If these Players did not exist, poker games would be very boring. Everyone would be playing correctly, the average pot would be small. Rarely would more than two players face off at the river. One hours observation of an average Low Limit Holdem game dispels the relationship between what players should be doing and what players are really doing.

Of course if it is you or I we are discussing, we always play perfectly for table conditions. We never get ruffled, and we love it deep down when someone chases to the river for that one in forty-something miracle card and gets it – even it happens way too often.

You on the other hand think you are watching your chips drain away. Throwing away hands you see the rest of the table winning with s the round crawls on. An hour or so passes, and we start playing those hands because they are looking better than an hour ago, and ‘everyone’ is winning huge pots with those same bad hands

Almost everyone at the table is playing poorly except us and that old man who has no life outside of the card room. Everyone is laughing and having fun. The problem is that old man has forty years of patience and a limited bankroll. You and I only share one of those attributes with him. My bet is it is not patience we three share.

Before you realize it, your ‘just this once’ bad play has evolved into playing as bad as everyone else at the table. Any edge you had from your skill set is now reduced to luck of the cards, and they are not feeling so lucky at the moment. But it has rewards attached, you won a big pot on your second bad hand.

One of the hardest to rules to adhere to, and one of the most expensive rules in any form of poker is: “A bad starting hand does not improve by throwing more money into the pot, and one outers rarely arrive by the river.”

Whether you think you are changing your game up, playing in late position with many callers, or the big blind with six players and one raise, a bad starting hand remains a bad starting hand. The only variable that changes over the play of a few bad hands is another players stack.

One idea that may help you improve, and only if you are not addicted to action is changing games. Some poker games are slow and boring by default. Mid level Holdem according to many players is pretty much abc poker. Learning an entirely different game may help with the boredom of throwing away hand after hand, watching some Turkey win more pots than seems humanly possible.

Ever thought about learning Omaha Hi-Low, Stud Low, Pineapple, or another poker game that may be offered? The one you never really looked at, but you see chips flying around faster than players can stack them?

Any game offered other than the game you normally play offers new challenges. You learn to think differently, value cards differently, and see card combinations in new ways. New strategy means new thinking, and new ways of thinking are good for your old game.

Two outcomes from learning a new game are possible. You may find you really enjoy playing the new game. It may be more fun, more competition, lets you think more or less, and use different strategies. You see other players in a new light, and perhaps come to appreciate the talent they bring to the game that you do not quite have, yet.

A second less obvious non-monetary win from playing a different game arrives in a round about way. Learning a new game will make you a better player in your main game. You become a better player because by learning and playing other games opens you up to knew ways of playing.

It may be easier to understand why certain plays you make are mistakes and other plays are high level plays in a different game. In the long term, with enough experience at other games, you may find you have become that Turkey others at the table are mad at and at and envious of, both at the same time. Your skill level improves as will your play.

Because we tend to do what ever our group does, it is easy to slip into the poor playing habits shared by many players in your usual game. Bad playing habits at the poker tables, are offered, learned, and reinforced every time you sit down to play in your normal game. Because it seems they all play poorly, bad play starts to become good play for you, and it is fun, when you win. Unless the penalty for bad play is somehow sternly reinforced, there is a strong tendency to play at the same level others are playing at.

Learning different types of poker games may not be the cure all, end all of unlearning reinforced bad playing habits, but they certainly help. All poker skill is built on previous skill. Poker skills are learned in a variety of ways. The basics are the ground floor to becoming an exceptional player.

Depending on the other players in your game to help you improve your game, is rarely going to happen. You may see a good player play well, but unless you can get into their mind it is hard to understand what makes them a good player.  No one is going to give you your chips back after you throw them away via poor play, and take the time to teach you what you are doing wrong.

Some players are consistent winners over time, most are consistent in they know how to play better but play poorly instead. Playing in different games can help you become your own coach. Watching yourself  learn to play in the light of a different game can help you improve faster than playing more of the same game with the same bad habits.

