10 Common Ways Poker Beginners Beat Themselves

10 Common Ways Poker Beginners Beat Themselves
Let's face it, poker is a tough game to consistently win at.

Players are better these days, even in low limit games, and if you don't have a good strategy, good game selection and some reasonable tilt control, then you will probably struggle to win.

However, having coached 100's of poker students in the past, one thing I noticed is that many beginners in particular actually beat themselves.

That is, they shoot themselves in the foot and ruin their results with a variety of "rookie" or "amateur" mistakes.

So in this article I am going to break it down for you. These are the top 10 most common ways that poker beginners beat themselves at the poker tables.


1. No Patience, Expect to Win Big Right Away


One of the most common ways that new poker players beat themselves is expecting to win right away. Many of them figure that after a week they should be raking in the big bucks!

But unfortunately this just isn't the way that the game works.

And quite frankly, when you are brand new to poker and still trying to figure out how to play a tight and aggressive strategy (TAG), you probably will lose!

You wouldn't jump into a game of Fortnite for example (having never played before) and expect to win right away. No of course not, you will probably be one of the first ones to get eliminated.

The same goes with poker. You have to take it slow at the beginning and you should expect to learn some tough lessons in the early going versus more experienced players.

This is also why it is important to play in the right poker games. I give you my top 5 in my latest video.



2. Do Not Understand the True Nature of Variance


Variance is the technical term that we use in poker to describe the routine ups and downs that are built into a game like poker which has a large short term luck element.

Many poker beginners are shocked to learn that you can actually "run bad" (get unlucky) in poker for weeks and sometimes even months on end.

This is something that I discuss in a recent video on why you get so many bad beats online.


Make sure you are subscribed to my poker YouTube channel by the way for more high level poker strategy videos.

And what's more is that there is absolutely nothing that you can do to make it stop. It is important to understand that only results over a period of months or years mean anything to a poker pro though.

It is only amateurs that worry about day to day or week to week results in poker. And this is because they fail to understand the true nature of variance in this game.

Many people choose to let this destroy their entire poker career and they can never win because of it. Don't let this be you!

Poker is and always will be, a long term game.


3. Failing to Value Bet


One of the biggest ways that poker beginners commonly beat themselves is by failing to value bet at the lower limits.

What is a value bet?

A value bet is simply a bet that you make in poker when you believe that it is likely that you are ahead in the hand.


For example:

You have AK and the flop comes AT4

The chances are very high that you have the best hand in this scenario.

However, many poker beginners fail to make a value bet in a situation like this because they don't want to "scare" their opponent away. Or they bet way too small and simply do not get enough value.

Often this is because they saw one of their poker heroes like Daniel Negreanu or Phil Hellmuth do this on TV.

What they don't understand though is that these are world class professional poker players playing against other world class pros in high stakes poker games.

The poker strategy that they use has absolutely no correlation with the strategy that you should be using in your $10 games online or your local $1/$2 poker game at the casino.

Failure to consistently value bet against all the calling stations in low limit games is one of the absolutely biggest ways that poker beginners destroy their winnings.


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4. Overthinking and Studying Too Much


The next way that poker beginners shoot themselves in the foot is by over-thinking the game way too much and studying every advanced theory out there.

As I have mentioned before, it is much better when you are first learning the game to keep everything as simply as humanly possible. Just learn one simply poker strategy.

And if anyone tells you that you need to know something like "GTO" or study solvers, please for the love of god do not listen to these people!

I go on a decent rant about that in this recent video.


Because stuff like solvers is seriously holding so many people back in small stakes games these days.

You do not need to know any advanced math or study AI poker simulations in order to beat a bunch of beginners at NL2 or some drunk tourists in your local $1/$2 game.

I have some of the highest winnings in online poker history at the lowest stakes. I even wrote an entire book and video course explaining how I did it, Crushing the Microstakes.

I never studied any advanced poker math or used AI poker simulations in order to win obscene amounts of money in these games.

