Put Action on Paper: Start your Poker Journal Today

Oftentimes, it’s possible to take real world applications and apply them to poker, and other times, it’s poker that can be translated into the real world.
Startup businesses are encouraged to formulate a business plan, to put their ideas on paper in order to get a better grasp of their business and what is needed to build success. It’s the same way in poker. If succeeding in poker were as simple as going out and “playing,” everyone would be a winner. Part of becoming a winning player is learning from your losses. Along these lines, I highly recommend starting a poker journal and putting your action on paper. I like to refer to this as a  knockout journal. It’s helpful to make notes whenever you get knocked out of a tournament, whether online or live.

Picking Apart The Hand

I talk often in my videos about playing a young person’s game being old. To give you some perspective, I am not that old, I started playing poker when I was 33 in 2005 and now I am just about to hit 40. Traditionally, most low stakes players are going to play extremely tight and passive which for the most part is how I started playing years ago. In the past few years, my game has changed a lot where I have keyed in some aggression, more like timed aggression, trying to find the right spots to make it work. For this article, I am going to discuss a hand and pick it apart where my bluffing was successful. This hand is from a $13.50 knockout tournament from Pokerstars.
I am not sure why I like discussing bluffing so often. In small stakes MTTs, it’s barely a part of the game anymore as so many players are calling stations and picking spots to bluff can become too difficult. I think it is because it’s almost a life skill to recognize these spots and I kind of take pride in being able to read a situation. So onto the hand so I can explain what on earth I was trying to accomplish in this hand.

What players want

Once in awhile, a card room manager asks me what players want. I usually try not to let the shock show on my face and try to give them a straight answer. With Bluff sitting in card rooms all over the country, I have an opportunity to answer the question for any members of management or staff that flip through the magazine. So what do players really want from a card room?
1. Consistency
A lack of consistency is the most common complaint and it is often the most valid. Players have a point when they complain about rules that vary from one dealer or floor person to the next, but the most frustrating lack of consistency is the non-standard rules that so many card rooms implement. If you have a rule that is unique to your card room, I can assure you that most players see it as unprofessional, annoying, and a reason to avoid your room in the future.
Almost all of these non-standard rules come from management who think their idea will allow their card room to reinvent the wheel. I’ve seen four or five different views on betting lines, what is required if a player makes a forward motion with chips, when you can listen to or text on your electronic devices, and whether cash plays on the table. To tell you what all the standard rules are would require a book rather than an article, but if you visit a few large card rooms, it isn’t hard to figure out what rule is the most common and the most common rule should almost always be the standard.

Let’s start with the basics

I believe poker is the most complicated game that humans play. With the exception of heads up fixed-limit hold’em, poker is the only game where computers cannot compete with us. The more I learn about poker, the more I realize how little I know, and I am a serious student of the game. This makes it tough to talk poker strategy with the average player at the table unless I feel like giving free lessons. My students usually have some idea how much there is to learn within a few lessons, and some of them are even intimidated by how long the road in front of them appears to be.

Loosening the tight

Most of the expert players you see play poker when you turn on the TV or open up the high stakes tables appear to play a loose style. Many novice and intermediate players consequently believe playing a loose aggressive style is optimal, and they overvalue loose play. Think about a common spot: opening from middle position. If you open 22 or A9s from MP, it’s hardly going to affect your results, because those hands are likely to be around break-even in the typical online game. Thus is it is only a stylistic choice whether or not to open those hands as a default. There are certainly tables where opening those hands from MP is profitable, and there are tables where it would be a mistake. The key to optimizing your profits is being able to tell the difference. You have to know with each situation whether it’s favorable to loosening up a little bit.

Be Flexible In Your Poker Planning

When we’re involved in a hand, there is a measure of both planned moves as well as moves we decide to make on the spot. To some degree, these two ways of going about things are zero-sum, as the more planned moves we initiate, the less spur of the moment moves we can expect to perform. We want to make sure we have a healthy blend of both pre-planned moves (better known as set-plays) and creative decision-making based on the ever-changing conditions we encounter.
If we’re planning on making a move on a future street, we’ll still need to take in and filter any new information that arises along the way. Let’s say that we have identified a player that tends to play weak post-flop. We’ll want to open up our calling-range in position, as well as from the blinds. Let’s say we’re up against this opponent and we have called in position. We’re obviously not calling in position with a hand like King-Jack or Queen-10 only to try and hit our cards on the flop. Knowing that we will miss the flop the majority of the time, we’ll need to work bluffs into the equation. Our intention is to bet the flop if it is checked to us, as well as working in re-raises and folds when we feel it is appropriate.