Some players peel off bills like they grow on trees. Others leave when they have lost their minimum buy-in. When I first started out, I used the wag system. I am playing $1 – 5 Stud, so sixty dollars is more than enough to sit down at the table with. After all the initial buy-in is only $20.00, so if I have three times the buy-in that should be plenty of money.

As Stud started sliding to the wayside and Holdem was gaining ground, I started to understand the initial buy-in didn’t mean very much. The low buy-in was to make it possible for someone curious to sit down, risk the minimum dollar amount and have the pleasure of being able to say they sat down at a poker table, and played poker!

As I was more lucky than I was skilled, I slowly started growing my bankroll. I also started to notice that sometimes my $60.00 was more than enough and other times, I was on my home after running out of money early in the session. On those trips home, without any real skill at making a bankroll size, I decided maybe $80.00 would be enough to cover those times when $60.00 was not enough.

Eventually, I realized that there were times in Holdem when $80.00 was barely enough to survive a few hands, let alone have any chance at winning a hand and entering the green side of the money number line. I was still making a profit over the month, so I decided to boost my session bankroll to an even $100.00. After all, Benjamin’s sure feel good when you pull one out of your wallet, and hand it over the to the cashier for chips, knowing that they are only holding it for you, and you will be back for plus the interest received when you are done playing for the day.

I moved up to $4 – 8 Holdem around that time from a spread limit game. Holdem was indeed good for my bankroll, and my play was improving too. Unfortunately other players were improving and their level of aggression was going up too. My session money doubled to two dimes, and after that three dimes. I thought $300.00 was sufficient for any game I might encounter. Until the night I sat down and the table was unusually aggressive. By the end of the first button rotation I was pulling out my third and final Benjamin out of my wallet and asking for chips.

So how much does a session of poker really cost? The Floor (Poker Room Manager) where I play suggests ten times the minimum buy in. Some players suggest ten to fifteen times one big bet. Others look in their wallet, and decide from there.

The truth of the matter is there are no hard and fast rules to how big your session bankroll should be. There are a number of deciding factors though. In no particular order: Your comfort zone, table dynamics, skill level, time of day, day of the week, total size of your bankroll, playing style.

Two hard and fast rules are do not play with more than you can comfortably afford to lose, and never play higher than you can afford. What you can afford is money you can throw into the trash can and not think about it again.

If you are playing Low Limit Holdem casually, whatever you show up with at the table that you can lose without harming the rest of your life is the correct bankroll. For many starting players, they make a decision between a Friday Night Holdem game or partying with friends.

For more serious players, as your bankroll grows, your experience should be growing too, and you know what table types you are comfortable with. As long as you stay in the parameters of the types of tables you are comfortable with, you know what you need for a bankroll at the limit you play. If you continue to grow your bankroll, protection of your bankroll is as important as session money. By the time that happens, you will have a pretty good poker knowledge base, and you will be accustomed to managing your bankroll and your session money.

A common mistake in low limit Holdem poker game whether live or online, is confusing the amount of the stakes with the game level. Holdem poker is structured in some form of small bet, big bet structure. When the stakes are low to play, it is easy to think, it is only: fill in whatever level you think of as small here – and either put out our chips or click the bet/call/raise button. Yardley would jumping with joy over your thinking, as that is one of the building blocks of his book as I remember it. Yardley promotes manipulating players to become comfortable losing.

There are differences in levels of poker games. Whether the game is online for pennies, the “Big Game” for $200 $400 blinds, or the World Series Of Poker, parts of the game are consistent across all levels. The cards are the same, and the structure is the same, and the rewards are the same.

Defining the level of acceptable risk is different at different levels. In a small stakes game, it is not uncommon to watch a player burn through one to two hundred dollars a week, week after week, because they are having a great time. As the stakes go higher, money becomes more important, and players care more about their win and loss rate than about enjoyment. Having fun takes place away from the poker table in big money games.