Keep it simple at the micros and you will win.


5. Playing Under-Rolled


The next way that poker beginners ruin their progress is a classic one. They simply don't have the bankroll to play at the stakes that they do.

This goes hand in hand with not respecting the power of variance in poker which I already mentioned above.


Here's the reality of poker that most people won't tell you:

Even very good winning poker players can lose sometimes for weeks or even months on end, through no fault of their own.

I have seen it time and time again throughout my own poker career with other people and it has happened to me countless times as well.

This is why I suggest that you have a bare minimum of 30 buy-ins for your stake if you play cash games or 100 buy-ins if you play tournaments.

A "buy-in" by the way is the maximum amount that you can bring to the table in a cash game (which is usually 100 big blinds) or the average stake you play in tournaments.

For much more on bankroll check out my complete guide to poker bankroll management.


6. Not Learning How to Grind


Back when I first learned how to play poker 15+ years ago we simply did not have the vast amount of poker training resources that are available today.

So for somebody like me, the only real option I had in order to improve was to learn how to grind. And what I mean by the "grind" is that you literally sleep at the poker tables.

I played so many hands in the first few years of my poker career that I often got accused of being a "bot" online and people questioned whether I was a real human being.

I am not saying that you have to play poker 12-14 hours a day like I did. But I do feel that many people these days have lost the ability to just simply put on their hard hat and grind.

10 Common Ways Poker Beginners Beat Themselves

Many of them sit around talking about the game in poker forums or reddit or watching somebody else play poker on twitch or youtube.

Now don't get me wrong.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. But if your goal is to improve and win big in poker, this should be kept to a bare minimum.

I have said it many times before on this blog. All of the best poker players I know have played way more poker than everybody else.

This is not a coincidence by the way. They learn through direct experience like I did.

Play 10 million hands of poker like I have and I absolutely promise that you will be a much, much stronger player.

Heck, even just play one million hands of poker. It is shocking to me how few people these days have even played this amount!

While a million hands of poker might sound like a lot, most full time online poker pros who multi-table will easily play this many hands in one year.


7. Moving Up the Stakes Too Fast


If you are a poker beginner then I always recommend that you start at the very lowest stakes no matter how good you think your skill level is or how small the money seems to you.

Because if you can't figure out how to beat the $5 games, then there is no way on earth that you are going to beat the $50 games.

Many poker beginners struggle with this bizarre idea that if they play at higher stakes where players "respect their raises" and are "easier to read," then they will finally start winning.

This is completely illogical though because poker players always get better as you move up the stakes (i.e. smarter, more skilled and tougher to beat).

So if you can't learn how to beat all the "wild" players in the $5 games, then you will never stand a chance of beating the much better skilled opponents that you will face in the $50 or $500 games.

This is something that Daniel Negreanu actually talks about in his new poker training course.

Do not fall for the common poker beginner flawed thinking that higher stakes games are easier to beat. Not only is this completely illogical but it also just isn't true at all.


8. Not Studying Their Poker Hands


One of the #1 ways that I finally learned how to start playing better poker is by relentlessly studying my own poker hands.

I would often study my own hands (and still do) after every session, win or lose. This is exactly what professional athletes do when they study the game film.

So why shouldn't you do this as a serious poker player as well?

You need to start learning from your own mistakes if you want to get better at poker. And the best way to do this is to study your biggest winning (and losing) hands in a program like PokerTracker.

If you play live, then start taking notes on your phone and think through these hands later or discuss them with other strong players.

The bottom line is that if you take poker seriously and you want to improve then you need to start putting in the work away from the tables as well.

All poker pros already know this and study their poker hands regularly.

By the way, I discuss this in much more detail in my new Elite Poker University training. 

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9. Playing in Bad Games


One of the biggest poker "skills" these days is learning how to game select and table select. This means finding the bad players to play against.

Because honestly, it doesn't matter how good you are, if you consistently play in tough poker games full of other strong players, you will not win big. Period.

