Be A Successful Poker Player In The Long Run

Decisions are important in playing poker. Those who win more make good decisions and those who losses obviously made bad decisions.

For each decision you made, it has a long term EV or expected value. That would be your standard win or lose in playing poker in the the long term. Here’s a concrete example: If you’re playing in a limit Hold’ Em game with $10/$20 limit and you bet the best possible set on the river you may expect a +EV of $20. And if your opponent calls every time you make this decision, you’ll get a guaranteed $20 each time. At the same game, you always fold when you are on a Big Blind, this means that you have -EV of $10 and every time you make this decision you’ll lose an additional $10.

However, expected value is a much more difficult than that. The -$10 big blind is not that easy to play. When you lose an average of $3 in the Big Blind, then the expected value when you fold every hand is -$7. But if you lose a hand worth $12 in the big blind then the expected value of your actions will be +$2.

So why does the majority of poker players make such poor decisions? This is because these players uphold that luck has a big hand on their fate. Long term play is out of their mind. They don’t even know what EV is. They just play because they think their lucky!

Better poker players make mistakes. They are not really visible on the naked eye but they exist. There are popular players who loved their most favored hand, others can’t understand the idea of positioning and there are too open minded to leave their blind unprotected. Actually, there are a lot of mistakes that a good player can be a victim.

Good decisions is the basis to become a winner in poker.
This idea has been misunderstood by some poker players. When someone wins the pot, he or she may think that he made a right decision. But the thing is, only a long term +EV will make a person a better poker player.

Disciplined poker players focused on the long term play of the game and short term luck is not important to them. Good luck is not that easy to ignore. But you need to focused in making right decisions in order to be a more successful long term player. This is because bad luck can take out your short term success in an instant but if you focused on getting the +EV long term play, bad luck is nothing to you. Your number one purpose is to place your money on a 100% winning bet.

There are individuals who ignore the core strategies of the game and they only rely on luck to and they are called results oriented persons. They look on what happened and not think about what could have they’ve done differently to make a better outcome. They are not aware that a term called EV existed in poker. They just think about the short term results of their play.

They are the ideal opponents in poker. The more distracted your opponent is, the better. Because the mistakes made by the other players will make you more money instead of relying on good game play.

This is the one of the core components of this game. Players who made the least mistakes win, players who make the most, losses. Even if you’re new in poker and you find a table with the worst possible players, you’ll come up triumphant. And that summarizes poker, to win poker you need to find and play with players who are weaker than you.

This idea applies to all the game of poker. Whoever your opponents are. The rule is be a better player than your opponents.