A New Way To Learn Poker

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I was reading some posts in the Low-Limit HE section on 2+2 the other day and it got me thinking about how we all (hopefully) come to grow as players. I’ve read many of the books from beginning to advanced but I’ve noticed that most of the learning material and resources available tell you how to play solid poker but they don’t necessarily teach you to play poker well.

For instance, you can read Sklansky’s starting hand requirements or Abdul’s and they do tell you at a high level why they came up with their groupings but it’s only really helpful in memorizing a good set of starting hands. You can learn how to count outs and calculate odds but I’m not sure it gives you the full context of the game. Do you know why you’re making the moves you’re making? Do you know why you’re raising or calling? Unfortunately, most new players just know only that, that was what it said to do in the book. It is only after thousands and thousands of hands (and some painful beats) do they start to develop an understanding of why the author wrote what he did and are able to take it to the next level and adapt the move to situations that fall outside the given examples.

This understanding gap is probably best viewed at the Low Limit and Micro Limit HE sections on 2+2. Actually, it’s probably best viewed at the tables playing with some of these guys but the 2+2 message boards give you the advantage of hearing them explain a hand. Ever wonder why that fish raised his pair of sevens UTG? They’ll tell you on the message boards. But I think the foundation of the problem is that many don’t learn the game correctly. Ask a newer player if he’ll take an even money bet where he pays $500 to flip a coin and if he calls heads or tails correctly he wins $1000. Sadly, many will refuse that bet because they don’t understand probability or odds. Yet, armed with a determined reading of their favorite beginner poker book they charge out to the tables and quickly surrender their money to better players while taking odds far worse than even money.

Instead of starting off with a Sklansky or Lee Jones book the beginning poker player needs to read a few books on probability and logic (decision making) first. I think the foundation of any gaming venture is understanding the decision you’re making and you can’t do that without understanding probability. Just this one deviation from the normal path of most poker players would save them many, many bets over having to be taught the hard way by the domineering gods of probability that chasing after gutshots and two outers is a fool’s errand.

Next they need to learn the relative value of various hands. How many times have you heard newer players (and some not so new players) complain about their aces always getting cracked? It’s because they don’t understand that aces are going to get cracked a significant percent of the time. So they either overplay them because they think they should always win or underplay them by not raising them pre-flop and calling down bets letting their opponent draw out on them.

With some background about probability and relative hand strength it’s time to move on to learning the importance of position. They should make a piece of instructional software like Turbo Texas Hold ‘Em except when you make a poor choice the worst possible situation occurs. For instance, if you do something stupid like raise your pocket sevens UTG, UTG+1 and the BB would isolate you and cap the betting. You’ll get no help on the flop (or the turn or river if you decide to go that far). It wouldn’t be a bad touch if the software mocked your play by having one of the players say something like “You raised with pocket sevens UTG? What a moron!” The problem with learning this lesson at the tables is that you make your set every once in awhile so you get that positive conditioning to continue making poor plays. This would beat those tendencies out of you long before they developed into leaks you have to plug later.

Hopefully, by this point some of the foolishness that takes months to beat out of new players should be gone. Now they should read poker strategy books like Skansky, Jones, Miller, etc. However, I would add another tool and that would be to have them study a chapter on some topic like raising for a free card on the turn and then send them out to play a few hundred hands and report back after they had executed 10 successful raises for free cards. Instead of it being some abstract concept that you learned with 10 other abstract concepts the same reading, you concentrate on one lesson and you drill on it.

I’m actually somewhat surprised nobody has approached poker education from this angle before. It seems to me that the two most common mistakes new players make are playing too many hands (i.e. poor understanding of relative hand value and poor understanding of position) and going too far with a hand (i.e. poor understanding of relative hand value and poor understanding of odds). This bottom up learning approach gives new players with the mental tools they need to ask the right questions. The current path tends to lead to people following a bunch of rules or advice that they don’t understand.

Of course this is all just off the top of my head so there’s probably some holes in my logic. All the same, I think there’s something here though. Anybody else agree (or . . . gasp, disagree)?

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