Two weird hands

Sometimes bizarre things happen at the poker table and only the smartest will prevail, says Jeff Kimber.
Online poker players never tire of telling live pros that they’ve played far more hands than they ever will and therefore, despite their age, they are the more experienced poker players. It’s widely accepted that an online pro, who can play 16 or more tables, each averaging around a hand a minute, can play a thousand hands an hour. In a casino, the live pro will be lucky to see 30 an hour. Tom Dwan reckons he had played more hands than Doyle Brunson in less than two years in the game, despite Texas Dolly having been playing for more than 50 years.
But there are some things that happen in a live game that no number of online hands can prepare you for, and how you react to those situations can be the difference between winning a major title or busting out early and wondering where it all went wrong.

Mixing Up Your Play In Tournaments

As a tournament poker player, we’re often seated with other players for long stretches of time. During this time-frame we’re able to get a good read on the general playing style of our opponents. One way we’re able to keep our opponents from getting a decent handle on the way we play is by constantly mixing up our strategies. Part of this process is having a lot of tools at our disposal, as well as being flexible and creative with how we implement these tools. No two poker players play exactly the same way, but many tournament players as a whole fall into the trap of adopting a conventional style.

Tilt = Insecurity

I recently wrote about the biggest downswing of my career in my blog on CardRunners, how it made me feel and how I dealt with it. In the aftermath, I emphasized the importance of solid self-awareness for a poker pro, which made me think about an old motto of mine: “The essence of tilt is insecurity.” The concept is universal, and has survived as one of the guiding principles in my life.
Feelings of insecurity are usually related to control and identity. Most human beings fear losing control of our own destiny and feel threatened by personal attacks. To combat these negative emotions we must work on our mindfulness: the more certain we are of our level of control, and the more comfortable we are with who we are, the more calm, composed, and secure we feel in stressful situations.

Playing Strong Out of Position

As you play tournaments, you’ll notice patterns as to how people play their hands in certain situations. It’s cutting off our nose to spite our face if we fall into these general patterns. Predictability is the death knell of any aspiring poker player. Being able to mix your game up and shift gears on the way to the final table will add profitability. Mixing up your game will also make it more fun when you’re playing, as you’re not doing the same thing over and over.
Let’s take a couple of different scenarios into account to see how we can play hands differently, in order to keep our opponents off balance. Many players think of playing out of position (in the small or big blind) as having a decisive disadvantage. I’m not going to say that it’s advantageous by any means, but it’s not as negative as some might believe it to be. I like to think of playing from the blinds as playing from “betting position” — as I’m the first to act on all streets other than pre-flop. By playing more hands out of position we’re able to lead into the raiser (donk-bet), check-raise, as well as check-call then lead the next street. Breaking down each option, we’ll see that just because we are playing “out of position” doesn’t mean we aren’t able to take down pots effectively.

Putting your opponents on ranges

I’ve often stated in my videos that there are two main levels of poker skill. Level one is putting opponents accurately on ranges while level two is “acting accordingly.” The former relies heavily on hand-reading, game dynamics, psychology and HUD-stats while the latter can often be solved mathematically to a great accuracy. Example: In a nine-man SNG, you open 88 from the CO 15 BB deep and BB three-bet shoves. The villain is an average regular so you give him a standard range of ATo+, KQ, 66+ and hit the fold button. In most stack-dynamics this is the correct thing to do due to ICM. However, to your disappointment the villain flashes 22 before collecting the pot.
This is a level one mistake. You acted correctly but your read on the villain’s range was wrong. Nothing to be ashamed of here — make a note of the villain of having an expanded three-betting tendency and move on. If, however, you read the villain’s range as 22+, A8o+, KJo+ and still fold 88 you have a level two mistake  — your action doesn’t support your read.

No Simple Solutions

A student of mine recently complained that he must be doing something wrong, that there must be a fundamental problem in his game, because he was getting too many bubble finishes and min-cashes. Another came to me with the hope that I could fix whatever was wrong with his game and teach him how to accumulate chips in the early and middle portions of a tournament. Both players noted that they only seem to final table a tournament when they are running good and winning tons of pots.
Neither of them got the solution they were looking for, though I gave them both the tools to improve and keep working on accumulating more chips and going on more deep runs. I couldn’t give them the solution they were looking for, because there is no simple solution to accumulating more chips and having more deep runs. If I had been in a wiseass mood, I would have answered their question with the only simple solution there is — play better!
We are all looking for simple solutions, systems, answers to the riddles that poker poses every session. But there aren’t any. If their problems could be solved in a single lesson, there would be tens of thousands of truly great poker players fighting with the few fish who hadn’t read the pamphlet yet.

