Poker: It’s Okay To Stay Inside The Box

Save for Later

Throughout the poker learning process, we’re all exposed to instances where we find ourselves trying to figure out what the top players in the game are doing – how they’re playing, what styles they’re adopting, and what outside-the-box plays are becoming more commonplace.

It seems that every year, we’re seeing new and interesting approaches taken by high-level players – one year it’ll be preflop limping, the next it’ll be unusual 3-bet sizing, then something else will take its place the next year.

In particular, if you’re a regular consumer of televised poker content, you’ll notice these trends developing over time, and since you don’t always get to hear the player’s explanation as to what they’re doing and why, it can be easy to feel like everyone is always making a variety of unusual plays.

The reality, though, is quite different. In fact, many of these plays that appear to be so far ‘outside the box’ are not as much so as they may seem, and when it comes to how these strategies might relate to the experiences of a recreational or beginner-level player, there is almost no correlation.

A common pitfall among developing players

The strategies and techniques adopted by high-level pros are couched in a logical thought process that factors in the high level of their opponents. It’s required for them to identify unusual plays and thin edges that they can gain through those plays, because the easily-obtained, not-so-thin edges are much less readily available against better opponents.

It’s common for developing players to feel a sense of insecurity when they see these plays – I’ve heard players say things like, “wow, I wish I had it in me to make a bluff like that”, or “man, that kind of play just isn’t in my game, it must be a leak”.

It’s easy to feel this way – seeing a high-level player do something you feel you yourself would never do is likely to cause you to question your game. It’s natural. But rather than approach the game by asking the question “why can’t I make these plays?”, there are a variety of alternative perspectives that would be more useful to us.

Building a high-level thought process

First, it’s important to recognize that when a high-level player makes an unusual play, the act of making those plays is not a skill set in itself. High-level pros don’t necessarily look at a specific situation – let’s say, check-raising the river – and try to forcibly generate more situations where they can make that play.

After all, you can’t forcibly generate a good river check-raise spot – you can’t forcibly generate any kind of spot. You simply have to wait for them to happen, and develop your ability to recognize them when they arrive.

In light of this, we must accept the reality that being capable of making ‘outside the box’ plays is rarely a representation of a player having built the skill set of being particularly aggressive, or having made a decision to adopt a particularly style of play.

In fact, it’s much more representative of the reality that these players simply have an extraordinarily deep understanding of the nuances of both their opponents’ ranges and tendencies, and the decision to make what seems like an especially unusual play actually feels somewhat straightforward when a player is able to analyze a situation to the necessary degree of complexity.

For example, the decision to check-raise bluff all-in on the river with 7 high in a huge pot might seem like it’s way above the rim when we look at it as an observer, but in the moment of making the decision, perhaps the player simply recognizes that they need to have some bluffs in that spot in order to be balanced, and decides that this particular hand is a good candidate. Pulling the trigger is easy, because the logic that led them to that spot is strong enough that they don’t doubt their decision.

Less developed players struggle to pull triggers in big spots or make unusual plays not because they “don’t have it in them”, but simply because they lack the analytical capability and experience to understand where those unusual plays might be incentivized. If they do force themselves to make big plays, whether those plays are successful or not will essentially be a matter of pure randomness – their decision was not based on their analysis of the spot, but merely on their desire to make a certain type of play.

Winrate prioritization

If you’re the kind of player who does believe that these unusual plays are beyond your current capacity, don’t sweat it. The reality is that they’re not essential for you right now – they may never be essential. It’s crucial to approach the learning process with a degree of ‘winrate prioritization’ – the skills we focus on building should be the ones that result in the biggest gains in our winrate, not the ones that represent the biggest holes in our knowledge.

Yes, it may be true that your inability to find good river check-raise spots or incorporate preflop limping ranges into your style might be grounded in some fairly deep flaws in your understanding of optimal strategy, but is it actually costing you any significant amount of money? After all, only around 10% of your hands or less will actually reach the river with action still to come, and plenty of successful players never limp in preflop.

Addressing leaks in your game should be tackled not through the lens of comparing yourself to top players, but comparing yourself to the players somewhat below that – the vast majority of the population of winning poker players aren’t playing televised hands on a regular basis. In fact, there’s a huge swathe of winning players who play virtually the same style of poker.

You may wonder why these players are able to get away with this – the simple reason is, it works. You can play a relatively straightforward strategy of aggressive preflop opens and continuation bets in the right spots, and it will allow you to achieve some degree of stability and success in tournament poker.

Learning to play a much more inside-the-box, yet still highly effective strategy will provide you with a shortcut to a higher winrate – yes, you will potentially be exploited by the top end of your player pool, but no, that doesn’t really matter that much.

In the early stages of your poker career, you should be much less focused on how to emulate the top 1% of the player pool than you are on how to beat the bottom 90%, because beating the bottom 90% consistently will be enough to give you a very strong platform of experience to build from.

Once you get to the stage where you’re playing higher stakes, such that your opposition is stronger and the same style is no longer as effective, then you can begin worrying about closing up the holes in your game that will only be exploited by top players. You can develop a more nuanced turn and river approach, and begin picking apart hands in great depth.

But until you have learned and understood a more basic, blueprint strategy to a high degree of efficiency, all the time and effort you put into learning how to make sick river bluffs or 5-bet jam with eight high preflop will be effectively wasted, because your decisions as to when it’s justified to make an outside-the-box play will be suboptimal.

The bottom line

You don’t have to look for reasons to make huge river bluffs in uncommon spots. You don’t have to look for reasons to shove preflop with the bottom of your range for all the chips. You don’t have to find creative postflop lines. You don’t have to limp preflop. You don’t have to make hero-folds with the second nuts, or hero-call with bottom pair.

None of these things are actually necessary in order to become a winning MTT player. If you literally never did any of them, the cost to yourself would be negligible, since you wouldn’t yet have the skill set to identify the best spots anyway. In fact, you might hurt your EV just by attempting these kinds of plays.

All you have to do is make solid, consistent decisions according to a logical framework, and put in the work away from the table to improve the quality of that framework. Eventually all those plays you think are outside of your playbook will become second nature. For the early portions of your poker career, inside the box is a perfectly safe place to be.