The Basic Fundamentals of Success

Let’s start with something simple…..or possibly, not so simple, depending on who we ask. Way less people understand this than should.

What are the main 3 factors that result in poker success?

Strategy/Skill
Volume
Mindset


Let’s say we were now asked to give each of these a weighting in terms of importance. Give each of these a weighting out of 100%. (The three numbers should obviously add up to 100%). Now ask yourself if the way that you work on your poker game reflects the values that you wrote down.

Here is how I think it works….

Strategy/Skill 40%
Volume 30%
Mindset 30%

So while our level of skill is the most important factor overall, volume and mindset are actually more important when considered together. It’s amazing how many people forget this. It’s common to see many players taking this to extremes also. All volume, but never any work on their game. All study but too scared to hit the tables and actually play. Good understanding of strategy and volume, but tilt problems destroying all the earnings.

The truth is that if we just remove one of the above 3 factors, then we have absolutely no shot at making it in the world of poker. All are vitally (and more or less equally) important.


So What do we Do?

A good idea would be to evaluate our current approach to poker and give ourselves a percentage weighting for each. We can then compare ourselves to the numbers suggested above and see if we are coming up short.

Strategy/Skill – If we are coming up short in this area then we need to start reading books, watching training videos, running some analysis with various software. Anything that can help to make us a stronger player in theory.

Volume – If we are one of these NLHE “experts” who plays 3k hands a month, then we are severely capping our potential. At this stage we should sit down and think seriously about how much time we have available for poker and create a grinding schedule that allows us to get in the most volume and maximise our potential.

Mindset – Mindset needs to be worked on in exactly the same way as strategy/skill; it’s simply that the resources are different. We need to get some books and watch some videos on mindset. These will help us to analyse our own psyche and make improvements. It doesn’t matter how good we are, and how much volume we put in, if we are struggling to control a raging tilt problem.

Ohhhhhhh great thread! Very excited!

I feel I have these 3 fundamentals relatively under control. It's hard to get in big volume alongside a full time job so I'm currently running at about 20-30k hands a month. Mindset was a problem for a while, and I'm sure it will be again when I hit a big downswing, but The Mental Game Of Poker completely changed my approach to the game.

I find my main problem is studying... Is it best to read books from cover to cover at one time and keep refreshing my knowledge, or should I focus only on specific elements of the game until I have them on lockdown? eg. Cbetting, 4bet bluffing, showdown value etc. I always find myself sitting down to study and not really going anywhere. I like to have a set curriculum and not sure how to construct one. Thoughts? I'm very excited for @CrazyCookie's new video series on here so hopefully that will help me. He made some good suggestions before about working on checking / calling ranges on each board etc. I've found this very useful

Interesting post, I think this is actually differner for different stakes. At 2-25nl I think volume is more like 45%, skill 35% and mental 20% because the skill edge is going to be bigger and your tilting mistakes cost less as everyone else is at a lower level. We also want to grind a tonne as this will be the best way to move up so 50k hands a month at 10nl will get someone of lower skill IP to 25nl a lot quicker than someone more skilled at 15k habds./month.

Where I play (50nl) I would say that mental game is more equally important and that it is probably 33% each. There is still a skill advantage to have of course, but the tough spots come from leveling and more aggression than lower stakes which is where mental game comes in massively. Tilting at 50nl will eat you up more than 10nl and people exploit you more when they realise you are spewing.

I have no experience playing higher, but I imagine that mental game takes over given edges are smaller and it will come down more to who can play their a game for the longest and most consistently.

Hey Adam, how did you train your mind-set to accept the nature of poker and become less and less results orientated? I still (even though knowing its terrible) refresh my cashier and graph and become aggravated after a bad beat etc.

Just wondered how to attack this silly problem that only tilts me!