Mental Stability

I thought about making an article reviewing a hand that had an interesting call I made, but people are already too good at poker for my taste, so, instead, I thought I would talk about something everyone can apply.
So here are a couple of fun facts for you guys:
- The majority of people who play poker are capable of being winning players
- Practically none of them are
- Playing bad is the reason losing players end up losing at poker
I’ll repeat that last point, because it is the universal truth of poker: playing bad is the reason losing players end up losing at poker, and that’s regardless of them being actually good at playing poker or not. Most people lose over the course of their lifetime not because they make dumb decisions in relation to poker theory, but because they make dumb decisions in relation to playing poker in general. I’m talking about things like trying to “win money back,” or playing when tired and frustrated, or playing after having drinks.

Using the Positional advantage on Wet Boards

This hand highlights how having the positional advantage allows you to control the size of the pot and get your money in good on later streets, particularly when the ranges of your opponents are well defined.
The SB in this hand is a 20/10 reg but other than that we don’t have any reads. I’m OK with limping behind on the button with a hand like this. It’s easy to get away from if we don’t flop top set and we can also get value when we make straights or cooler people with overboats. From early position and in the blinds this is basically always a fold.
Post-flop is where things get interesting. What range can we assign him after he leads pot into three other players? The number of opponents in the hand affects our ability to hand read accurately. To refresh your memory, people generally play very straightforward in multi-way pots. They don’t lead into three other players with air or any wide ranges whatsoever on wet board textures. In other words, his range is narrowed down to a big draw and a set. It’s hard for him to have a set because we have a blocker to the bottom one and since the board is 2♠8♦J♠, there are more combinations of strong draws than made hands. It’s possible that he has top two with redraws but for the sake of this example let’s assume he has a big draw.

Building And Managing Your Bankrolls

Several years ago, I heard a quote that a poker player’s relationship with his bankroll is similar to a carpenter and his tool box; even the best carpenter is useless without a good set of tools. And just as a carpenter with only a hammer won’t be able to find much work, a poker player can only go as far as his bankroll allows. Now, every PLO player experiences ups and downs throughout his career, and one of the most important, yet least talked about skills that can determine your boom or bust future is how to manage a bankroll, regardless of size.
When planning the necessary bankroll requirements to get started grinding, the first thing to realize is that PLO is a high variance game. As mentioned in previous articles, the money goes in faster, more often, and with narrower margins in PLO than in Hold’em. What this translates into is the need for padding your bankroll with more buy-ins to play comfortably, as even the best players in the world commonly experience 20 and 30 buy-in downswings for every 50,000 hands they play.
Playing within your comfort level is what dictates both what stakes you play and how many buy-ins to keep in your roll before moving up. That said, staying comfortable also depends a lot on what your purpose is for playing cards in the first place. What I mean is that the poker goals (and therefore bankroll requirements) for someone that receives a steady paycheck every week and only plays recreationally on the weekends will be dramatically different from a professional that’s grinding 30K-50K hands every month

Don’t Get Left Behind--- Keep improving or start losing

I lead out for $6, slightly more than half the pot after the rake was taken. Three players called me. Two of these callers were loose and passive, and the third was an aggressive player who is guaranteed to float the flop and bet the turn if you check to him. This was a perfect setup for me.
The turn was the Tc and I checked. The first loose/passive player checked, and the aggressive player bet $8. The second loose/passive player called the $8 fairly quickly. This action probably indicates that the first loose/passive player doesn’t have much since he called my flop bet and then checked behind on the turn. It also indicates that the second loose/passive player probably has a draw.
Even the most passive player is not likely to slowplay a big hand on a draw heavy board for two streets. The quick call also usually indicates a draw, so I thought the second L/P was almost certainly on a flush draw without a pair.
The aggressive player has called one bet and then bet small, and I knew this player fairly well. He was aggressive, always looking to pick up pots, but he knew when to shut it down and could fold if he ran into some real pressure and he didn’t have a hand.

