Trading Mistakes for Mistakes in Poker

Evolving in poker means stopping making some mistakes and starting to make others, hopefully less serious ones.

Beginners, for example, tend to ignore position in poker. Once they stop ignoring position, they tend to start using it incorrectly. Over time they use it better, but then they start making mistakes in their bet sizing or even start overvaluing position.

As we progress, our mistakes become harder to identify and correct. In my coaching and my work on the Thinking Poker Podcast, I’ve come across a few situations where many people get stuck. There’s one area where players tend to make steady progress but then stagnate – their choice of bluff catchers.

Pay or give up

Poker beginners tend to call if their hands look good and fold if they don't, without thinking much about what their opponents have. After a while they learn that when the decision is between calling and folding, the decision should be based on the relative strength of their hand, not the absolute strength.

They realize that it doesn't matter how strong their hand is in a ranking of the strongest hands, only if their hand is better than the other players'. As a result, they try to guess what the other player has, calling if it is worse than what they have, and folding if it is not.

If your deductions are accurate enough, this is a great method for deciding when to call or fold a hand. None of us can guess a hand correctly all the time, but we start to use pot odds more efficiently to make our decisions, calling more when we have better odds. Eventually we combine this with an understanding that we should choose hands to call based on a range of hands that we and our opponents can hold, neither calling nor folding too much.

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However, here is where a new set of mistakes begins. Just knowing that your calling hand should be related to your range and your opponent's range is not enough. At least three new mistakes are possible here:

Confusing preflop strength with situational strength

I often hear poker players say that “if I’m folding AQ here, I’m folding a lot,” and that may well be true. These statements, however, often seem to have more to do with whether AQ is a good starting hand than whether AQ is strong in a given situation, for example on a QJT board.

A common mistake of this type is to get too attached to a middle pair in situations where it would be better to call with A-high. Often what underlies this mistake is an attachment to the hand that is proportional to its starting hand strength, rather than the situation.

Ignoring small percentage differences in poker

This is another mistake that lurks behind decisions to call with, say, 66 instead of AQ on a J82 board. Players are too focused on whether they are ahead or behind, and not enough on what their equity is if they are ahead or behind.

When you have a flush draw, it's obvious that you (usually) have some chance of winning. In this case, it's a little easier to forget about the chances that AQ has of improving, and it's even easier to forget that the three or six outs that overcards provide are far greater than the two outs of a pocket pair.

The equity difference is often just a few percentage points, but over the course of a year this can add up to a lot of money, especially if you play the later streets smartly.

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Ignore range advantage

It is usually not correct to fold most of your range. Sometimes, however, the board hits one player's range much more than another. This is especially true when starting hands of 10% or something like that are much better on a given board than, say, a range of 20% or something like that – in which case an early position raiser or 3-bettor should have something much better than that.

In poker situations like these, worrying about defending even half your range against a bet can be a huge mistake. The board intervenes and puts most of your range well behind most of your opponent's range. Here, folding is often the best you can do.

If, like many players, you've advanced enough to be aware that you have to choose calling hands in a range in a judicious manner, but are still unsure of the details of how to do so, I hope you're one step closer to eliminating a number of mistakes from your poker game.

Article translated and adapted from the original: Replacing Mistakes with Mistakes on Pokr