Cheers

Stubbtoe

Great post! I heard someone say once that poker is a 'journey of self improvement'. In my case nothing could be truer. Poker doesn't come naturally to me at all, my graph will attest to that but that's probably why I love the game. After a year of playing I'm now starting to develop some of those attributes. Patience, clarity of the moment,perseverance etc. I have to agree that probably in different stages of our poker career different aspects of our game will need more work.

For me, I find the mental aspect of the game extremely challenging. Studying and learning about the game was never a problem but the set backs, oh the set backs and dealing with failure, A lot of great athletes will tell us ' the game is easy' it's the emotional roller coaster that competition brings with it and how one deals with it, is what separates good from great and great from greatness.

The exact numbers are not important. The problem is that there are guys who fit into the following categories --->

Play good volume with good mindset but suck at poker.
Have great volume and good skill but tilt all of the time.
Have good skill and mindset but hardly play any volume.

All three are important regardless of limits. Even if you have a big skill edge at micros, it's pretty easy for tilt to destroy that winrate. I've seen many guys with this problem.

I used training resources to help me. I think the biggest eye-openers for how to work on and improve mindset were from Jared Tendler's books. It's recommended that all poker players read both volumes.

Yeah it's true. A common saying regarding poker players is that the quality of a player is defined on their worst days. It's super easy to have a great mindset when everything is going well. The real test is when we face set-backs/adversity and we get to see if our mindset is strong enough to deal with it. If viewed in the correct light, the set-backs are actually very good for us because they help to refine the quality of our mental state. This is assuming we stick with it and don't just end up quitting however, as the majority eventually do.

I find a great way to learn and keep a good mindset is watching coaches like Jon et al in their videos and the way they deal with all the ups and downs, reading books doesn't do it for me, I prefer learning visually and practically.

I also found a sense of humour works for me whilst experiencing 'adversity' in game (good word!) and can act as a catalyst, setting me to harder work but without the stress.

Hey Adam.

Poker, no limit to learning. But no more time as well as in my college years. Sports, family, fiance, social life and work then, poker remains very little time. The time I spend on study, I have to cut from poker. How do I follow a procedure for that? At the moment I'm playing NL20. I wonder if there are books that I must read to improve myself?

Ty for your answers.

What is your main limit that you are playing these days? Does your main income comes from making training vids or by playing? Thanks

People learn in different ways to some extent, but it is important to mix it up. Watching live play vids is great for understanding the general flow of a poker game, but it doesn't help to work specifically on individual concepts. Live play obviously jumps continually from one-topic to another which is not good for maximum memory retention. Using a variety of different methods to improve is the best.

First thing to do is take an online calendar or an excel document and plan everything out completely in terms of how a regular week should go. In some cases you find that you have more time than you think, in other cases you will find that your schedule is so packed that you need to be realistic and start removing things.

Either way, use all of the time you have available (same some for relaxation of course), and strive above all things for balance. You need a decent mixture of all the important things in your life. We don't want to let important things get crowded out. You may even find that some things are not as important as you thought they were initially and you can make sacrifices. But being a guy with a super busy schedule myself I can attest to the fact that this system works and helps to boost productivity a lot.

Midstakes. Anywhere from 100nl up to 1000nl. Main income comes from playing poker, but I pay all of my bills with coaching since it is variance free. It takes a lot of pressure away; I know that if I have a bad month it doesn't even really matter that much. I don't really want to be one of these guys where 100% income comes from poker - it can be tough and stressful imo.

Why is Everyone Winning?


Before we break into the hardcore strategy advice, let’s take a moment to reflect on some the trends that occur regarding forum posting in the poker community. If you were to log on to any poker forum and look through the graphs posted by members, you would often get a strong impression regarding the following: everyone is winning.

In fact, try it now. Run a quick google search for “poker graphs” and see what you come up with. Sure, one or two of the graphs are losing, but the overwhelming majority are winning.


Most People are Losing

If we ignore rake then poker is a zero sum game. Rake is a very real factor in online poker however, which results in a fundamental truth  Most online players are losing money. Likely less than 10 percent are winning even at lower limits, and when we start talking about higher stakes it is less than 5%. Only the top 1% really make significant money playing poker.