The Three Biggest Leaks in … Low Stakes Tournament Players

I’ve noticed some trends lately among my students. Most of them are low-stakes, recreational tournament players who are looking to take their game to the next level, and many of them have some of the same leaks in common. A lot of these leaks are a result of recent progressions in tournament theory that “traditional logic” simply hasn’t caught up with yet, while some are simply misunderstandings or misapplications of well-known concepts. Here are the three most common and damaging leaks I’ve seen recently.
Picking the wrong hands to three-bet bluff with
I’ve seen many players recently making errors with their three-bet bluffing ranges in certain spots. They take hands that play relatively well postflop and have limited blocker value, and effectively turn them into trash hands by three-bet/folding them.
The best examples of this concept are the kinds of hands that are so difficult to fold preflop in general, because they just look too good — King-Queen suited, Queen-Jack suited, Jack-10 suited. There are certainly spots where it’s good to three-bet/fold these hands, but the majority of the time, these hands play so well against most opening ranges that you’re wasting the value of the hand if you put yourself in a position where seeing a flop is unlikely.
If a standard, tight-aggressive villain opens in the cutoff and you three-bet Queen-Jack suited with 40 big blind effective stacks, you’re in a spot where you have to fold to a four-bet most of the time, and when the villain does decide to flat-call your three-bet, his or her hand will dominate yours more often than vice versa. Queen-Jack suited has so much flop potential that it’s strong enough to call with.

Your opponents are telling you everything

The following is a preview of a chapter from the soon-to-be-published book “Verbal Poker Tells,” by Zachary Elwood. Pre-orders are available on the author’s website.
Immediate Verbal Responses
One sign of relaxed speech is that it flows freely, without hesitation. Anxious people are more likely to think before speaking; they have a reason to be concerned with how an opponent might interpret their speech. For this reason, a player who has made a significant bet and responds im­­mediately to a question or statement is more likely to be relaxed and have a strong hand.
The more complex and potentially meaningful a verbal response is, the more an immediate response points to relaxation. Smaller and simpler responses, when said immediately, are not as meaningful as more complex responses said immediately.
For example, a player goes all-in on the river and is asked, “Do you want a call?” He responds immediately, “Maybe.” Because this is an ambiguous response that doesn’t contain much information, the immediacy of response in this case isn’t very meaningful.
For comparison, let’s suppose the bettor had answered immediately: “I definitely want a call.” Because this statement contains a more complex idea and could theoretically contain information about the speaker’s hand strength, it is unlikely that a bluffer would make such an immediate statement; a bluffer would first want to consider, at least for a second, what the consequences of such a statement might be. A bluffer doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and trigger a call. If this player had paused a second or two before responding “I definitely want a call,” his response wouldn’t be as meaningful because the player would have had time to consider whether saying such a thing was a good idea.

Making the Leap – Becoming a Professional Poker Player

If you’re reading this magazine, chances are you’re pretty into your poker. You’ve probably been playing for a while, taking an interest in the game, and learning as much about it as possible. Maybe you play pretty regularly, and maybe you’ve had some success — some good tournament results or a solid win rate in low-stakes cash games. This might stir you to think of playing the game professionally one day, a dream held by many a bored office-worker worldwide.
But is that really such a dream? Why not reality? There are thousands of individuals worldwide who make their living playing poker, so why not you? Well, there are a number of reasons why you might do well as a professional poker player. Almost everyone has some of the characteristics necessary, and almost anyone who’s interested in poker probably has the short-term motivation to try. However, there are also a number of realities you’ll need to prepare for, and since poker players are reluctant to encourage good players to play more often, advice isn’t always readily available. I’d like to offer a few insights based on personal experience that might prove useful to anyone considering “making the leap” and turning professional.
Understand the day-to-day realities
As a professional poker player, you’re going to spend a lot of time playing poker. Much more than you do right now. You might assume that most poker players work a three-day or four-day week, or that they take a month off here and there to go do whatever they want. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of professional poker players put in long hours, and those who don’t, don’t remain professional poker players for long.

Making Moves … The Value of Position In PLO

Know where you stand.

Given the state of the games and availability of poker training out there, I’m assuming practically everyone reading this doesn’t need to be told that being in position (IP) is good, and being out of position (OOP) is bad. I don’t know about you, but that seems too general for me, especially since every PLO book or video talks about how position is more important in PLO than any other poker game.
So if you’ve already mastered everything there is to know about using position, then go ahead and skip this article … But in case you haven’t, I’ve broken down what I consider to be the five most important reasons why position is valuable in PLO. They are:

1. Extracting Value
2. Bluffing
3. Pot Control
4. Equity Realization
5. Getting to Showdown

Extracting Value: It’s The Name of the Game
It’s no secret that the majority profits (especially at the low and mid stakes) are derived from extracting the maximum amount of value from your hands. This is easier to accomplish in position, because you have more information about your opponent’s holding. A hand that would perhaps be a check OOP can turn into a value-bet after our opponent checks, allowing us to extract more value.

