Matt Berkey: High-Stakes Pro Explains Why Beginners Should Treat Poker Like Investing

High-stakes regular Matt Berkey, the founder of the popular Solve for Why training site, doesn’t need much of an introduction. The Pennsylvania native has been playing in the highest stakes games in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and on various live streams for over a decade.

Berkey’s profile got even bigger after launching a daily podcast show called Only Friends. The gregarious circle of rabid poker freaks, geeks, and special guests was inspired by Berkey’s love for sports fanatics’ roundtables airing weekly across ESPN and FOX Sports, and as a result it has gained a considerable audience on YouTube, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.

The show won last year’s Global Poker Award for best podcast with its cast of characters, hosted by Berkey and featuring Melissa Schubert, Landon Tice, Conrad Simpson, and others.

Never one to shy away from a dispute or controversy, the 41-year-old has always been a vocal advocate for challenging poker’s norms to elevate the conversation to the next level and has been quick to point out those that are not serving the players and the community ethically.

Last spring, when his poker academy Solve for Why was challenged by high-stakes reg Nikhil “Nik Airball” Arcot, Berkey defended his honor with a mano-a-mano heads-up battle that resulted in a satisfying million-dollar uptick to his bankroll.

Berkey recently took time away from the daily poker grind, the podcast, and his New Year fitness challenge to talk to Card Player about how beginning players can get over the initial hump and find their way in poker.

Craig Tapscott: What is one of the main leaks you see players have after years of working with private students and interacting with your training academy at Solve for Why?

Matt Berkey: The first thing that comes to mind is that many players struggle with bet sizing at different points in a hand, from start to finish. The main problem is they don’t have a baseline from which to start. They usually don’t know what size to choose, and it will just be haphazard and random.

It’s essential to have a good, strong foundation and understand why you’re betting to begin with. That will often lead you to choose the proper sizing for that spot.

That being said, it’s always tricky to distill a game like no-limit hold’em down to a handful of areas that people struggle with in a specific way, but I’ll try.

CT: Okay, what are the most common leaks across the board?

MB: The players deep within the early learning phases will mostly struggle with the guidelines. And I’m using guidelines as a very generic term. In the sense that most of us come to the game intuitively, we try to just feel our way through, as far as where the thresholds are.

Let’s think about it like basic investment strategies. You know you want to fire a lot of money into an opportunity where you expect a high return, and you want to be very conservative or not invest in situations where you expect no return.

And I don’t think poker is much different. The issue is that people aren’t very educated in these tactics. What you’re asked to do when you’re playing a game this deep is make a bunch of investment decisions over and over, hand after hand, etc. Are they prepared enough to mechanically execute these decisions?

Beginners suffer most within the guidelines for range construction. They don’t know what to open from what position, they don’t know where to three-bet from what position, and the lazy choices often become the most common choice. These choices usually include limping preflop instead of raising, calling preflop instead of three-betting, etc.

CT: That sounds like a pretty weak approach to the game, but most of us started there.

MB: It is. Essentially, most players new to the game will gravitate towards passive play, because it is less of an investment, and they’re hedging their bets. Secondly, they have no concept of what particular hands are worth, and bet sizing is all over the place from preflop to post-flop to the river. Beginners are just often going to have massive sizing tells.

CT: Such as?

MB: The lazy version is that they bet big with a good hand and small with a bad hand or check too much with all the hands in between. Mechanically, those will be the two largest areas, range construction, and bet sizing, that I think beginners will make the most errors.

CT: What should beginners be hyper-focused on to get up to speed quickly?

MB: An understanding of equity, how it’s derived, how it’s divided, and how it is exchanged within the rules of the game. And that’s really what, at a math level, this game distills down to.

When they’re beginning, most people are entirely unaware of equity as a concept. As they become more experienced, they see equity as just the raw number of how often your hand improves, which isn’t really correct either.

The most accurate definition of equity is how much pot share your hand currently holds. In other words, how often will your hand hold up at showdown. Sometimes, that requires improving, but other times, you just have the best hand in that moment.

For example, many players start to make grave errors when they have the nut flush draw. They assume that they only have 38% equity because that’s how often they make a flush, forgetting that when they make a pair of aces, it may be good, or even their ace high may be good. This means their hand is closer to 60% equity against the range of hands their opponent could hold! I think understating equity is the entry point to tackling these other surface issues.

