For many skills, the best way to learn is trial and error. Trial and error is the worst way to learn poker because you will learn all the wrong lessons.
Stay on your Butt
jOE ESZTERHAS’ ADVICE TO ASPIRING SCREENWRITERS.
Suppose you play a tight session and are dealt:
3♥ 3♠
Your opponent (Villain) raises and you call. Heads up to the flop which is:
3♣![]()
7♦ K♦
Set! You notice a face card and two diamonds on the board and raise Villain’s bet, hoping you are against a drawing hand or a strong top pair. Villain calls.
The turn is:
3♣ 7♦ K♦ 8♣
Villain bets all in. Unwilling to fold your set, you call. Villain shows ace-queen of diamonds.
The river comes:
3♣ 7♦ K♦ 8♣ T♦
aaaand your stack is gone.
What lesson would you learn? You might learn not to go all-in with a set when there are two cards to a flush or straight on the flop. Makes sense after that disaster. Why there were two flush draws on the board at the turn. You were almost sure to be drawn out on, right?
You would remember that lesson a long time because you went all-in expecting to win and you lost which will put a beginner into an emotional state known as tilt.
I myself learned this lesson when I was playing one of my first live tournaments (before I discovered the micro-stakes). It was literally only my third time playing for money and I made the final table by the grace of the Poker Gods. I had a set cracked by a rivered flush as described above and I was out.
Was I tilted? Oh, yes.
Because of that tilt and because of what educational psychologists call the “Primacy Effect,” what I learned early on was internalized much better than subsequent trial-and-error lessons. I knew that getting all in with a set when there is a flush draw on the board was an expensive mistake. I learned my lesson.
But that lesson was wrong.
You want to get stacks in with sets. The possibility of flopping a set and then playing for stacks was the only reason you called pre-flop with such a small pair.
Your opponent was drawing to nine diamonds left in the deck (outs) on the river, which gave him about an 18% probability of improving. But you had ten outs to a flush-beating full house or quads, including two of his outs.
Sure, he could and did beat you. What is important is that in the long run in similar situations, you would win the overwhelming majority of pots.
With a set, the math is almost always on your side as you will learn in the chapter on small pairs in the book Poker Beginner to Poker Winner in 1,000 Hands, available on Amazon:
Also available in .pdf here.
What will overcome that wrong lesson is study about poker.
Reading Reading that book is a great place to start. It will be especially effective if you read it and take The Thousand Hand Challenge as you read. You can read about the Thousand Hand Challenge and the Plan to go from beginner to winner here.
While reading, you can also learn short lessons from numerous Youtube poker advisers, who analyze specific hands and talk about general concepts. In Volume I, I recommend specific online poker advisers and specific videos about the topic of the chapter.
For those who enjoy reading, I also recommend just a few specific books to read after you finish this one. I have read dozens of them but the few I recommend in the order I recommend them are the best resources for in-depth study of poker.
You should spend about half your poker time studying and half your poker time playing. Study will teach you the math, but only by playing can you really understand and internalize the psychology.
You must literally play thousands of hands online for nickles, dimes and quarters while studying for hours and hours to learn how to play this game for profit at higher stakes, such as NL100 and 1/2 live games.
What not to Study
Avoid poker advice not specific to no-limit hold ‘em cash games. Advice about tournament play, limit hold ‘em, and pot limit Omaha is great for those games, but can confuse you in your game which is no-limit cash.
If you are following The Plan, you will spend about three thousand hands just developing your micro-stakes and small online stakes skills for you to become a consistent winner. One thousand hands takes you from beginner to winner at the micro-stakes, 10NL and 25NL. The remaining two thousand hands (at least) prepare you to win at 100NL, which is considered small stakes.
At approximately forty hands per hour when you include time waiting for tables to open, time waiting for the blinds to come to you, and other delays that will take up about seventy-five hours.
I recommend you spend the same amount of time studying which means it will take you about one hundred fifty hours to work through the entire challenge. That is almost four typical work weeks and that is the minimum. If you read the first few chapters of the book, you know that I say you must invest a little money and a lot of time. I was kidding about neither.
Many player prefer to spend much more time playing than studying and there are always the oddballs (like myself) who actually find themselves enjoying the studying more than the playing. I recommend that you keep it at most 60/40 in favor of your preferred activity because too much play and not enough study or vice-versa will slow down your skill development.
With the playing and the studying, you should plan on wearing out a seat cushion learning to play poker, so factor that expense in.
Frank Reese is a former math teacher with a Masters degree in Educational Psychology who has found a way to combine math, psychology and teaching for a second career as a poker player and adviser.