The following hand will highlight what I mean here. I was playing in a Texas Hold em NL100 game a few days ago when the following hand came up. Now my style would be defined by many as tight-aggressive based on how few hands I play and then how I play those hands. It had been folded around to the cut-off who open raised to $3. A quick look at my PokerTracker stats revealed that this player had a high steal percentage and had steal raised on 10 of the 14 chances that he had previously.

My hand was A-J which was easily strong enough to play back given the hand strength and the fact that my opponent was likely stealing. I three bet to $12 and the big blind folded but my opponent called forcing me to play a hand out of position. The pot was $25 and the flop came 10s-8s-4c and now I had to decide how to proceed. I felt that a c-bet looked obvious but I wanted him to feel less confident about his hand and the best way to do that was to take it further into the hand. If I bet then I would be doing so blind and so I checked and he bet $12.

I called looking to check-raise the turn and the turn came and was the 7s and I checked again looking to check raise. The pot was $49 and I checked but my opponent checked also. The river card was the 2s and I didn’t want to check and have my opponent check it back and show me something like a pocket pair for the best hand. So I shoved my remaining $71 in the middle and they folded and I took the pot. Liken this to another tight-aggressive player who also three bet pre-flop. They c-bet the flop and get called and then check the turn and fold to another barrel.

You can see the huge difference here in how two tight-aggressive players have played the same hand. While both were tight-aggressive pre-flop, the difference post flop was that I stayed aggressive while the other player became passive when the dollar figures increased. So you can see here that there are definite styles within styles and this is why the four main poker styles are nothing more than generic in nature. Knowing that someone is tight-aggressive basically doesn’t come anywhere near telling the full story.

So why don’t they do this? Well they don’t do this for one simple reason and this is to do with locating the correct balance of money that they can make from their customers and their customers not being prepared to play the games. At the end of the day casinos care about their clientele but they want to make money as well. They want to give their customers the best experience possible but to charge them an amount as high as possible.

This shouldn’t be seen as anything negative and is well within the rights of any business. However it would be bad business practice to devastate your future earning potential by taking too much from your customer base during the early stages. Far better for a casino to make $1 million a year in profit and keep on making that money indefinitely than make $3 million over the first six months and then have nobody walk through the door.

Poker is very similar in that there are many reasons why EV and attaining maximum EV is not the ultimate objective. This is akin to stock market traders who try and predict tops and bottoms maximising their trades. If you talk to traders or read what they have to say then all experienced traders will tell you that trying to achieve this is a utopian goal that breaks many a trader. Many people will argue with me on this subject but there are more important factors involved in poker than maximising EV. Factors like emotional stability and money management are far more important concepts.

This is never more proven than when I play multiple tables. I will often play hands more passively than I would if I were playing only one or two tables as I am trying to keep an all round equilibrium on so many tables at the same time. With rakeback and sign up bonuses and value coming from bad players anyway then I simply do not need to even try and pursue every last drop of value because the act of doing so on so many tables at the same time is going to lead to confusion and me making many more mistakes than I would normally. So it is clear then that there are many reasons for why sacrificing EV or the process of trying to maximise it is a viable and often successful strategy.

However it is possible to make money in random markets and it has simply to do with staking levels, profit and loss levels and money management. If a stock is trading at $2.00 and you have good reason to believe that it will fluctuate by $0.50 and you would only be right 50% of the time then you could cut your losing trades and place a stop loss at $1.70 so that you only lost $0.30 per share. But you rode the entire profit and each winning trade saw you close the position at $2.50 if you bought the stock at $2.00.

This gives you a profit of $0.50 per share when it goes your way but you lose $0.30 per share when it doesn’t. If you bought 10,000 shares then you make $5000 when you win and lose $3000 if it goes bad. If you have a 50% strike rate of winning trades to losing trades then you will make $2000 on average for every two trades or $1000 per trade on average. But this still does not get around the fact that 50% of your trades will be losing trades. This situation is identical to poker, no matter what you do then you will experience horrible losing days and sessions. In fact most professionals only win a percentage of sessions that is close to 50%.

