Another misconception that is common among newer poker players is that in order to win more you need to play more. In fact, the exact opposite is true. In order to win more you need to play less.
This one fact can make the difference between a winning poker player and a losing poker player.
It is of great benefit to established, winning poker players that most newbies do not get this simple thing. Winning players make their money from other players mistakes.
The range of starting hands and the possibilities of the flop are not endless – they are finite. They do seem unlimited when you first start, but they are not.
And the percentages for winning, if you play for long enough, are fairly fixed. You may have good runs and bad runs, incredible suck outs and incredible bad beats, but in the end the numbers are true and will come out.
What makes a crucial difference then is that the numbers will only be true if you play each hand optimally. The profit for other players is in the mistakes that you make. And I’m not saying that you should not make mistakes. I mean, you shouldn’t, but you will. Every one does. But you should make less mistakes than the next guy.
If you can’t do that, then you should make your mistakes cost less. Learning to recognize early when you have gone wrong, how ever that may be, will be the single biggest profit making play that you will ever have.
Conversely, learning to recognize when your opponent has made a mistake and hasn’t pulled out will also make you a lot of money.
Take some time to think about that. Think back over your last session and find the errors. Think those through and see what the result would have been had you played it differently. More profit? Less of a loss?
Think about that for a while, and we will get on to common errors in the next lesson.
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in: biggest profit, limiting losses, losing poker player, playing less, poker errors, Poker Mistakes, reading players, winning poker players
