How do you know if you’re improving at poker? What metrics can you use to track your own progress? And how will you know if you’re ready to level up?
Unfortunately, many people still use results from short periods of time to answer this question. “Look, I’ve made $5,000 in the last 100 hours, that must mean I’m good, right?”
Results are generally a poor measure of your actual progress. No, earning five thousand dollars in a hundred hours does not make you a good player. You might be, but you might not. This is not remotely enough evidence to point one way or the other; there is a lot of luck involved in small numbers like this.
If you are a winner over more hours, say 1000 hours, then the evidence will start to point to you being a winner in the long run. However, that still doesn’t answer the question, “Am I improving?” Who knows if your results over the next thousand hours will be better or worse than the last thousand? Are you improving? Maybe. Only the numbers will give you bad answers to these questions.
Here are four concrete signs regarding how to approach your game to know if you are, in fact, improving.
1st Sign: You stopped playing hands just to stave off boredom
A common problem with amateurs is that they play differently when they are bored than when they have just played. Almost all low-stakes players have the boredom factor. In live poker, hands come slowly and gradually, and it is not common to be dealt 20 or 30 bad hands in a row before the flop. This can mean an hour or an hour and a half of no action.
After folding hand after hand, and after realizing that they could have spent that hour doing something better, this type of player starts to get anxious. They start looking for reasons to play a hand, such as “They think I’m tight, so this is a good opportunity to bet,” or “Sometimes you have to force the action,” or “You can’t wait for the nuts,” and so on.
None of the above statements provide logical reasons to play a hand. At this point it’s not about profit anymore, it’s about boredom. Random cards are, of course, random, and if you get a long, bad string of hands, that’s just how it works.
There are many reasons to play marginal hands and even hands that are bad preflop, but playing just out of boredom without a plan is not one of them.
2nd Sign: You find good reasons to stay in post-flop hands that you missed
This is an important one. There are players who stay in many hands after missing the flop. They think that by calling more bets, the saving card will come and win them the pot. Sometimes this works, but usually you end up losing money. However, that is not what I am talking about here.
What I mean is stay in hands for the right reasons. Good poker players win more pots than average players, and the way they do that is by staying in pots after the flop and finding ways to win them.
However, this requires some judgment, as folding is usually the best choice in these situations. So you can tell when you're improving when you can clearly see the types of hands you should stay on and the ones you should fold on.
If you can say something like, “Six months ago I would have folded here, but now I can see there is something better to do in this situation,” then you are definitely improving your game.
3rd Sign: You have a clear understanding of the reasons behind the size of your poker bets
Bet sizing is a very important tool in No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker to help us lose less and win more.
Almost every bet or raise you make, especially on the turn and river, requires some consideration of sizing. When you’re not that good at the game, these decisions can seem confusing. “Should I bet big? Small? Maybe something in between?” At this point, your sense of comprehension still gives you little direction in this regard.
When you start to realize that you have a clear understanding of why you are making the bets you are making, you can know that you are improving. This is especially true if you can let go of fear as an integral part of your decision-making process (most amateur players will bet small in certain situations simply out of fear of losing chips, this is an extremely weak and exploitable tendency, and also quite common).
So if you notice that you are making different sized bets on the turn and river, and that you are fully aware of the process that led you to choose these sizes and not those, you will definitely be improving.
4th Sign: You’re More Focused on Playing Hands Well Than Making Money
This leads to another trap that many amateur players fall into. If they lose a big hand, they will immediately try to think of ways they could have played better.
Well, this is the process that is common to all poker players, good or bad. However, weaker players tend to focus on the wrong thing. They ask themselves, “How could I have prevented this huge loss?” or “What could I have done differently to avoid losing all this money?”
They invariably decide that they should have folded at some point in the hand, or just checked. When you're focused on figuring out how to not lose money, you tend to decide that you shouldn't put your money at risk. This leads us to conclude that you should have played the hand more passively than you did, and that conclusion is usually not the right one.
Good players know that sometimes losing big is the result of playing a hand well. This is true not only for coolers that you “can’t escape,” but also for other hands, such as when you lose everything on a botched bluff or are surprised by a monster hand trying to catch a bluff.
You can be sure that you will be improving when you revisit those hands that caused you losses and, instead of assuming that putting money at risk was the problem, you ignore the results and try to figure out how best to play the hand the next time that situation arises.
Article translated and adapted from the original: Strategy With Ed Miller: Four Signs You Are Getting Better
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I feel like a little bit of each item is playing a part in my game. Mainly about playing hands out of boredom and bet sizes and why.
This is very good! By knowing our own game in a neutral way (mistakes and successes) we can value our qualities and improve our defects.