Understanding poker

There's been a lot written about poker over the years, particularly in the last fifteen since a guy named Moneymaker improbably won the World Series of Poker the first year it was shown seriously on television. There's so much information out there it can be hard to figure out how to start. You can spend years at this point learning about how to play No-Limit Holdem well, and never find an end to the writing and training videos you have to consume.

So I think it would be useful to get back to basics a little bit. We can talk about cards, and statistics, and tactics, more or less forever. One of the great things about poker is that it constantly generates new situations, new things to think about, new things to analyze. But at their core all poker games are essentially the same, and it's important to remember that before you get caught up in the analysis itself.

In any poker game, your goal as a player is to do three things:

1. Figure out what mistakes your opponent is making.
2. Figure out how best to exploit those mistakes.
3. Make sure when you do that you're not opening yourself up to being exploited in return.

Those three things are the game, and the cards and the betting are just mechanisms within it.

So when someone calls too much, you exploit it by betting your strong hands against them, and you watch out for them noticing and adjusting. When someone folds their blinds too often, you exploit it by stealing relentlessly, and you watch out for them defending or three-betting more often.

Number 3 can be especially tricky in multiplayer situations, where your choices to exploit one player might open up an opportunity for a third player to exploit you. It's always important not only to watch what other people are doing, but also what you're doing.

As I write about poker, I like to focus on this process, rather than things like finding optimal betting percentages, and which starting hands are worth playing. It's important to always remember that poker is a negative-sum game: there will always be less money left over for the players in the end than they started with, because of rakes, fees, time charges, etc.

This makes other players' losses incredibly important, because you need to take a substantial chunk of their money just to come out even, much less win. While most poker advice focuses on your own game, it's much more important to understand and react appropriately to the games of the people you're playing against.

That's where you win money - when you can take it from a specific person because they've made a choice to play poorly and you have recognized it and adapted.