The potential changes to your life are obvious. You can win or lose a lot of money. What you do for work and where you work can change.

The potential to changes to your mind are not obvious, especially to a novice poker player. At the negative end of the spectrum, is developing a destructive compulsive gambling habit. The positive is developing a sense of self-determination and responsibility as well as problem solving abilities. This will be the focus of the article, as it is the only end that I have experienced personally.

If I had to pick one word to express how playing professional poker affected my mind, I’d pick “rewired.” Existing in the extremely meritocratic online poker world has made me very appreciative of personal responsibility and solution oriented thinking. I have often thought about how playing poker is just me and the decisions I make. No bosses, no coworkers, no customers, no bullshit. Other than financial trading, I can’t think of a single way to make serious money that is as free from the influence and prejudices of others. Unlike in the “real world,” your age, gender, race, education, employment history, criminal history, social skills, disability status, country of origin, wealth or influence are completely irrelevant in the online poker world. All those factors that may or may not be relevant to that job you just applied to are likely to come into play, instead of the more important question of, “Will you be good at the tasks presented to you?” In the poker world, that is the only question.

There are really no excuses for a poker player. Either you played well or you didn’t.

Someone with a normal job might be able to explain away poor performance due to a family situation, an illness or other act of God. In poker, you just don’t play if your mind isn’t up to it. Being incapable of determining that is a sign of failure as a poker player. If you need to play because you desperately need the money,  you have already made a big mistake. (If you play poker for most or all of your income, you need several months living expenses at a minimum).  You can be lucky or unlucky in specific situations or specific stretches, but if you aren’t jumping around between games you are underrolled for those downswings are insignificant when you look back in a year or two. Expect that no one will care about your problems and definitely don’t act like you are owed anything. Did your favorite site raise the rake to an unbeatable level? They owe you nothing. Did legal pressures cause poker sites to leave the market en masse? You aren’t entitled to make a living playing online poker. Use that emergency fund and start figuring out other ways to make a living. (That’s the situation I’m in right now)

Millions of hands of poker into my poker playing lifetime, I realize that I have adopted an “everything is my fault” sort of mentality. Of course this isn’t literally true, but a lot of times I end up in a situation that isn’t my fault, but if I take a step back and look at the steps leading up to it, it’s my fault. For example, Full Tilt Poker has a lot of my money and I probably won’t get it back. I did my due diligence and stuck with “trusted sites.” But so what? That sort of event comes with the territory of playing online poker in this day and age. That is my fault. No one made me play online poker.

This line of thinking extends to other things. There’s very little that can’t be chosen in life (caveat: those born with low IQ, born into extreme poverty or born in a totalitarian government). Most excuses along the lines of I really need to do “X but I can’t because of Y,” usually mean that X isn’t actually important enough to give up Y, or that person isn’t looking for a solution. Solutions aren’t always fast or perfect, but they are always better than surrendering yourself to an unfavorable situation and wasting time and energy complaining. A lot of problems are either directly caused by the lack of money or have a solution that can be implemented with money. You’ve come to the right place, if that’s your problem. Read my (yet to be finished) poker guide and other poker strategy resources mentioned within the guide and you are on your way to solving your money problems.

With the advent of the Internet there is a more equal opportunity to make serious amounts of money than there ever has been in human history. This opportunity combined with the problem solving power of wealth is why my next goal in life is to become rich. It’s not terribly important to me how that happens or how fast, but having an income that covers my living expenses, as well as an emergency fund that’s worth a decade of those expenses will be freeing. I don’t want to be someone who is bitter that all these “lucky” people have more money, more freedom and less problems (or at the very least, less stressful problems). I’m going to be one of the “lucky” people.

That’s not to say that I’m some sort of hyperefficient robot that is consistently making optimal decisions in life. I’m not. I make tons of bad decisions, but I’m getting better. Maybe I’ll end up completely broke, or a victim of  a circumstance that would be solved by having money. But if that happens I’ll know where 100% of the blame lies.

Why do people make blocker bets?

Blocker bets can be an effective way of paying less to see another card or get to showdown. If you expect your opponent to bet 65-85% of the pot size but you have a hand that would like to continue, you may be able to make a smaller bet and save yourself a decent amount and still be able to see the next card. Your opponent needs to have a range weighted away from strong hands or you will get raised too often and then you will pay without getting to see another card.