Poker rookie mistakes

Therefore, it is your job these days as a serious poker player to scout any game before you sit down to play in it. There needs to be at least one bad player who is playing too many hands, chasing every draw and so on.

It still surprises me just how few poker players actually do this, even much more experienced ones. You wouldn't just randomly invest in a stock or cryptocurrency you have never heard of right?

No of course not.

You would learn more about the company or the history of the cryptocurrency, study past earnings reports, learn who is on the board of the company or the coin, their vision and so on.

A poker table is the exact same thing. It is a profitable (or not so profitable) investment opportunity depending on which one you choose.

Do you homework before you sit down to play at a poker table. This is a crucial skill that you must have in today's games if you really want to be a winning player.

I have already written the most comprehensive guide to poker table selection available on the internet today.


10. Not Having a Quitting Strategy


The final way that poker beginners ruin their results is by not having an effective quitting strategy. Now what does this even mean?

It means that after you lose a set amount you will step away from the poker tables no matter what. We also call this a "stop loss" in poker.

The reason why using a stop loss is so important is because it prevents you from playing poker when you are heavily tilted and making very poor emotionally based decisions.

This is quite literally the death of so many poker careers. I have seen it time and time again. They literally just throw all of their profits away when the cards inevitably go south on them.

This is why for beginners I suggest using a 3 buy-in stop loss strategy. If you lose 3 buy-ins, then you quit for the day, no matter what.

Once again, a "buy-in" is typically 100 big blinds in a cash game or the entrance fee if you play tournaments.

So if you are playing the 2cent/5cent blind cash games online for example, then 3 buy-ins would be $15.


Final Thoughts


So these are the top 10 ways that poker beginners beat themselves in my opinion. They are in no particular order.

In fact, tilt is definitely #1 in my opinion even though I saved it for the very end. Make sure you have a plan or a stop loss strategy for when the cards inevitably go sour on you!

Other ways that poker beginners routinely beat themselves though are not having a big enough bankroll, expecting to win right away and over-thinking the game too much.

They also fail to play enough poker, don't study their hands in order to learn from their mistakes and try to move up the stakes too fast.

If you are a poker beginner yourself, hopefully a few of the tips on this list will help you from making these same mistakes yourself.

Lastly, if you want to know how to start consistently making $1000+ per month in low stakes games, make sure you grab a copy of my free poker cheat sheet.

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Let me know in the comments below how you think poker beginners beat themselves. Did I miss anything important on this list?

10 Ways Poker Beginners Beat Themselves

17 comments:

  1. Lots of good advice as usual. One of the most funny things in poker forums is people, who claim, they can not win in online poker, because the other players are to bad. Because as you say, if you cannot beat absolute beginners or gamblers, then how are you ever going to beat better players at a higher limit.

    I especially remember one guy in Cardschat, who claimed, he was a winning live player for 20 years, but online he just could not win because of all these donkeys! It turned out, he had played maybe 3 low stakes online tournaments, and someone had jammed light on his aces and sucked out on him. Well ok so you suffered a bad beat, and you did not cash in 3 tournaments. Sounds pretty normal to me.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Thanks Lars!

      Haha I have heard stories like that many times before. There isn't much that you can do for somebody who thinks 3 poker tournaments (or even 100 of them) is a statistically significant sample size.

      The vast majority of people who play poker massively under-estimate the impact of variance in my experience, and it ultimately prevents them from ever having any real success.

      And it's not even just poker.

      You see this sort of thinking everywhere in business, fitness, almost everything. Most people want fast results now and that's very rarely how things actually work in reality.

      Delete
  2. Good article like most of yours. :)
    I also think that some beginners play way too much tables when still learning the beginner strategy. Sometimes it seems that they don't have a clue about the board texture.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks JJ! I agree, it is important to only play as many poker tables as you feel comfortable with while still making quality decisions.

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  3. I have just recently started playing online poker and would like to take it to a level where I can play to win instead of casually (my previous experience is with friendly home games and the occasional charity tournament or low stakes casino game).