There are bets that can made in the stock market commonly called puts and takes. Newspapers and financial source on the net list them. Puts and Takes are bets on the movement of the stock market as a whole or certain broad categories of the Stock market. It may have changed now, but it used to be possible to bet on the movement of the S & P 500 for as little as sixteen dollars.

In the world of companies and stock, sixteen dollars is a tiny sum. Almost everyone could afford to lose sixteen dollars. Almost everyone does lose some increment of sixteen dollars bets on the stock market each betting period.

One thing I found interesting about options the on the S & P 500 is generally the majority is wrong when they make their decisions about where the stock market is headed. Options are one place where a contrarian investor, ie gambler can make their mark.

The same rules apply to the Holdem poker table. If you treat your bets as bets, and not pocket change, or a few dollars, and you manage your play contrary to the majority of the players at your table, you can not help but be a winner.

Yardley treated his poker games that way in his book. While the people he rounded up to play in his games thought they were only losing a few dollars a session which was more than offset by entertainment and bravado, Yardley was at the poker table to take their money, not give his money away.

Anyone who plays in the stock market, goes to a poker room, or online poker site should know exactly why they are there. Reasons range from entertainment, bragging rights, or gambling, to actually making a profit. Most people do not gamble in the stock market or Holdem poker table to make money. If they did, they would not be throwing their money away on bad bets, and loose calls.

After you have decided why you play Holdem poker and decide the major reason is to make money, think more like contrarian and less like the majority of people sitting at the table with you. As you play, you may pretend you are Herbert Yardley reinvented, and focus on betting structure and profit, and not dollar value.

One common response is, “The people you are playing with will not notice, so why bother.” This is true for a couple of reasons. In many Holdem games, especially games where no one is trying to make a living playing poker, the range of hands everyone plays is one of the last things players pay attention to.

The second response is generally, “Players are so clueless they will not know you played a bad hand, they will only know you won the hand.” This response is also true. The average Holdem player knows there is only a narrow range of good starting hands, but they are there to have fun and gamble. Playing good Holdem is not fun.

At an average Holdem table few players would notice if you left and a complete stranger sat down in your place. The dealer would notice of course, but that is another matter. Playing bad hands to show off how loose you can be needs to be weighed against another more important consideration.

If you play Holdem live, it is likely that the people you play against are regular players, and generally know what your range of hands is. One poor quality hand is not going to change their opinion of you if you are a tight player. If you play on line, stats do not lie.

A good reason not to play bad hands is the chip drain on your stack. Any two cards be played Preflop, sometimes for a minimal investment, most times not. The idea is to play a bad hand to the river to be seen by the rest of the players. Getting a poor hand to the river is expensive when you add up all the costs.

Playing bad cards to the river is usually done with the expectation of winning the hand, and dragging in the pot. The possibility of playing one bad hand to the river and winning is slight, and the chip bleed is expensive. Adding the Preflop, Flop, Turn, and River Bets is three Big Bets to the river if no one raises. Three Big Bets if there are no raises to be able to lay down bad cards for anyone watching to see.

That is the cost for one attempt. The hidden cost of bad hands is getting them to the river cheaply. Then there is the flop problem. No one is going to continue playing a bad hand such as 6,2 off suit when the flop is T,J,A. One Preflop bet may not seem like much the cost adds up quickly as you repeat the process trying to get a flop to fit your bad hand.

The cost of playing one single bad hand to the river is about an hours profit for a good player in a live Holdem game. Because it will normally takes more than one try to get ot the river, a good session can quickly change into a losing session by trying to show the table how bad you play.

If you feel the need to play bad starting hands, do it smartly. Do not play a bad hand unless two or more players have been replaced by new players. Use your watch, a set number of rounds, or dealer changes as a timer if player changes does not work. Play one bad hand only!
Play bad hands more often and you are showing the table your poor decision making in action. Play too many bad hands and players will start ignoring you. Players will play against you more often and they will get tricky. If you are a strong player on a strong draw this is a good news as you want the most players in the hand you can get. Most likely you are not quite at that level yet though.

