Good news! Tonight, you’re going to the cardboard room. You’re going to play $1/$2 no-limit hold’em, or $6/$12 fixed limit hold’em, or $4/$8 Omaha high-low with a half-kill. You’re excited. You can’t wait to feel those heavy clay chips on your hand, to listen to the chatter of the cardboard room, to look the large pots shoved for your direction. Your plan: to cash out as a large winner on the end of your session.
That is your plan, right?
Nope. That’s not a plan. It’s not even an objective. Cashing out big is solely a hope, and a misguided hope at that.
Of course you would like to win. But your plan for tonight should take care of playing well and learning more. And that takes preparation. Should you execute your plan well, and if you’re running well, you'll win (and if you want to be sweet). But when you execute your plan and lose, you still win — in relation to reinforcing good habits and nurturing the seeds of future poker capabilities.
Make a List
What do I mean by a “plan”? I’m relating to something more explicit than a general idea (or want to) win.
I’m talking a few small set of maxims that you just write out or type into your phone. And it's critical to jot down them out somehow. Mere thoughts are too insubstantial. You need your plan to have tangible, concrete steps, and also you want your plan to be difficult to disregard.
I write mine out in a small pocket notebook, a brand new list for a brand new session, regardless of how redundant it can be or seem. I start with truisms: two or three things that I absolutely, positively know, but don’t never forget to do. Things like...
- Look left
- Remember the significance of position
- Don’t bluff a calling station
These ideas are simple to be informed but harder to adopt and execute consistently. Execution is where the rubber meets the road, in poker as in everything else. Execution is where ideas turn out to be actions, and actions count greater than ideas on the poker table.
My strategic plan will even include a couple of seemingly oddball admonitions such as...
- Breathe (an concept that comes from Tommy Angelo’s superb Elements of Poker)
- Get up a minimum of every two rounds stretch my legs
- Quit at midnight, without reference to what number of chips I’ve won or lost
Again, lots of these these directives are simpler to jot down than to do. Midnight comes, for example, and I’m stuck — it’s very hard to quit then. But now after I do, I THINK good about my discipline.
And finally, my plan will include some very specific strategic ideas I’ll hope to place into practice, for instance...
- Pick one player and put him on hands
- Look for tells from one player (only one)!
- Make some uncharacteristically thin value bets at the river
- Find five hands to think through later (irrespective of outcome)
All told, I’ll have six to 10 items on my list, some of which I WOULD LIKE hardly be reminded of. I’ll check out the plan while I’m looking forward to my game, and that i will check out it again at a kind of breaks I'VE reminded myself to take.
The Benefits of constructing a Plan
Here’s why this plan is so important to any player, and especially to learning players. A strategic plan is a chance to strengthen things you’ve learned, to cause them to so ingrained that you just (almost) don’t need to take into accounts them anymore.
For example, by now I’ve kind of mastered the “Look left” idea (another one explained by Angelo that has to do with players acting once you and getting an concept in their intentions before you act). In effect, that item can most likely burst off my list.
A strategic plan is the way you consciously add new tactics in your repertoire. Maybe it’s the check-raise, the stop-and-go, the three-barrel bluff, or making seat-of-the-pants ICM calculations. To grasp how strategies work — to succeed in a degree of unconscious mastery — it's a must to practice them consciously.
But there are two other benefits of writing up a strategic plan in your next session.
First, it'll help you ability to get your mind into the sport and its moments. Once I’ve decided, for example, really to look at the player in seat five and in fact begin to watch him or her, my attention is targeted and strengthened, and never just on seat five. The more you look, the more you spot. The more you see, the more you recognize. The more you know, the easier you’ll play.
And second, having a plan will give you the power to show every session right into a positive one. I don’t mean you’ll always leave winner. You won’t. But it is possible for you to to generate some positive results out of your plan, especially in case you have a look at your plan later that day and grade yourself to your progress.
“I looked left on every hand tonight,” you'll be able to tell yourself as you look one last time at your list after the session ends. Or “I had an even read at the player in seat five.” And even “I made certain to stand at every round and took good, deep breaths.”
These benefits is probably not bankable within the delicious way of cold, hard cash. But they're bankable within the long run, and anything positive can and may take the edge out of the monetary loss.
A plan shouldn't be confused with, say, a blueprint, or a schematic, something to be followed slavishly whatever the circumstance. Your actual strategy for any given hand will depend entirely on what your opponents are doing. But a plan can set your agenda for tonight’s game — and permit you to turn this session right into a set of opportunities for learning.
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