    I had been reading/watching a lot of your content and read Massive Profit before I started. I installed PT4 and jumped into 888Poker with a $120 bankroll for 2NL. My first session was just playing up to 4 tables at a time and I played 681 hands with the following stats:

    VPIP 28.11
    PFR 17.46
    3BPF 10.88
    CBF 83.91
    TAF 8 (I realize now I was probably being a Maniac, as you call it!)

    I lost $8.79 that session (I know... I should have set my stop/loss limit at $6). It started well with a few wins early on, but I knew I was doing it wrong when I was getting burned by calls when I was trying to force folds against my heavy bets. Basically, I was trying to bluff some of my hands like I would in live games. Clearly, I needed to go back and re-read Massive Profit and get better at identifying and isolating the bad players at the table to exploit them. Instead, I was clearly the bad one here!


    My next session of exactly 1200 hands looked like this:

    VPIP 34.29
    PFR 12.72
    3BPF 4.91
    CBF 83.91
    TAF 5.71

    I played with more of my hands (admittedly, I was being dealt a better % of hole cards than my last session) and I was winning more big bets than I was losing with only about a dozen bad beats (~$.50 or more lost) to my 16 wins, of which almost all WTSD. I won $4.63 overall this session (with proper betting, I am sure it should have been more), but when I went back to look at my percentages, I thought I was playing LAG (realizing now it was too loose at 34%), but my 3BPF% was too low and it felt like I was more like somewhere between LAG and aggro-ish fish.

    If you saw these stats, how would you classify me as a player and what kind of strategy would you take against me?

    I know my VPIP should be 15-20%. What about the rest?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi,

      I don't coach anymore so I am not going to go into a deep analysis of your stats, especially here in the comments section of a blog post.

      However, a basic look shows that you are playing too many hands (whether this is 6max or full ring), and the gap between VPIP and PFR is far too wide.

      If you would like a more detailed analysis of your stats and poker hands, I have a private poker forum where you can get advice from myself and many other serious players:

      https://www.blackrain79.com/p/forum.html

      Delete
  4. One does sympathise a little with new players who have invested in poker books or magazines only to find that the strategies provided are useless against most players at NL2 - because their actions are virtually random and seem to have no connection with the flow of the betting or the cards. But the solution surely has to be finding better strategies, rather than finding better opponents!

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    Replies
    1. Hi Ed,

      The opposite is actually true in my opinion.

      Any basic poker strategy like you will find in my free poker cheat sheet for example works exceptionally well against "random decision" low stakes players.

      And this is because poker is ultimately a game based around mathematics. If the odds are continually in your favour, then you will win in the long run.

      Their actions are irrelevant because you can't fight math.

      Delete
  5. Awesome work @blackrain as usual ...

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  6. in my earlier career of poker, i always chase losses by going to higher stakes. Luckily i was playing zynga poker during those times, how stupid i was buying fake chips with real money :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Tom,

      Haha I am pretty sure selling fake chips is big business just like with mobile games. Mobile game developers make a fortune with people making in-game purchases for some level-up or whatever.

      Delete
  7. Do you have a Discord channel of poker players who would like to work with each other to move up in the micros? I feel like that would be a good strategy for you to make a Blackrain79 community.. We could be the "Micro Dark Storm" group (play on words for blackrain lol)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey William,

      Nope I don't have a Discord. However, I do have a private forum that is active every day right here on my website.

      https://www.blackrain79.com/p/forum.html

      Delete
  8. I've definitely used the "people will respect my raises" when I play for more money line. Thankfully I realized pretty early that is a loser's mentality usually caused by a series of bad beats and suck outs. Then I started playing live also and was shocked to see people are perfectly willing to make a pre flop call with Q7o for 20BB in a 1/1 game. And thank God for that!



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  9. I think the no patience thing is huge. Many of my friends tried poker and quit because they weren't winning right away lol.

    ReplyDelete