CT: What are some of the problems that arise when you begin to share these concepts with students?

MB: One of the most significant errors that occurs from a teaching standpoint is you try to put a Band-Aid on the simple fixes: the range construction, bet sizing, and the passive play or too loose play, whatever the case may be. So, my challenge has been to create a mechanic that students can follow.

You show them a chart or a one-size bet strategy and share with them that you will only raise this “X” amount preflop. You’re only going to raise or fold, no more limping. You’re only going to three-bet specific hand ranges from these positions, etc.

You reel them in mechanically and give them a definitive reason as to why these mechanics are sound. Then, as they grow, they learn how to deviate from that.

CT: It’s very much based on the equity and the return on investment—more than I may have ever realized.

MB: Yes. At the end of the day, it’s the equity that determines how much money we can freely put into a pot.

CT: What happens when a player suffers a big downswing and starts to blame their game when it’s simply variance.

MB: That’s when the mental aspect of their game needs to be the strongest. It’s so important in the scheme of things. It’s one of those things where most players stick a pin in it until they get good enough at poker to address it. But the truth is, it’s something that everybody probably should be working on to some degree all the time. The mental game helps you understand these more significant concepts in many ways.

CT: How so?

MB: When you have a solid mental game, you become calmer when you lose a flip. You become a lot more present whenever somebody sucks out on you on the river. You recognize that and understand it’s just an outcome that happens.

We like to throw around a lot of platitudes, such as, ‘It’s all about the long run, or that’s supposed to happen sometimes, or 20% of the time your aces get cracked by kings.’ We do that to soothe an emotional response to a player who doesn’t have that much of a clue about what’s going on.

CT: I have seen many players freak out over a bad beat or a downswing, mainly because they have invested so much into evaluating themselves as a ‘great’ player, which may or may not be accurate.

MB: The mental game breaks down because there’s a lack of information there. Fear and emotion fill that void when information and knowledge are absent.

It’s best to start early in your career by understanding your mental development in the game. You work on the little things and then understand the more extensive and profound concepts. These become keystones in your game, and as you begin to beat certain levels, you’ll be pretty far ahead of most players.

CT: You recently posted your ROI graph for last year.

MB: I did. I played 1,200 hours last year and made about 75% of my bottom line in the first 400 hours. The following 800 hours of the year were pretty much break-even. I had a bunch of ups and downs, but if you look at hour 401 compared to hour 1201, I made no money. So, you have to be able to come to grips with the fact it’s just variance.

CT: How best does a somewhat beginning player walk away from reading this article and adapt the information you shared to improve their game and climb the stakes?

MB: Players are just calibrating their game for the environment that they’re in, from low stakes all the way up. And when it comes to what to study, they should adjust as they learn and grow.

You have to learn to examine different situations or spots. It takes being willing to be exploratory and not just taking everything at face value. But the truth is, even if you took everything at face value, it doesn’t replicate your actual environment when you’re beginning. But eventually, it’s still going to embed in you a lot of powerful principles that you can always defer back to as you come up through the stakes.

CT: So, it’s like a funnel as you progress up the stakes, getting narrower as you rise?

MB: The lowest stakes will be the ones that are the most wide open. And then it will funnel towards some of the more challenging games you’re going to play where everybody is pretty experienced and studied, and then eventually, it will open back up again. So maybe it’s more like an hourglass, because there’s a lot in common with private high stakes and the lowest stakes entry points.

CT: What do you mean?

MB: Private high-stakes games are the lowest entry point for rich people, and you start to see that chaotic environment where there’s a lot of multi-way pots. People at that level of wealth don’t respect money, and they certainly don’t give a crap about hand ranges. They’re just playing any two when they feel like it. The bottom line is a lot of emotion is driving their decisions.

So now, as the studied pro who’s come full circle, you have to draw back on your experiences as to how to proceed in the hands dealt to you in those games. It’s very similar to when you were just first starting as a newbie, and many players at the lowest stakes will also play any two cards in those games.

You can follow Berkey on Twitter/X @berkey11, watch the Only Friends Podcast on YouTube, and learn from him and other top pros at SolveForWhy.io. ♠