From Mistakes to Greatness
Let’s begin with two questions:
How many mistakes do you make during an average poker session?
How many do you think you should make?
If your answer to question 1 is zero, you’ve got a very serious problem. You lack the self-awareness required to succeed in poker, and you’re on a path towards barely improving.
Either that, or you’re a robot, which I guess isn’t a problem if you’re cool with it.
What about question 2?
As you may have intuited by my answer above, this answer shouldn’t be zero either. Though, if you answered zero here, there’s still plenty of hope for you! You were just misinformed.
Until now.
As humans, we’re fallible. Poker, unless you’re playing something like heads up no limit with five big blind stacks, is an extremely complex game.
Not only that, but it’s a game in which you might make hundreds or thousands of decisions per hour.
How could you possibly make that many decisions without a misstep?
Defining Mistakes
What is a mistake?
If a solver says that your hand should bet 75% pot, but you bet 80% pot, did you make a mistake?
If a solver says your hand should’ve checked, but a very similar hand should bet, is that a mistake?
The annoying answer is:
It depends.
If you bet 75% with your entire betting range besides top pair, which you bet 80% with, that’s a leak that an opponent could pick up on and punish you for.
But are they going to pick up on it and punish you, or will they not notice, in which case you’ll go ahead and make a little bit more money with your top pair hands?
This is one tiny example that should illustrate the first key distinction between mistakes:
Theory vs. Practice
I’m not going to preach a specific way that you should measure your mistakes.
Some great players strive to play as close to theoretically optimal as possible.
Other great players strive to make whatever they believe the best play is in practice in each unique spot they find themselves in.
Many great players strive for a combination of these two.
What I want to caution you against is evaluating your mistakes in whatever way you’d like at the time.
Ego is Your Enemy
You probably don’t like making mistakes. They don’t make you feel good.
Because of that, when you’re looking back and evaluating your mistakes, you have a strong bias toward not seeing your faults.
I see so many players review hands and talk
themselves into thinking they played great.
In one spot, they had a read that made it a great bluff, even though it’s not in theory.
In another spot, they first think they might’ve made a bad calldown, but it turns out their play was solver-approved!
Now, these might have both been great plays. But they might have been terrible.
Solvers give us an objective way to evaluate our plays, but, if your goal isn’t to play exactly like the solver, they’ve also given your ego another way to justify mistakes to yourself.
Treat each hand the same when reviewing them, and you’ll be more likely to root out mistakes, which is key because…
Mistakes Are Your Friend
If you almost never make mistakes and are satisfied with where you’re at, great! Because you’re staying there.
For the rest of us, every mistake is an opportunity to improve.
I’ve played with many of the best players in the world, and I can tell you confidently that every poker player makes mistakes. Every poker player has room to improve.
I make countless mistakes every session, and while they can frustrate me, I enjoy finding them because that means I see an opportunity to better myself.
This is true in all walks of life:
Mistakes are the best possible clues
on your path to improvement.
But you have to be willing and able to use them.
The first step towards that is the willingness part – you need your ego to get out of your way.
As I said, I still get frustrated by my mistakes. I’m not fully enlightened.
But I’m always willing to see my mistakes. And after getting frustrated, I treat them as exciting opportunities to get better.
Using Mistakes to Improve
Let’s say you’re facing a big river bet. You call and lose, and in the minute after that, you realize why you shouldn’t have called - you realize that you screwed up.
You say to yourself, “I’m such an idiot,” and you move on, slightly tilted for the next hour.
Later that night, you think about it again. “That was such a dumb call. I could’ve been up another buy-in today.”
The next day comes, and you don’t think about it again.
Will you improve from this?
Maybe, in a really tiny way.
If you face a similar player in a similar spot, you might think back to the lesson you learned here – perhaps it was something like, “Don’t call river against passive players when they need to be turning a made hand into a bluff” – and make a good fold.
But that situation will come up rarely, and more importantly, you already knew this – you realized 60 seconds after your call why you shouldn’t have. In a few months, will this painful reminder still be there, or will you make the same mistake again?
To really improve from the mistake, you need to examine it.
Like almost everything in poker, it all starts with the why.
What Went Wrong?
You had the knowledge somewhere in your head to make a good fold. So why didn’t you?
There could be a whole host of reasons.
Maybe you were tired. Maybe you’d just gotten a distracting text that upset you.
Maybe you get excited about making hero calls and tend to find any excuse to go for them.
Maybe you simply didn’t give yourself enough time!
Maybe you were on autopilot.
At any decision point, we need to compute all of the variables in question while cross-referencing all of the knowledge we have somewhere in our heads.
Identifying what truly went wrong is the hard part.
From there, you’ll know what to do.
If you didn’t understand the spot, study more.
If you didn’t give yourself enough time, take more time for big decisions.
Set yourself up to succeed.
Reduce – Don’t Eliminate
Do we want to eliminate our mistakes? Yeah, that would be great.
But a black-and-white view of mistakes can lead you to focus on the wrong things.
Don’t try to eradicate mistakes. Try to reduce the frequency and magnitude of them.
You can’t study every spot in the poker game tree well enough to have easy access to all of that information. So, rather than study a specific spot until you have memorized it completely, start by studying many spots well enough that your mistakes won’t be big.
You can’t expect to be fully focused and in a great mood every minute that you’re playing poker, so look to increase the number of hours that you play in that state. Look to eliminate the worst of your bad states.
As my mentor Tommy Angelo says:
“Lop off your C-game.”
You could do that by being a better quitter, or by taking breaks. You can work to improve your sleep, eat better, exercise… the list is endless.
But if your criteria is “will this eliminate mistakes?” you’re going to miss out on a lot of EV.
Will getting better sleep eliminate mistakes? No, of course not.
Will it, at least marginally, improve your performance, reducing the frequency and/or magnitude of your mistakes?
Absolutely.
Winning
If you’re unwilling to consider the benefit of slightly reducing money lost by mistakes, or even worse, unwilling to admit that you make mistakes, you’re not going to start stacking up these small wins and improving yourself.
Now, some of you might be thinking, “Is Phil seriously telling me that I need to start working out every day, studying preflop play, looking at flop strategies on paired boards, meditating, warming up pre-session, tracking my sleep, breaking down my opponents’ games, avoiding my phone during sessions, quitting the game whenever I feel off, hiring a poker coach, hiring a performance coach, taking 15-minute breaks every two hours, eating clean, reviewing my past hands to find mistakes, journaling, and a bunch of other crap?”
No, I’m not.
I’m telling you that if you pick one thing that you expect will reduce the frequency or magnitude of your mistakes, you’ll start making more money than you are now.
You’ll never be perfect at the poker table, and you’ll never be perfect away from it.
But you can get a little bit better today.