So why is that when we search for “poker graphs” we get all of these beautiful graphs. 3 main reasons – and it’s worth keeping these in mind when browsing poker forums in order to not become discouraged. After all, it’s pretty easy to feel like a failure when 95% of players are apparently crushing poker for 10bb/100.


1. Players have a tendency to only post winning graphs. Pretty straightforward. If someone runs good and has an epic graph over the last 50k hands, they show a strong tendency to post; to show everyone how good they are. If that same player breaks even over 50k hands, there is a pretty good chance he will not post his graph. The results are in no way remarkable and he doesn’t want his peers to think of him as a losing or mediocre poker player.

2. Players have a tendency to omit the red-line from graphs when it is low. People really just want to paint themselves in a good light, and having a red-line which tanks super hard does not achieve the desired effect. No problem, they can just uncheck the box which says “show non-showdown winnings” and post the green line only. The truth is that the red-line is not overly important anyway, the green-line is what matters. But a while back there was this huge trend of it being “cool” to have a positive or break-even red-line. So people would tend to only include the red-line if it was “cool enough” to warrant displaying.

Players behave in similar ways with their allin-EV. The line is somewhat useless as it happens, but if a guy is running 100 buyins above EV he is probably not going to include his allin-EV line. We are left with the mysterious impression that everyone is running below EV at poker

3. Players do not understand sample size. If someone wants to show a graph so they can see how much they are “crushing”, it helps if there is at least 200k hands on the graph. Anyone can run hot over 50k hands. Having a 10bb/100 winrate over 50k hands does not even guarantee that someone is a winning player. There are so many sample-size fails in terms of graphs posted on the forums. “Hey, I beat 25nl for 10bb/100 over 2500 hands, I must be the next Isilur1!”

Think how easy it would be for me to lose over 20k hands at 10bb/100 and then win over the next 20k hands at 10bb/100. Perhaps this means that I am actually a break-even player. No problem, I’ll just post the last 20k hands so that everyone thinks I am a 10bb/100 winner.


Don’t Believe Everything you See

So really we are just drawing attention to the biased way certain poker information is portrayed. It can be damaging to our mindset. If you are beating your current limits for 4bb/100 over a big sample you are doing well. Don’t let the fact that every graph you’ve seen in the last 2 months shows a 10bb/100 winrate. Very few players can achieve these kind of winrates, only the absolute best.

I post the green graph line only, because my coach says that's the one that matters and agrees the allin-EV line is a bit of a waste of ink.

I do post my losing as well as my winning, graphs, I think it's important to be face up about how my game is going.

I also agree totally about sample size, for the first 4 months of the year and 100K hands in on BV I was crushing it, for the next 100K, erm, not so good!
And as you said, rake hurts down in the trenches, we need a good winrate to compensate. I think it's why variance hits hard at micros when we have say a 2bb/100 winrate, making the swings, well, more swingy. It's also probably why being a nit makes it tough to make decent winnings I should think.

There is really nothing that wrong with being ultra TAG. It's a simple style to play and makes money. It doesn't maximise winrate, but it can potentially allow us to maximise hourly. If you want to play 19/15 and add 16+ tables, that might even be a good approach. If your goal is to maximise winrate, you need to loosen up. Your DB review is in, so go check out the thread.