How big is a blocker bet?

There’s no set size, but it has to be large enough that it won’t automatically get raised but smaller than the betsize that you would expect your opponent to make. I’d say between 25-50% of the pot size is pretty standard.

What kind of hands do people make blocker bets with?

Weak hands that would like to continue or see showdown but can’t continue in the face of a large bet are probably the most common in practice. Medium strength draws are the other prime candidate for blocker bets.

What are the downsides of making blocker bets?

Mostly that your small betsizing will betray the strength of your hand or allow you to be pushed out of the hand by an assertive opponent. A blocker bet will be extremely effective against weak opponents who will let you dictate almost every action in the hand. Blocker bets are overused by beginners, who are afraid to make bolder decisions and make a strong thin value bet or turn a draw into a semi-bluff.

For now, a decent way to look through the strategy articles is to go through the Basics category and the Advice category. There is a lot of stuff I’d have killed to know when I started playing poker. I need to change that to display only summaries or titles instead of full articles, but that’s not a simple setting change, so I have to go look up the code.

Example:

John has €145 on the table.

Tim has €105 on the table.

They are in the hand together and all other players have folded.

The fact that John has an extra €40 is irrelevant to the hand. His extra money gives him no advantage and cannot be put into play under any circumstances. (However, advanced players will know that there are times when the number of chips a player has will affect the decisions he makes.) If you were talking about the hand with a friend and wanted to communicate the stack sizes to the hand you would say “The effective stack size is €105.” This is clear and concise. If you don’t understand effective stacksizes, you might end up saying “John has €145 and Tim has €105.” This increases the cognitive load on the listener as well as introducing the potential for them to only remember one of the numbers and get the effective stack size wrong.

How do I avoid fancy play syndrome?

There is a fine line between brilliant play and fancy play syndrome, but there is a very general way to avoid it at low levels, where playing standard tight aggressive poker is still very profitable.

• If you have a strong hand, bet and try to get the money in unless you have reason to believe your opponent will bet or your hand eliminates possibilities of your opponent having a hand that he is able to continue with (such as flopping a set of aces)
• Make your bluffs with equity, at least some overcards, if not a flush or straight draw.
• Avoid making hero call downs for lots of money
• Make your decisions both pre and post flop based off of hand strength. No need to three bet that 52s.

In the long term, you’ll have to outgrow these simplifications, but the general trend for successful poker players is that they start off as very loose and passive losing players, then play too tight, followed by opening up their game and playing slightly too loose, and ultimately settling in a middle ground. This usually means playing about 20-25% of hands in a six max no limit hold’em game.

When is it best to make thin value bets?

While there are exceptions, the river tends to be the best place to make a thin value bet. Marginally good hands are very vulnerable to being drawn out on, so they are better candidates for pot control on earlier streets.

How big should thin value bets be?

The expected value of a given betsize is determined by a simple math formula (although some of the variables you input will always be educated guesses).  There is legitimate concern that you could give away the strength of your hand if you are making different betsizes with slightly good hands than you would with a very strong hand. The fear is less that your opponent will stop calling with worse hands, and more that your opponent will stop calling with worse hands and start bluff raising you.

Are blocker bets and thin value bets the same thing?

Nope, in both we have a hand that is of marginal value, but among other things, blocker bets are small relative to pot size and are made out of position.

What happens if someone raises my thin value bets?

If a clever opponent starts raising your thin value bets, he may have legitimately trapped you with a good hand or he may be bluffing at your perceived weakness. I would default to folding and maybe not betting so thin next time. Calling or reraising (if there is enough money behind) can be a reasonable response, but at lower stakes this is not necessary to play winning poker and will likely result in fancy play syndrome instead of controlled aggression.

If you have already headed to the next logical question, “How do I know my opponent is likely to have a worse hand than me?” you should read my post on ranges in poker. At the bottom of that post is an example of a the process to determine your opponents’ range. Much of that skill will come from playing a lot of poker and consciously thinking about what trends you are seeing in the collective play of your opponents.

