Three Plays You Can Try Today To Open Up Your No-Limit Thinking

Don't miss one article! Subscribe to the Full Feed RSS or get NPA in your inbox.

Poker players get stuck in ruts. We make so many decisions when we play that it’s natural for us to develop a sort of default, automatic way of handling most situations. Automatic plays are, on one hand, a practical necessity. I play about 500 hands an hour, and I probably make at least 800 to 1,000 decisions during those hands. That means I’m making a decision, on average, every 3 to 5 seconds. If my brain were cranking on each one, I wouldn’t last fifteen minutes.

But automatic decision making has a major downside also. We stop considering alternatives, and we therefore stop improving.

I believe in using trial and error to improve your poker game. I don’t mean that you should start playing randomly and see how many pots you can win. I mean that you should think about the game and try to come up with plays you rarely, if ever, make. If those plays are obviously bad, like checking back the nuts on the river, then toss the idea. But if the play might have something going for it, even if you are skeptical about it, make an effort to actually try it out. Sometimes you’ll find that it works better than you thought.

Poker players like to make assumptions about how other players play. For instance, “Nobody is going to fold to a min-bet on the river.” We then form our strategy around these assumptions. Some assumptions are good, and some aren’t. Many of the plays we avoid, we avoid because they conflict with one of our assumptions. If we avoid a play because it conflicts with a bad assumption, we play bad. Trial and error is a great way to break down these false assumptions.

Here are three plays you can try today that might help you to break down some bad assumptions.

 Print :: Trackback :: Respond ::