Here’s a quick Seth Godin-esque nugget of wisdom, since I haven’t posted in 15 days somehow (I have 5 drafts that need some finishing touches).

Once you have the basics down and are winning at say 25nl, try something different. Pick a modification or two and apply it to your game for a day. Be biased towards aggressive modifications, because playing every hand passively is going to be lighting money on fire. You can do more than one modification in a session, just be sure that there is no overlap between the modifications. For example, 3-betting every button open would work well with raising every river bet but not flat calling all open raises when you are on the button. If multiple modifications could trigger adjustments in the same area of your opponents’ strategy, it will be very hard to determine what modification is causing what change.

• Raise to a different size preflop all of the time. Or some of the time.

• Limp reraise from time to time.

• Raise every continuation bet.

• Float every continuation bet where you have overcards and raise on the turn when draws complete.

• Make all of your postflop raises minraises (double the betsize).

• Use your imagination.

Small sample size will limit the ability to actually see how profitable these strategy adjustments are, but the goal is not to see if these are good long term strategies.  Almost all of them won’t be profitable, but what you will see is that it is very effective to do things that are non-standard and deviate from your normal strategy.  Some players will start playing crazy once you start doing things out of the ordinary and will take some time to adjust.

The other important takeaway is to learn how the average regular reacts to a specific play. I’ll illustrate this with an example.

Let’s say your adjustment for the session is to slightly overbet (bet larger than the size of the pot) the flop when you are the preflop raiser. If you do this 30 times against regulars and get folds 23 times, you will see that the default reaction to your large bet is to fold. Sure, making a larger bet will deprive them of odds to call with some hands, but you are likely to be folding out some hands that should be continuing if your opponent knew how wide of a range you were betting with.

If you kept it up, eventually thinking players would start to call and raise your bets and see that you frequently have nothing with your large bets and would begin to adjust to how you play. But there is no reason you can’t do this play against a poker player that you have very little history with, now that you know how the average player reacts to your bet. Or you could just do this infrequently, just often enough to make money from the play, but not often enough that your unusual play sticks out in your opponent’s mind and receives special attention.

It doesn’t matter if you are watching poker on ESPN, Sky Sports or anywhere else. All televised poker is bad for your development as a winning poker player. Here are some reasons why you should stop.

• The games are typically high stakes live games populated by many professional poker players. Any information gleaned from those games does not transfer well to small stakes online poker games.
• Nearly all hands are viewed and discussed out of context. It is often very hard to figure out what structure of the tournament or cash game is, how many chips players have or what positions the players are in. Not to mention the lack of history, table image and other relevant factors.
• The commentators are awful. With some exceptions, the commentators are not advanced poker players and make comments that contradict basic gambling principles. The analysis should be completely ignored.
• Players make decisions that hinge on the fact that they are being watched and recorded. Again, this will not transfer well.
• Anyone who has a marketable personality and a lucky score under their belt is considered a professional poker player. Chris Moneymaker and Phil Ivey are discussed in the same breath as formidable pros. This is not reality.
• It is very tempting to replicate something that a successful multi-millionaire poker player does on TV, despite the knowledge that it isn’t a good idea.

If you have the ability to completely block things you see on TV from entering the strategy part of your brain and only watch for entertainment, more power to you. You probably can’t though.

And yes, the fact that TV poker is like this is great for the games and makes all of us richer. I’m not suggesting that TV poker turn into a Cardrunners sweat session video.

There are many reasons that poker players aren’t able to win. All of these reasons have solutions. Like I have said in my guide, I think that a very large segment of the population is capable of making a decent amount of money playing online poker. If you have made it to this site and are capable of using the Internet, have the motivation to search out poker strategy websites and can read this, you probably are capable of winning at some level of online poker. A little bit of basic math and some low level logic skills are all that is necessary in the raw talent category. Only people with very low levels of intelligence or other mental limitations, such as the lack of a short term memory, are inherently unable to win at poker.

Two Types of Winning

The first type of winning is being capable of executing a strategy that wins in the long run at some form and stake of poker. Some poker players in this category are in fact losers. A player who wins at 10NL cash games but loses all of his money playing high stakes tournaments is a loser, despite the fact that he knows how to play winning poker.

The second type of winning is being capable of showing a profit from all poker play combined in the long run. This is the kind of winning that makes poker a rewarding pursuit. It combines the ability to execute a profitable strategy with self control, bankroll management, game selection and other smart decision making that is necessary to survive in the poker world. Remember that winning can mean playing one table of 2nl. This post isn’t about making tons of money from poker. It is about winning at poker. Winning simply means greater than zero.

