Poker Talk

One more stepping stone you need to climb on your way out of poker “suckerdom” is to recognize the need to keep detailed records of your table antics. Regardless of how objective you think you are, simply keeping a mental track of what you do at the table is not enough, because you’ll always remember things in a slightly distorted way: from your own perspective, exaggerating the good moves you’ve made and forgetting about the bad ones.

The first thing you need to cover when deciding to keep serious track of how you’re performing at the green felt is the issue of the bankroll. Very few players keep a separate bankroll for poker purposes only. Most of us commit the mistake of mixing our everyday finances with the money we take to the poker tables and that’s just plain wrong.

Your primary objective at the poker table is to make money. Sure, some people play it for the fun and the kicks, but I’ll assume you’re in it for the money as much as for the fun aspect.

If your goal is to make money, you need to know exactly how much you’re making, and I’m not talking about keeping track of how much you take to the tables and how much you walk away with. For a serious player, that’s just not going to cut it. You need to know exactly what limits you play and how you do on each and every one of these limits. If you’re dominating a certain limit and you move on to a higher limit where you still win but you only make like $15 an hour, obviously, you shouldn’t hang around there just because it’s a higher limit and you’re aiming for the boasting rights. You should also sign up for rakeback too. Rake rebate deals like the Full Tilt rakeback or the Ultimate Bet rakeback offer you a very nice edge bankroll-wise. Leaving an edge like this unexploited is a sin for every serious poker player.

These factors don’t really have anything to do with actual hands-on poker strategy, but they will help you discover your strengths and weaknesses and ultimately they will help you become a better poker player.

How you keep track of your poker performance is up to you really. You can use the low tech approach of pen and paper, you can use Excel or another similar spread-sheet application, you can use the stats provided by your poker room or you can go really high tech and purchase an application like PokerTracker.

The basic information that you need to keep track of, should include the current date, the start time of the session and its end time (it’s quite easy to lose track of time amid all the excitement, so you need this information to be able to tell exactly how long you play), the total amount of buy-ins (all the money that you take to the tables) and the total amount of your cash outs. This basic information will help you determine your hourly rate, which will offer you a precious clue regarding the EV+ in the hands that you play.

Other information that you should also track: the limits at which you play and the location. Location is not only important for live play. Different online poker rooms throw different levels of competition at you, and if you have accounts in tens of poker rooms, you’ll eventually find it difficult to track what you did and where. The bottom line is, you need to know where you played, because you may dominate a certain limit in one poker room and struggle at the same limit in another.

The most important result is of course your hourly rate, but putting together monthly statistics as well as overall ones is also helpful.

I know it may seem like a lot of effort should go into these statistics but it isn’t exactly so. Once you start doing it, you’ll see it’s easy and the rewards it’ll offer you will be more then worth the effort you put into it.

Keeping records of your poker shenanigans may not give you a direct help at the table, but it will definitely help you identify and eliminate your weaknesses which will translate into a better overall table performance over time.

It’s not exactly a secret that online, the vast majority of players suck at poker. Not only do they suck at the game itself, they pretty much suck at everything connected to it. Take rakeback for instance. While deals like the ongame rakeback and the rakeback Full Tilt Poker offers give players a handy advantage over the house rake, the vast majority of them never even consider signing up for such a deal. Some of these guys do realize they’ve made a mistake by signing up without rakeback, but they only do so when it’s already too late and they have an account opened. Most online poker rooms won’t allow those who already have a rakeback-less account to open a new one for rakeback.

Anyway, learning about the advantages of rakeback and signing up for a deal is only a matter of some reading up. Most of the factors that will differentiate you from suckers at the poker table are similarly “insignificant”.

The truth is, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist and you don’t even need to be extremely skilled in poker to beat 95% of players out there. Just master a few basic concepts and you’ll be amazed at how big an improvement you’ll show at the table.

One of the most common mistakes rookies make is that they play way too many hands. Every time they pick up their two pocket cards, they start seeing all sorts of dreamy flops that will hit their hand dead on. Then they build on the weak starting hand mistake by chasing it way too deep into the hand.

There are several reasons why beginners act this way, not the least of which are the “strategies” they pick up watching televised tournaments. Guys on TV seem to be raising and shoving on almost any two cards, and professional players openly advocate that real poker is about playing the player and not the cards, and therefore they can win pots on any two cards.

First of all, professionals are correct about the importance of playing the player over playing one’s cards, but you have to bear in mind that these guys don’t play on the same thought level that you do. On the level where they play, starting hand selection takes a back seat to playing the player, but on your level (which is most probably the first or second level of poker thought, where you only consider your cards and maybe the board texture), proper starting hand selection is vital.

Add to that the fact that the hands you see on TV are specially selected ones (they’re not going to show you the hundreds of hands that were folded before because it’s just too boring for TV) and that you may have seen action from the closing stages of a high buy-in tournament where starting hand values change radically.

The bottom line is, as a rookie you should exercise proper starting hand selection. There’s no shame in learning starting hand charts. After all, if you do not consider the suits, there are 169 possible two-card starting hands, and some of those hands win a much higher percentage of the time than others.

The premium starting hands are the AA,KK, QQ, JJ and AK suited. These hands are not guaranteed winners, but they do offer you a serious edge over the suckers at your table. Don’t lose sight of the fact that real poker begins after the flop, however, by selecting your starting hands well, you’ll make it much easier on yourself to play after the flop and you’ll simplify the decisions you’ll be forced to make.

Besides the starting hand selection, keep an eye out for your table position as well. The same starting hand will have a different value depending on whether you’re in early or late position and depending on the information you collect on your opponents before you act.