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How to Gauge Your Poker Improvement

You follow this website, you read plenty of poker books and you discuss poker with your friends at every opportunity. You tick all of the boxes that a questionnaire asking if you are a dedicated poker player would ask. How do you know when that work is paying off and is worth the effort as sometimes sheer bad beats and unlucky moments can make even the best player look like they are not as good as they obviously are.

Online poker is designed to make your experience of the game as good as possible, with ever improving poker software. Lots of the poker tournaments are designed with a short structure so players who have improved their tournament game are better off playing higher buy-in tournaments where patience and skill become more important. Low stakes poker is more about participation. Some players can get disheartened that there are swings even at the low stakes games. My belief is that the low stakes games are designed as a primer for the bigger, more rewarding levels of play.

In gauging whether you are improving I would look away from table results and seek the advice of a better player, either a poker buddy or coach, to assess your play. They will be able to discuss with you key concepts of poker and check that you have the right approach to certain situations. It is the decisions you make that decide on whether your poker game has improved and not which cards fall at that point. Winning and losing is important in poker but providing you are winning and losing in the correct way this will decide your long term profitability in poker. A good coach or good player will tell you whether your long term expectation has improved or not. After you know the answer you can then use good bankroll management to run this out or help you continue to learn the game.

Winning one tournament does not make you a great player. Many a tournament professional has had one big score at, for example, the World Poker Tour then become a professional player. The reality is that they have a bit of money and can afford to. They then travel the circuit believing erroneously that they have an edge, returning to normal work once the money has run out. They can then tell their friends that they can become a pro whenever they want refusing to admit that they got lucky for a nice score. Many players have done this, even some reading this article may not realise, or want to realise, that this applies to them.

This does not mean winning one tournament means you cannot be a great player, but that whether you are a great player or not is not determined by your short term results. The knowledge of how to play A-A-K-7 against an aggressive opponent or whether A-K-K-3 can be shoved with 10 big blinds remaining on the bubble is a decision based on poker knowledge. A good player can describe in detail why the answer is yes or no. Certainly in this spot players who are terrible may make the wrong play and win, whilst the excellent player can make the correct play and lose. The luck factor in poker hides both bad plays and massive improvements.

Many will argue that Darvin Moon is a bad player because he only recently learned to play poker. The truth is we do not know just how good he is, he may be fantastic and a massive winner online thus fooling us all! This player is going heads up for $8 million tonight so can he really be so bad? His opponent is a poker professional and Joseph Cada may be the greatest player to ever play cards and if he wins tonight and becomes youngest ever WSOP champion there will be a belief he can do great things in the game. Whilst Cada looks great, just because he has the moniker “professional poker player” before his name does not mean he is in any way better than Darvin Moon.

Judge your own improvement by your understanding of key ideas in poker, the ability to discuss poker with your friends and your understanding of watching hands played by professionals and the ability to remain patient and play your best game at all times. Single results are short term, but long term profits show your class. Reacting to bad beats or losing streaks separate the good from the bad and the great from the good. The important thing is to keep listening, learning and trying. Improvement then takes care of itself.

By Malcolm Clarke

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