You’re reading this article on a poker training site, which suggests two things – firstly, that you’re a poker player, and secondly, that you’re a poker player who’s interested in improving their poker game.
Unfortunately for you, only the first piece of information is needed for us to know that you have leaks in your game – everyone does. Even the best players have areas of their game that haven’t reached their full potential.
The process of plugging these leaks – of fixing the parts of your decision-making process that are currently costing you money – can be a long and arduous one. In some instances, even players who stick with poker for many years never end up coming to terms with a specific type of situation, or a specific game format.
The reason for this is that due to a variety of specific mental patterns that are very common among poker players (indeed, many of them are common among human beings in general), our desire to achieve our greatest potential as poker players often becomes the very thing that prevents us from actually achieving that potential.
That doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but it does. Let me explain how.
The origins of a leak
When tracking where a specific flaw in a player’s poker game comes from, the source is almost always one of two things:
- A lack of understanding or awareness of the strategic or mathematical properties of the game of poker
- A mental or emotional tendency that causes the player’s understanding and awareness of the game to fail to materialize when actually making decisions in-game
Note that in the case of category 2 leaks, the player must ensure that their strategic knowledge is in order before fixing the mental game leak that emerges as a by-product – not being on tilt doesn’t matter much if even your most zen-like self can’t identify the key factors in a decision.
Category 1 leaks are much more easily contained, since players are often hyper-aware of the situations that cause them the most strategic discomfort – these are simply the situations where they never have any idea what to do. Oftentimes, these are also situations wherein they have received considerable negative feedback from the game, in the form of lost pots or tournament stacks punted off.
Category 2 leaks are sneaky, because it’s so easy not to even recognize that they exist. Players can be blissfully unaware of the extent to which their mental game robs them blind every time they sit down at the table.
Why leaks get progressively worse
It’s the Category 1 leaks, though, that tend to be the hardest to rectify once they’re spotted. This is because our natural human tendency is to avoid putting ourselves in situations where we know we aren’t very strong or confident.
This goes double for poker, because it we know we’re liable to make a mistake in a certain situation, the fear of the pain that comes with realizing we made that same mistake again is enough to cause us to rationalize ways to avoid that situation altogether.
If we know we don’t play particularly well postflop, for example, then we rationalize avoiding postflop situations because we might make mistakes. It may be that in the short-term, this is the right approach – but in the long-term, never exposing ourselves to postflop situations will simply reinforce our uncertainty in these spots, and actually hamper our ability to make decisions in each individual instance.
How a leak becomes a weakness
Once a player makes the same avoidance-based decision a number of times on a later street, that leak will then start to filter down into earlier streets – in fact, it may even filter down into their decisions as to whether to play poker at all.
Take a situation where a player becomes aware that they have a weakness regarding river bluff-catching decisions, for example. The awareness of this leak causes the player to begin making decisions with the intent of avoiding river bluff-catching spots in the first place – the first starting point is to begin folding the river more and simply never bluff-catching, for fear of the mistake.
Then, when the mistake continues occurring, the player begins avoiding river bluff-catching spots – they may fold the turn more, or raise the turn more, in order to avoid arriving at the river with a bluff-catching range.
When they start making mistakes on the turn due to their attempts to compensate for their river mistakes, they then repeat the process and begin avoiding the turn – they simply fold the flop more often.
The next step is obvious – they begin folding more preflop, and playing fewer and fewer hands, until they lose confidence in their game altogether. The original stimulus point – the painful experience of making river mistakes – filtered all the way through their game, and manifested itself in a huge over-folding tendency. In this way, a leak became a weakness, and the player was worse off than if they had continued making the river mistakes in the first place.
It all boils down to results-orientation
The resolution to this problem lies in recognizing that a desire to avoid putting ourselves in situations that might expose our leaks is, at its core, results-oriented. We play poker for the purpose of making money (or at least, one of our goals when playing is to make money), but this often leads us to be short-sighted about where the money actually lies.
If we make a short-term decision to avoid playing a certain type of situation because we know we make mistakes in those spots and we fear repeating them, then we may be saving ourselves money in the short run, but we’re crippling ourselves in the long run. We’re ensuring that the weakness we have in these spots will be perpetuated.
The appropriate response to identifying a weakness is to seek out instances where this weakness can be rectified – explore the type of situation that tends to generate it, and figure out why that weakness is occurring in the first place.
Any time an avoidance behavior manifests itself as a consequence of wishing to avoid mistakes, that’s a sign that a leak is likely to develop into a weakness, and a weakness may develop into a significant problem.
In order to correct a leak and produce a long-term improvement in our game, we must first embrace the reality that we will need to be willing to lose a little bit of EV in the process of correcting this leak, because fixing this leak at a faster pace will save us money in the long run.
Imagine this effect manifesting itself across the whole of your game. Think about players who possess the financial resources to throw themselves into the toughest games in the world – their leaks get exposed, addressed and fixed very quickly, but it costs them money to find out what they are.
If those players avoided playing higher-stakes games as a fear response to finding out they possessed those leaks, they would be missing out on whatever EV they might gain in the long term from being willing to expose themselves to tough environments, and eventually becoming winning players in those environments.
I’m not suggesting anyone should play way outside of their bankroll, but I’m definitely suggesting that avoidance cannot be the way towards improvement. If you want to stop making a specific mistake, lean into that impulse, recognize that you lose less in the short run by adopting an ‘exposure therapy’ approach, and soon enough that leak will be closed forever.