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Poker adalah permainan kartu keluarga yang berbagi taruhan aturan dan biasanya (tapi tidak selalu) dalam peringkat tangan. Permainan Poker berbeda dalam hal bagaimana kartu dibagikan, bagaimana tangan dapat terbentuk, apakah tangan tinggi atau rendah memenangkan taruhan di pertarungan (dalam beberapa Permainan, taruhan dibagi antara tangan tinggi dan rendah), batas taruhan dan bagaimana banyak putaran pertaruhan diperbolehkan. Dalam Permainan poker yang paling modern, putaran pertama pertaruhan dimulai dengan beberapa bentuk kontrak paksa. Aksi kemudian hasil ke kiri. Setiap pemain pada gilirannya baik harus sesuai dengan taruhan sebelumnya maksimum atau lipat, kehilangan jumlah taruhan sejauh ini dan semua bunga lebih lanjut di tangan. Seorang pemain yang cocok dengan taruhan juga dapat meningkatkan, meningkatkan taruhan. Babak taruhan berakhir ketika semua pemain telah baik cocok dengan taruhan terakhir atau dilipat. Jika semua, kecuali satu pemain kali lipat pada setiap putaran, pemain yang tersisa mengumpulkan taruhannya dan dapat memilih untuk menampilkan atau menyembunyikan tangan mereka. Jika lebih dari satu pemain tetap di pertarungan setelah ronde pertaruhan final, tangan akan ditampilkan dan tangan memenangkan mengambil taruhannya.

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Poker adalah permainan kartu keluarga yang berbagi taruhan aturan dan biasanya (tapi tidak selalu) dalam peringkat tangan. Permainan Poker berbeda dalam hal bagaimana kartu dibagikan, bagaimana tangan dapat terbentuk, apakah tangan tinggi atau rendah memenangkan taruhan di pertarungan (dalam beberapa Permainan, taruhan dibagi antara tangan tinggi dan rendah), batas taruhan dan bagaimana banyak putaran pertaruhan diperbolehkan. Dalam Permainan poker yang paling modern, putaran pertama pertaruhan dimulai dengan beberapa bentuk kontrak paksa. Aksi kemudian hasil ke kiri. Setiap pemain pada gilirannya baik harus sesuai dengan taruhan sebelumnya maksimum atau lipat, kehilangan jumlah taruhan sejauh ini dan semua bunga lebih lanjut di tangan. Seorang pemain yang cocok dengan taruhan juga dapat meningkatkan, meningkatkan taruhan. Babak taruhan berakhir ketika semua pemain telah baik cocok dengan taruhan terakhir atau dilipat. Jika semua, kecuali satu pemain kali lipat pada setiap putaran, pemain yang tersisa mengumpulkan taruhannya dan dapat memilih untuk menampilkan atau menyembunyikan tangan mereka. Jika lebih dari satu pemain tetap di pertarungan setelah ronde pertaruhan final, tangan akan ditampilkan dan tangan memenangkan mengambil taruhannya.

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Poker adalah permainan kartu keluarga yang berbagi taruhan aturan dan biasanya (tapi tidak selalu) dalam peringkat tangan. Permainan Poker berbeda dalam hal bagaimana kartu dibagikan, bagaimana tangan dapat terbentuk, apakah tangan tinggi atau rendah memenangkan taruhan di pertarungan (dalam beberapa Permainan, taruhan dibagi antara tangan tinggi dan rendah), batas taruhan dan bagaimana banyak putaran pertaruhan diperbolehkan. Dalam Permainan poker yang paling modern, putaran pertama pertaruhan dimulai dengan beberapa bentuk kontrak paksa. Aksi kemudian hasil ke kiri. Setiap pemain pada gilirannya baik harus sesuai dengan taruhan sebelumnya maksimum atau lipat, kehilangan jumlah taruhan sejauh ini dan semua bunga lebih lanjut di tangan. Seorang pemain yang cocok dengan taruhan juga dapat meningkatkan, meningkatkan taruhan. Babak taruhan berakhir ketika semua pemain telah baik cocok dengan taruhan terakhir atau dilipat. Jika semua, kecuali satu pemain kali lipat pada setiap putaran, pemain yang tersisa mengumpulkan taruhannya dan dapat memilih untuk menampilkan atau menyembunyikan tangan mereka. Jika lebih dari satu pemain tetap di pertarungan setelah ronde pertaruhan final, tangan akan ditampilkan dan tangan memenangkan mengambil taruhannya.