I, personally, don't want to play 16+ tables, not even sure I could, both from an ability perspective and from a system setup perspective. I tend to play somewhat of a TAG style. I float from being ultra Taggy, like the example you give, sometimes even treading into Nit territory, up to playing kind of Semi LAG style, it just depends on who is at the table and to some degree the cards I am being dealt. I find that I really like being in the 24/20 or 22/18 range, something like that. It feels comfortable to me and doesn't get too boring where I start to lose focus. I have been spending a lot of time working on 3bet ranges and have been trying to increase that. I can see how it can be profitable and create better table dynamics for you. Naturally I tend to land in the 5-6% range on 3betting. Since working on it, I am increasing it and can see getting it up to the 8% or even 10% that is "recommended." I tend not to worry too much about have the "suggested" stats, as I do think it depends a lot on the types of players that you are up against, but I do know that it is good to have some sort of benchmark to help you find leaks in your game. It might be suggested that having an AF of 2 or 3 or 4 is ideal(I don't know the actual number) but you may run at 1 for a session or 2, or even longer, because your player pool is full of aggressive players who just barrel anything and it is much more profitable to just call them down a bunch, just as a simple example.

All that being said, I have a question for you Adam. It came up in the staking skype group. @Pwll Might be able to add to my description of the villain or other info. So how do you deal with these very aggressive Ultra-LAGS(I guess that is what I will call them)? They run like 38/30 or 38/28 or 35/25, stuff like that, but they are also really sticky. They tend to 3bet a ton, over 10% sometimes even more than 15%. They also tend to be really sticky and won't fold to 3bets even though their range is very wide, nor do they like to fold post flop. They are like this weird combo of aggressive and sticky. They are on the high end of LAG almost to the point of being fishy or a maniac. I actually look at them like fish and want to play them and know that I can profit from them cuz they aren't good regs. They have to have a ton of leaks, but we are just having a hard time trying to find the exploits and leaks.

The only things I can come up with don't seem to work for me and I think it is because it is somewhat unchartered territory and way out of my comfort zone. So the first thing I can come up with is to tighten up against them so your range is more value heavy and has hands that are very playable post flop so you can make bigger hands to punish them with. Obviously, you can 3bet them more when they are in later position and opening, as they have wide range so they should fold, but they don't, they tend to call a ton of 3bets and even more so they will 4 bet you more. This always puts me in a very uncomfortable spot because I have just opened my 3bet range up a bit and now I am getting 4bet more and don't feel comfortable just stacking off with speculative hands or non premiums. Conversely if they are 3betting you a ton, than you should just be able to 4bet them more, but again some or a lot of these guys will just start shoving on you and it puts you in that uncomfortable spot where you are trying to decide if you should call off with some speculative or non premium hands. Does just calling more of their 3bets and floating flop cbets work? Should you be semi bluff raising more flop cbets? If you were going to start 4betting more, shoving more, or calling off shoves more, how would you construct those ranges? I have been working a lot on 3bet ranges and 3bet defending ranges but it isn't something I have had to use much or worry about a ton up until now at the ultra micros.

I know there is a lot to this and I know there is no simple answer if A then do X and if B do Y type system, but this is definitely outside of my comfort zone and not even sure where to start other than avoiding them(which I don't want to do) or tightening up a lot and just trying to wait for a big hand. Maybe that is the answer. LOL

Thanks in advance

Basic idea is to play tight and straightforward. Reduce open-raise sizings, avoid LAG open-raises.

If they are super sticky, all of our hands generate better implied odds. We can play fit or fold frequently in some cases. It is important to differentiate between the different types of loose opponents.

1) The ones that hardly every fold
2) The ones that are capable of folding sometimes

Type (1) we basically just play for value and understand when to go for thin value. Do NOT get tilted and play back in bad spots. The amount of times I see players started trying to call Axo against a 3bet because their opponent is aggro. This is exactly what he wants, he can make even more money now.

Type (2) Analyse your opponents folding tendencies and understand when it is correct to bluff. If you just play purely for value against these guys you will not get paid off. Understand his bluffing tendencies. Perhaps he likes to three-barrel in which case the EV of slowplaying stuff might increase.


The key to all opponents is to understand their specific tendencies. The first mistake is trying to categorise all of these opponents into "one type of opponent that is giving me trouble". These guys are not necessarily that similar postflop. We must always ascertain what the individual tendencies of each player are and how to exploit them.