Like everything else, poker has good examples of successful professionals we want to follow, but there are also players who talk a big game but never deliver or always find some kind of excuse. Being good at poker and being perceived as a good player has become an ego thing for a lot of players in the poker community, but that is one of the main things stopping them from progressing.
I Play High Stakes!
Poker is a relatively small community, and it’s even smaller when you trim it down to professionals in the same game type, like No Limit Hold’em Cash Games. Most serious players will know who the top players are. They will be publicly known even to broader audiences, but as a professional player who is deep in a game, you will also know who your competitors are. You will know about the best players in stakes you were playing before your stakes and at least a stake or two above what you are playing, so there are no mysteries or secrets.
What I find really annoying and hard to deal with is when a random person you meet at the casino, a friend of a friend, or even an old friend of mine pops out of nowhere and talks a “big game” about how he plays at a high level. I think we all have been there: somebody in our circle knew somebody playing high-level poker.
You can go to your local casino, and there will be players who present themselves as absolute crushers, but then they won’t know some concepts that the average NL50 online player thinks are basics. The thing gets even worse when you realize that they convinced everyone around them and in the casino that they are crushers, so you are put in a spot where you have to deny it or agree with it even if you don’t believe it.
There are also players who rapidly moved from NL5 to NL200 by joining CFP or Staking group that are now claiming they are playing high-stakes poker (some people consider NL200+ mid-stakes online, but as this is the highest zoom level running on major sites, I consider it high stakes poker by skill, not by the amount of money played).
The main problem I see in this is it’s unrealistic; you are just following a “script,” and your win rate is fixed (if you even have one), and you are not improving. You are also being held by your coach/staker, who is just giving you input that gives him the most returns, and you are not learning from experience or doing enough work off the table to have a natural progression. You are not developing skills on how to study by yourself, and you are not “figuring things out.” You are also most likely table selecting and “bum chasing,” which doesn’t mean you are “beating the stake you are playing”; you are just being opportunistic, so we have to separate apples from oranges.
- Read more: Process of Modern Poker Study
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Delusion of Tournament Players
Tournament players can hit a hot run early in their career, and they start thinking that it is normal to win a major tournament with 10,000 entries, so they start playing buy-ins above their bankroll and against smaller pools filled with stronger regulars.
The main misconception when comparing success in cash games and tournaments is that you can get lucky and become a profitable cash player. You have to continuously win and make the right decisions, but in tournaments, even if you do not make the right decisions, you are going to win a tournament here and there, and if you are lucky enough, it’s going to be a big one that will most likely swing your career and ego in the wrong direction.
I have never seen a bad cash game player become profitable and make a lot of money over the years playing in tough games, but there are plenty of tournament players who have had one or two big scores that are going to keep them profitable for years, even if they are burning money while playing.
It is really hard to assume your future cash results, so it makes even less sense to assume you will repeat high scores in tournaments year after year.
- Read more: There Was Never a True Grandmaster of Poker
There is Only One Thing That Determines Your Poker Skill
So, after we discussed some of the misconceptions and false showboating in a few examples, let’s talk about what really determines how good you are at poker.
What I would want to see from a player is his style of poker, whether he is a tight player, a loose player, aggressive, or passive, combined with his results on a really big sample.
Suppose I see in his graph that most of his win rate is coming from a blue line (showdown winnings) and that he is losing a lot in a red line (non-showdown winnings). In that case, I can conclude that he is too tight and not taking enough risks in spots where he needs to bluff or call down in weak lines, but he knows the pool well enough that he can extract value by value betting. This approach is more of ABC poker with limited downside but also limited upside; most of these players will be breakeven or slightly winning at the tables, but will get most of their win rates from rakeback and other promos.
The other graph that is rarer is the graph where winnings are coming from the blue line, but the red line is slightly losing or breakeven. This is a good player who understands where, when, and who to bluff while also getting value from calling stations and not punting.
The really rare graph we can see is the red line winner that is losing in the blue line. This player is pushing every spot and putting pressure on the opponents in all spots, understanding that aggression is the key to putting opponents in tough spots, forcing them to make mistakes and give up their equity. If we look at this kind of player, we can surely say he is doing something special and is extracting the maximum from his HUD and MDA (Mass Data Analysis). If this kind of player is profitable in a massive sample, he is a special player who is skilled, understands poker, and sees it in a different way.
The final graph is the graph where the player has both red and blue lines winning. This is a unicorn in the poker world, and only the best of the best players will have that. They will know how to adjust properly and what to do to each opponent while also having an excellent grasp on GTO and where the pool’s weak sides are. Not by MDA, but by the mass of hands played with each opponent individually. These are usually going to be players who are best in the pool by a significant margin.
So it doesn’t matter if you got enough money to play NL1000 by your stake; it matters if you came there with your own money and had a natural progression while also having high win rates at the limits where you played while climbing. You have to have millions of hands backing that. You never lose your database, as it is one of the essential things you need for your progress, and every time you hear a story where “super crusher” doesn’t have a database where he can show/prove what he is saying, it is 99.9 percent a lie.
What I’m trying to say is that I faced a lot of poker players over the years, and most of them just lack the fundamental knowledge of what is possible or realistic, so we see some players taking Linus Love in head-up battles for hundreds of thousands of dollars, others going in debt to their stakes and traveling the world trying to hit a big tournament score, others playing poker for six months and trying to play highest zoom cash games. We need a standardized, rigorous method of assessing somebody’s poker skills because it feels like there are a lot of Ferraris and Lamobs with Peugeot engines.
Before any poker player starts talking about offering to coach, selling action, or bragging, they need to have a sample of half a million hands with a decent win rate and a graph to show their playing style. Graphs only count from major poker sites, not poker apps, pools like GG Ontario, or limited pools. Delivering this shouldn’t be any problem for a legit professional player; if it is, you are most likely not the one.
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