develop a strategy for what you would do with every hand on this particular flop. Then review your strategy to see if it is balanced. You should bet with value hands and bluffs or semi-bluffs. If you decide to have hands to check back, you should have a few strong hands and reasonable draws that you check. If not, your opponent can exploit you by betting the turn knowing you are weak. I have summarized a very complicated procedure, and in some future columns, I will walk you through a few of these exercises in much more detail.

Devote a reasonable amount of your poker time to study. Select from the above sources and create SMART goals for learning from them. In the next column, I will shift away from studying the technical aspects of poker and move on to studying the psychological aspects. ♠

Steve ‘Zee’ Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful gamesplayer. He has been a full-time gambler for over 35 years. With two WSOP bracelets and few million in tournament cashes, he is easing into retirement. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at some major tournaments and playing in cash games in Vegas. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A in New York City -The Library near Houston and Doc Holliday’s on 9th St. are his favorites.