Exclusive Netbettor Texas Hold'em Article:

Why Good Players Lose

As our beloved games continues to explode across the gaming landscape of America, we’re finding more and more hold ‘em players who have read some books, studied the game, and taken a disciplined approach to becoming better players. Yet, many of these players are still only playing break-even poker, or perhaps still losing. Why is this? In this week’s article we’ll look at some of the more common mistakes intermediate players make, and try to come to an understanding as to why ‘otherwise good players play bad.’

Mistake #1: Calling pre-flop raises cold with likely dominated hands.
I am firmly on the record as saying that you should almost never cold-call a raise before the flop (i.e. call a raise, two bets, before you've called one bet). The exception to this occurs when the pot is going to be contested by multiple players (at least six, or perhaps as few as five if you’re holding a big enough hand) and you have a hand that plays well multi-way. If you’ve read any hold ‘em books at all, you’ve probably already learned that cold calling pre-flop raises with hands like A T offsuit, or J T offsuit, is tantamount to poker suicide. Yet many players who understand this will gleefully cold-call raises with hands like Q J suited, or K T suited, when they can only anticipate three or four way action going into the flop.

While having the hand be suited is a definite advantage, the fact is that this is not enough to overcome the handicaps that these types of hands face against a typical pre-flop raising hand when the pot is being contested short handed. How do I know this? Because I’ve probably logged more hours in ‘tight’ hold ‘em games than anyone I know, and I was still able to profit nearly one big bet an hour in these games. Many of the players I played against were fairly solid, yet they insisted on cold-calling before the flop with hands that they should have known would play very poorly against one of my ‘typical’ raising hands. As a result, I was able to get paid off on my big pairs just as I would in a loose game, which accounted for a large portion of my profits.

The rule is this: Anytime you’re ‘not sure’ whether to fold before the flop or call, you should probably fold. When you decide to take a flyer with a marginal holding, at least make sure you’re going to see the flop with at least five other players. If this strategy is ever wrong it’s not wrong by much, and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches by simply bowing out unless the conditions clearly indicate you should proceed.

Mistake #2: Failing to take the size of the pot into account.
You have 9 8 on the button, and four players have limped in in front of you. The small blind folds, the big blind raises, and all call. Now the flop comes K 7 5. The big blind bets out, the next player raises, and one player calls to you. What should you do?

If you’re like a lot of intermediate players, you probably said fold. But take another look. The pot currently has 17 small bets in it, and it’s going to cost you two bets to call. That gives you immediate odds of 8:5:1. True, that’s not quite enough to warrant a call, but your implied odds in this spot are huge, as it would appear as though you’ll have a chance to trap at least two opponents for two bets on the turn if you hit, and probably get paid off in two spots on the river (note that the flop doesn’t contain any obvious draws, which makes it that much more likely that the raiser on the flop, and the cold caller on the flop, are playing hands that they’ll pay off with on the river). Also, you might get someone with a three-of-a-kind involved in a raising war on the turn if you do hit. Folding in this spot doesn’t cost you a ton of EV, but when you make these kinds of sloppy mistakes over and over it starts to really add up. In a loose game you’re not going to make much money by bullying top pair through a large field, which means you’ve got find other ways to make your salt. Taking long shot draws into big fields is one of those ways. Of course, you’ve got to make sure that the money is there, since you need to get to drag a big pot when you do hit in order to make up for all those times that you miss. But dismissing a hand like this by saying that ‘you don’t pay two bets with a gutshot draw’ is just lazy. Every draw has its price. When you’re getting that price, you’re not doing your job if you turn it down.

Mistake #3: Getting bunged up about short term results.
You see this on message boards all the time. A new player reads a couple books, logs on to an online poker room, and starts whacking the game for 3 big bets an hour for the next month. After a while our hero catches the short end of the variance curve, and starts hemorrhaging money. One session he loses 10 big bets. Then 20. Then 10 again. He wins 15 on his next play, and finally figures he’s righted the ship, only to be met with a 45 big bet swing on his next session. On the cusp of utter panic, our hero starts posting on every message board he can find on the Net, imploring veteran players who advise him as to where he’s gone wrong.

This is great, except for one thing: He probably hasn’t gone wrong. His early results were unusually good, and now he’s simply coming back to earth. By sticking with his game plan, and trying to slowly incorporate new strategies and tactics into his arsenal, he’d probably become a long-term winner. Instead, he freaks out over the losses, decides that ‘he can’t beat a loose game’ and either a) blows the rest of his bankroll playing like a jack-off, or b) gives it up all together.

Every poker veteran has at least one horror story about a prolonged losing streak. I know I’ve got my share of them, and so does everyone else I know. If you’re going to play poker you just have to get used to the idea that there’s a lot of short term luck in the game. Once you’re able to take that to heart, my friends, you’ll have gone a long way towards getting through the weeds.

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