But their money management skills are very strong and so they make sure that their winning sessions amount to more than their losing sessions even though the number of winners to losers may be as low as 50-50. So it needs pointing out that a strong poker player often loses just as many pots as a losing poker player but the difference comes from the level of pots that they win and lose. Skilled poker play leads to bigger average winning pot sizes and lower losing pot sizes. This when compounded over any one week, month or year leads to profits.

Novice poker players or inexperienced poker players tend to assume that professional players make huge bluffs and reads more than what lesser players do but this simply isn’t the case at all. Poker should be treated as a business and this means minimising your losses the best that you can. To be able to do this means basically being at one with the game and feeling out what your opponents are doing not just in the game that you are in at the moment but at the level that you are playing at in general.

It is also far more pertinent to Online Texas Holdem poker as well which is a key factor as tracking software needs to be factored into the coaching these days without a doubt. But yet there are certainly no quick fixes with poker coaching and there are some very good and valid reasons for this. Firstly there are many facets to your character that are shaped before you even start out down the road to playing poker. One such trait is your attitude to risk. If you are cautious and risk adverse then what makes you ever think that you could ever play for meaningful amounts of money or amounts that represented a serious loss to you?

Attitude to risk or risk aversion is something that is common in many people but we can take this a step further as well. Many people are happy at taking risks as long as the risk is tiny and the chances of them losing money are minimal. But yet poker is simply not like that and you simply cannot avoid losing money whatever you do during bad runs and when outdraws arrive.

For example if you have a personal stop loss hurt limit of $200 then you could never play all that high with this kind of limit. All of us have different amounts of money that when we lose it hurts us. For one person that could be as little as $10. If you were seriously upset at the thought of losing $10 then you really need to have a good long hard think about playing poker for levels that include the possibility of losing more than $10 per day.

At the end of the day, poker and playing poker well isn’t just about knowing how to play cards or play cards well. That comes with practice and education but there are many more factors that dictate why winning players are the way that they are. While in one sense, taking advice from winning players and coaches is good…..in another sense it isn’t. You would be correct to think that the best players to learn from would be the people who are making money and this is entirely true.

But yet winning players who have made their money easily are often unaware of the psychological problems and risk aversion problems that lesser players face in their battle to become winning players.

The low-stakes levels are what I would call $0.50-$1.00 through $1-$2 and up to the $3-$6 level. However there are huge differences in game play in $1-$2 limit Texas Hold’em poker and $3-$6. I have played in some $3-$6 games that were very tough indeed. What you have to remember is that the advent of multi-tabling has led to a vast compression of skill in online poker. The better players are now playing lower levels and playing more tables.

There are reasons for this and it is to do with players wanting to spread their risk and play in games with weaker players where they can earn more in rakeback. Let us say that a professional player was playing two tables at $30-$60 six max limit Texas Hold’em and was making 2ptbb/100 and playing 75 hands per hour per table so 150 hands per hour. This player was making $180/hour and doing very well.

However game selection is critical to his career and he can only get 20 hours of game play per week and so he makes on average $3800/week. But imagine if he moved down and played six tables at $10-$20 and still made 2ptbb/100. This time he would be getting 450 hands per hour and he would be making $40/100. So he would still be making $180/hour that he made at the higher level playing limit Texas Hold’em.

However the real difference stems from the fact that because he is playing far lower then he can more easily find beatable games because he already has the skill to beat limit Texas Hold’em at the $30-$60 level. So he can now play 40 hours a week and make $7600/week. On top of this is the fact that he is also earning more in rakeback as well. So you can see now why many players are playing at lower limits and multi-tabling rather than playing higher up.

It is a huge potential mistake to assume that you would not encounter very strong limit Texas Hold’em players until you reach the higher end of the middle limits. This is simply not the case for the reasons that I have just stated. This vast compression of skill is caused by three crucial factors. The first is the ability to multi-table. The second is the fact that the online games at all levels have got significantly tougher of late and the third reason is to do with sites offering rakeback.