The purpose of our site in writing this lesson is to give you an idea of the kind of mindset and commitment that are required to be most efficient to reach real poker proficiency. The reader doesn't have to be a player aspiring to become a professional; just wanting to become good enough to beat the game at any meaningful level is enough of an ambition .
Anyone can read this, of course, but our target audience is a decently experienced beginner who has started to "get" the game of poker and is now considering taking it more seriously. Perhaps casual players will still get something out of reading this, though, specifically that they're making the right call staying casual. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Also, none of these articles will actually give strategy tips or pointers. You won't learn how to play AQ-offsuit from middle position, and you won't find out how to extract the most money when you flop a set, there are loads of books for that. We would, however, encourage you to read those books, and then re-read them. And perhaps read them again.
And this brings us to the first lesson in this series:
• Learning how to beat poker takes time - a lot of time. In fact, likely more time than you can imagine. Being a fast learner is imperative, but even if you are you still will need plenty of time to soak up all the information you can in order to move forward. There are natural talents (Stu Ungar comes to mind), but they are very few and far between, and the likelyhood of you being one of them is diminishingly small.
Now, the exact numbers here aren't important, but we want to give you an idea about the scale of what I'm talking about in terms of experience and understanding:
- Playing a hundred thousand hands.
- Reading ~3000 pages of poker books, some of them several times and a few of them many times.
- Spending about an hour for every three hours played analyzing the way you played certain hands.
Almost certainly, there will be someone reading this article who will think "100k hands is nowhere near enough!" and this person is probably correct. Our point is that if you think 100k hands sounds like a lot, you have to brace yourself for the fact that it will likely take even more - and probably a lot more.
Do you really need to read all those books? Yes, and no. You don't really need to read all of them, since there will likely be a few books from which you won't really learn anything you didn't already know, or couldn't have picked up from some other book. However, you still need to read all of them because you have no way of knowing beforehand which books you could have been able to skip. It's a bit of a catch 22, you could say. The willingness to study is absolutely key to becoming better and you should feel excited about devouring a new book on the market, scoreing it for things that can help you become better. If you think reading books is boring, then your only way to greatness may be natural talent.
• Spending 25% of your poker time on analyzing hands already played (yours and others') is also something you should take into account and plan for. The best way of plugging holes in your game is to put them under intense scrutiny, and preferably the scrutiny of others. You would do well to spend a lot of time on internet forums, discussing your own and others' hands. This number - 25% - may be a bit off, but we find it reasonable.
If you can work through the list above in less than a year, We are impressed, not the least if you have other commitments (a job, school, parenting, etc.) that take up time. Read stories all the time about new poker millionaires, like some kid at a place won $1 million last year, and similar things. It's not surprising that many people think that poker is easy money, but they should stop and wonder how come, if it's so easy, not everyone is doing it. The answer, naturally, is that poker - for most of us - isn't such easy money after all. We hope that message is conveyed clearly in our attempt, You've likely got a long way to go, and although not everything we suggest will sound fun and exciting, but do believe that it may shorten the time it will take you to get there.
