Poker is a great game that many people seem to enjoy. The rules are easy to learn, but it can take a lifetime to master the perfect strategy. Once they’ve fallen in love with the game, people generally begin embark upon a predictable pattern of poker training. Here is the basic course.
In Game Poker Training
When you first start to play poker, you do it primarily for fun. This lasts for about as long as your beginners lucky does. Many of us have the same story of depositing $50 on an online poker site, sitting with the whole roll, and eventually losing it within a matter of minutes or hours. Once you start to lose, you either quit or you try to get better.
The first form of poker training players usually try is in-game training where you identify what causes you to lose money then stop doing it or you watch what the winners are doing then try to emulate it. If you are methodical, this approach can take you surprisingly far, but alas most of us do it haphazardly. Eventually, we recognize the need to move on to more structured learning.
Individual Poker Training with Books and Videos
The second form of poker training most players try is reading poker books or watching poker videos like the entertaining once at Twitch or the more educational once here at Tournament Poker Edge. Books and videos can be a great way to nail down the fundamentals of the game. Like a traditional textbook, you would find in a school, they start from the most basic concepts and move on to the more advanced ones. This is where you will gain the bulk of your knowledge about correct poker strategy.
Books will often lead you to poker training video sites and these sites will often lead you to a forum where you will find like-minded players. Unlike traditional textbooks, poker training material doesn’t come with a teacher who can clear up any questions you have. This is where the more experienced players you find on the forums can be a tremendous asset.
Group Poker Training with Friends
The third form of poker training you will encounter is discussing hands with other players who you meet in the forums and develop symbiotic friendships. Not only can these more experienced players answer questions for you, but they also provide moral support when things aren’t going well. With the constant ups and downs of the game, I cannot overstress the importance of this.
You may also meet up with these people at live events and share expenses to help keep costs down. If you become serious about the game, these people will make up a large portion of your social network, so it is important to surround yourself with quality people. Players around your level will generally be willing to discuss hands with you for free, but you will also meet players far above your level who may only provide poker training for a fee as a poker coach.
Poker Training from a Coach
The fourth form of poker training you should consider once you have started to take the game seriously is to hire a poker coach. Up until this point, you will have learned correct poker strategy from books and videos which tend to teach a more GTO approach. This is great when you are playing against competent players, but this is rarely the case in small stakes tournaments. A coach can show you how to get out of line to best take advantage of the typical mistakes you see in the games at your level. This should win you more money than a GTO approach would and eventually, you will be able to move up to higher levels and face more competent players, which is where the GTO approach will be more useful.
Poker Training with GTO Solvers
The final frontier in poker training is when you start to do work with GTO solvers like PioSOLVER or Simple postflop. Like books, solvers tend to teach a correct, GTO style of poker, but unlike books, they can be customized using variables to show how to best exploit players who are not playing a GTO strategy. This is crucial since all the money in poker revolves around these types of players. Harnessing the poker of computers to accelerate your poker training will put you miles ahead of players who are new to the game or slow to adapt to changes in the poker landscape. As long as players like that exist and your put in the work that they will not, you should be able to find success in the game for years to come.