Zeenith and I were sitting around the house, pretty bored. For lack of better things to do we took some money we had lying around and decided to have a competition. So what does one do when they have too much money, build money structures!

-The extremely architecturally sound gripsed $100 mansion

-Tall and wobbly, zeenith’s leaning tower of hundos

LOL

Stop playing so many tables

No, seriously, STOP PLAYING SO MANY TABLES

Are you having trouble moving up? Losing your love for the game? Feeling like you’ve plateaud?

I know i recently had these feelings and lot of my poker friends had the same experience. If you’re wondering why, there’s a good chance you’re playing too many tables and you’ve stopped doing what a succesful poker player does, THINKING.

My friend gave me a great analogy that i don’t think i could possibly improve on. Let’s say our friend Bill really wants to play golf, his buddies always tell him how much fun it is to hit the linx and he wants to be a part of the comradery. So what does Bill do? He takes lessons he works on his swing, his putting, everything a good golfer should do and he goes from being god-awful to being a decent player who can keep up with his friends on the course.

But what happens once Bill gets good enough to keep pace? He stops working on all the things that made him good in the first place and simply plays instead of practicing because, getting great at golf wasn’t his goal, getting GOOD ENOUGH to play with his friends was all he wanted and now that he can be a part of the party he stopped actively improving.

Sound familiar? If you’re like me when you first found poker you wanted to get as good as possible as fast as possible. You read books, joined some training sites, talked with your friends and got good enough to grind out a decent winrate. You then trained yourself to add more games so that you could increase your hourly rate without having to increase your skillset because the decisions are all ‘standard’ and straightforward. You probably worked your way up to a limit that was comfortable, took a few shots that didn’t work out so hot and realized that well, the players at the higher limits are too good and things are too tough there so why bother moving up to a higher limit and challenging yourself when you can grind out 2ptbb/100 over 8 tables at your regular limit and make a very decent amount.

The problem is, when poker was new and everything was exciting, learning was fun, and moving up was fun. Once the learning curve flattens and you think you know it all it’s hard to see where you can improve. There’s not much to it really, once you know how to float, bluffraise, read peoples ranges and such you’ve got all the tools you need to succeed. The problem is, you aren’t using your full mental capacity.

There’s a reason that the basics are in the beginners section and playing the player is in the intermediate section. In fact, i think playing the player could be even beyond expert techniques because that’s what this game is really about. Your job as a poker player is to figure out your opponents strategy and figure out the best counter for it. If you’re playing a million tables, you’re not going to know what kind of hands the guy calls cbets with (top pair, mid pair, draws) versus what he likes to raise cbets with. You won’t know if he 2-barrels or 3-barrels and what types of cards he continues on. Does he like to 3bet only for value, with speculatives, with trash and so on and so forth. To really get to know your man, you have to study him. You have to see what makes him tick and see how he plays POST FLOP because while pokertracker stats are a good indicator of someones general style, they are far off from telling you how capable someone is of making a play, running a multi-street bluff or making a huge hero call.

I know when you’re in money-hungry mode the obvious solution seems to be to play as many tables as possible, get in as many hands and hit the long-run ASAP since you are probably a winning player. But if you want to be the best you can be, you have to learn how to make the BEST play in UNIQUE situation, not simply follow the standard.

Patrick Antonius only plays 3 tables at a time and he’s considered one of the best if not the best cash game player in the world. At the highest level everyone knows all the moves, but it’s about knowing who’s tilted, who’s on their best game, who’s move happy and who’s just playing standard. If you don’t know how your opponents are adjusting you can’t in turn adjust to them. If however, you know that they are playing the same usual style that they always are, exploiting them will be a piece of cake.

Poker is not a card game played with people (or a pokertracker statistics game played on generalizations), It is a people game played with cards. I suggest you get to know your people as well as possible while they’re too busy autopiloting and shallow to bother getting to know you…

So do yourself a favor, on a day when you’re feeling good and not tired or tilted, try playing just 2 tables. If you don’t think it’ll be exciting enough, play a higher limit than usual but play 1 table. Try to really study the player that you table selected for and find his major flaws. You’ll make much better decisions and i think you might develop a whole new love for the game, you can’t own someone’s soul if you aren’t paying attention to them, and there isn’t a much more satisfying feeling than having someone completely figured out and seeing through every move they pull.

Cut down the tables.

Start THINKING again.

It worked for me, and i’m playing the best poker of my life. Worst case you have a lower win-rate for one hour of your life, a very small price to pay for an eye-opening experience.

See you at the TOP!

-gripsed