P.S. Today’s post was super basic, but I am trying to make this very accommodating to new poker players. The “pain” caused by a more experienced player having to spend 5 second scanning a post to see that it isn’t relevant to his needs is far smaller than the “pain” of a complete novice being surrounded with terms and concepts that he doesn’t understand and feeling overwhelmed. This will be part of a series on very specific types of bets and what that means for you, an aspiring poker player.

EDIT: The post has been updated to reflect that Russia was among the blocked countries.

Slowplaying too much is a common pitfall of beginner poker players. Rather than to simply tell you to stop doing that and be more aggressive, I’ll explain the motivation for slowplaying and a natural outgrowth of that explanation is the reasoning behind using the slowplay sparingly.

Goals of Slowplaying

1. Disguise the strength of your hand
2. Wait for your opponent to make a second best hand
3. Induce bluffs from your opponent

Disguising your hand is a basic goal in poker, but against many (less aggressive) opponents it makes more sense to represent a bluff, not medium strength or completely worthless hand. How often do you or anyone else at a small stakes game flat call the flop, check through the turn and then raise a blank river as a bluff? Almost never. Once you make that river raise, your hand isn’t very disguised at all, and you have very little to show for the part of the hand where it was disguised. If you just raise the flop in the first place, you are mixing up your play by taking a line that could credibly be a strong hand or a weak hand.

Letting your opponent catch up to you is also a good idea in theory. After all, if you have the nuts, letting more cards out will increase the probability that your opponent will make a hand that’s almost as good as yours, right? Not quite. You have flopped a full house on a board with a flush draw. Let’s say that your opponent is drawing to the flush and you have the option of either betting or checking back the flop. He will make his flush ~20% of the time and you stand a good chance of taking his whole stack. But what if he has a low flush and doesn’t stack off? What if he is unwilling to put lots of money in on a paired board? He will likely call a flop bet anyway, so you get money from his uncompleted flush draws and from when he completes the flush. Plus, you get money from all the hands that aren’t draws, and even though you think you are letting your opponent catch up, you may be letting the board get scarier for middle strength hands.

However, if we adjust that situation to where you have bet the flop on a board with a flush draw, received a call and now have the option to either check back or bet on a non-flush turn card, the argument for slowplaying is way more compelling. Now your opponent might fold all of his flush draws

Inducing a bluff at the pot also has value in some situations. The problem is that against players who aren’t very good at hand reading and aren’t very aggressive (I’m describing most microstakes players) is that at best you will get a one small bet out of the play. Most players are just going to take a stab at the pot and when they see that you didn’t fold they will give up on the hand. You are especially unlikely to induce bluffs if there has been a reraise preflop or if there was action on the flop and you are looking to induce bluffs.

My next post (tomorrow, if the hurricane smiles kindly on the power grid) will have a hand that should be played differently against different types of players, and guess what?  One of the correct options will be slowplaying!

So what should you write in a note about another player?

• Specific actions that expose the thought process of another player
• Use abbreviations and shorthand that you will understand in the future. Something like RR3x = reraised to 3x initial raise size, BLF = bluff, SWPY = slowplay, and so on.
• Make note of odd actions (overbets, very small bets, unusual lines, etc) even if you don’t get to see your opponent’s cards. This way when it happens again, you will have an idea of how frequently these actions occur.
• Differentiate between hands that involve you and those that don’t involve you. If the hand doesn’t involve you, make note of the basic stats of the other player in the hand.
• Dates. I can’t stress this one enough. When I first took notes I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that I might be playing the same guys 3 years later. Sure enough, I ended up playing against players at 1000nl with notes that may have been from 50nl. Both you and the other player will have likely changed greatly. If you label your notes (month and year is good enough), you will know how relevant your notes are.
• If you have a battle with another player, whether in the chat box or through targeted aggressive play, you should make note of this. Forgetting a contentious history with another player could cost you a lot of money if you don’t realize you are getting bluffed more frequently than normal.

I was never good at note taking. I played way too many tables to take good notes and if you’ve found a way to play a lot of tables and make money without doing much more than looking at a heads up display, there’s not much reason to fix it. At the beginning, you will struggle just to be making a profit, so your focus should be on making as many quality decision on very few tables to ensure that you play winning poker. Taking good notes will absolutely boost your winrate, at a small sacrifice to how fast you can play.