Reasons You Might Be a Losing Poker Player

• You don’t know the proper strategy - This is probably the most common problem and luckily the fix isn’t terribly hard, at least at microstakes. Lots of strategy content is coming soon here, but for now read my poker strategy page. Links to all the resources that were important to my own success at poker are listed. Also, browse through my blog posts in the basics category. Most of those focus on varying aspects of beginner poker strategy.
• You practice poor bankroll management - Knowing basic bankroll management is easy enough. Many people who have issues with bankroll management are aware of what they should be doing. There is some sort of self control issue here that is hard for others to help you with. It is really an internal struggle and what works for one may not work for others. Some may find playing in the presence of a friend helps, others find bankroll management software helps.
• You have poor game selection - It is pretty common to see players who have a great sense of pride and consequently find themselves playing in games with players that are better than themselves. There is nothing wrong with trying to challenge yourself. Besides, being the 5th best player in a six handed game is frequently profitable. But if you aren’t sure that you have a positive expectation at the table, it probably isn’t large enough to justify playing. Estimating your winrate just by looking at the statistics of the players at a table is a skill best acquired through experience. If you start off at the bottom you can’t be wrong. The easiest way to improve your game selection is to move down in stakes (all the way, if necessary), but it can also be done by scouting out particular tables and analyzing each player. Ultimately, this is like bankroll management: I can “teach it” to you in 30 seconds, but it is up to you to figure out how to make yourself to do it.
• You tilt too often - I can teach bankroll management and game selection, but I can’t make it happen. I can’t even begin to teach tilt prevention, let alone help you implement it. In my personal experience, playing a lot helped me immensely. The more poker scenarios I saw, the less I was affected by the swings, the losses and the suckouts. A numbness to poker is acquired. Your personal experience with poker will almost certainly vary greatly from mine. Tilt often manifests itself in the form of poor bankroll management or poor game selection, but it is not the same thing. Tilt is a change in mental state that results in playing worse poker. Hard tilt might involve breaking a mouse and open shoving at all of your tables. Soft tilt might be losing focus due to a long breakeven stretch. No one is tilt free, but if it is preventing you from winning, this should be your number one priority. All the strategy in the world won’t make up for a bad case of tilt.
• Lack of self control - The three reasons above are all mostly related to the lack of discipline, but I included this to cover other related issues that can make someone a losing player. Examples of this include frequently playing while drunk and/or tired.
• You find playing poker however you please more fun - I personally think that winning is more fun than losing. Winning at six or nine handed poker games will require playing a fairly tight and consistent style of play compared to the style of the average recreational player. If you really enjoy being able to play however you want and making all the crazy plays that you want, I respect that. Being a losing poker player can be a well thought out, rational choice. Playing poker well is not easy, and many people just want to have fun. This “problem” doesn’t have a solution, either sacrificing the fun of not having to play disciplined poker is worth it to you or it isn’t.

If you not only have these problems and your losses from poker are seriously affecting your financial situation, you might have a gambling problem. If you suspect this, go here and don’t come back. Seriously. You may be genetically wired to make impulsive and irrational decisions. I have seen “pros” who were very good at the strategy part and terrible at the rest. These guys have gambling problems and no matter how much they win on the upswings, their lives would be way better off completely poker free.

You should have figured out by now how much of succeeding at poker is about discipline and emotional control. I know my solutions aren’t much of a help, but I’ll plug a few things that other poker players and myself have found helpful when dealing with anything related to mental aspects of poker.

Tiltbreaker – This is the software I mentioned in the bankroll management bullet point. Tiltbreaker can force you to quit playing poker after losing X amount, prevent you from playing above Y stake and other similar things. It may help, but it only fixes the symptoms. A truly determined person will get their demons out by uninstalling the software or playing on a site not regulated by Tiltbuster. I have never used it personally, but I know others like it. When I first started playing online poker I knew I was being mentally affected by the amount I had won or lost in that session. I was playing limit poker at the time and used a software program to cover up my stack size. I had enough self control not to look at the cashier (doing this is the devil!) or close the software program, and it definitely improved the quality of my play.

The Elements of Poker - I can’t say enough good things about this book. The parts about the mental aspects of poker are fantastic and really reframed the way I approached poker. I don’t think the strategy parts are particularly good, but the mental game sections are just so unbelievably good.

Jared Tendler - This guy is a licensed mental health counselor who specializes in helping golfers and poker players improve their mental game. I have seen very little of his stuff, and there may be others out there like him, but his name pops up around the poker world. People seem to like his work. He makes videos about mental game at Drag The Bar, a subscription poker training site.