The best thing you can do for your game is play bad hands right where they belong – Into the muck preflop. If you really want to gamble, playing bad hands is a sure way to get that big rush when a long shot comes through. If you are trying to play correctly however, playing one bad hand leads to playing many bad hands. Too many bad hands is the way home a lot quicker than you planned.

Winning too fast, or losing too fast is of one of the fundamentals of poker. Playing poker it is not how many hands you win in a session, but rather optimizing the hands you play to win as much money as possible from the hands you do win. Forget this concept, and you end up winning or losing quickly in a session, and losing over the long run.

There are times when I play when I am lucky to win one out four hands I play to the river, yet overall I am making a lot of money. There are other times when I play a lot of hands and I also win a lot of hands, but I am barely holding my own as far as staying on the winning side of poker.

One of the tools experienced poker players use is to monitor their variance. Poker not played well results in having a very large amount of money invested in what is essentially a poker game where you should lose much less. Managing, or reducing that amount is managing your variance.

According to a site, icoachmath.com variance is defined as: Variance is a statistical measure that tells us how measured data vary from the average value of the set of data.

That may sound confusing if you are not a math person. I think of this as measuring or monitoring at certain times whether I am ahead or behind, and by how much. It is not uncommon to sit down at a poker table and win at a very high rate, sometimes three or more times the normal expected win rate of a good player. The opposite happens too, where a player finds themselves losing at the same rate.

When I play poker when I like to use variance as my poker gas pedal. If I am winning or losing at a rate much higher than normal I know my variance is over my average variance. When this happens I start to analyze what is going on. Is the opposition that bad, or that good? Am I getting more than my normal share of winning or losing hands? Am I making dumb mistakes and it is time to leave the table? Keeping tabs on reasons for variance at the poker table, helps keep your chips in front of you, and not in front of another player.

I also keep tabs on my variance in my life too. Life runs in cycles. Some days or weeks are very good, some days or weeks are terrible, though most days and weeks flow without any real ups or downs. It is when the variance in my life is quickly rising either on the upside or the downside that I stop to think about what is happening in my life.

Occasionally, especially when life is going well, we forget to keep an eye on ourselves. The same thing happens when life is not running so smoothly. In both instances it is important to recognize your variance is much higher than normal. When life is going smooth there is little variance in our day to day life, and we need not pay attention to our variance as it is about where it should be at any given moment.

When our life is not going that well, our decisions are sometimes made for the wrong reasons and do us more harm than good which sends our variance plummeting downwards from an already too low point from where we would prefer it. Our decisions are made out of frustration, childishness, not thinking of long term consequences, or just because. Later when our life slows down and we start thinking again, we realize that we were responsible for making a low point in our life worse than it had to be.

Check on your variance daily, and if it is going down, slow down and think of what is going on and how you can keep it from going lower. Spending some time thinking about what to do is a lot better than trying to fix problems from acting without thinking.

With the net and television saturated with, “all in” Holdem, it is hard to find a game where Holdem is played like the book(s). The throttled no limit games have changed the nature of the game at both limit and no limit Holdem.

Limit Holdem, even the lowest limits has become more aggressive, and plays more like bigger limits with minor differences. I see a lot more three betting these days preflop, with more callers, but the quality of hands has not not changed much. This makes for a great game, but also opens the door for expensive mistakes for anyone who does not change their playing style to match the game they are actually sitting in.

The most costly long term mistake I see players make other than not learning enough about the game itself, is expecting the game they are sitting in to play exactly like their Holdem book(s). Bad news – practically everyone sitting around the table with you has read those books and knows at least as much as you do.

When you play exactly as the books tell you, and it is not your truly lucky day, you are in for a rough ride, and probably a losing session. You watch your big pair crumble, your two pairs get crushed, and your sets ran down by stellar hands like 74o, J7, or even 52. Winning hands become so incredulous that you fully expect some piece of trash hand to win every round.

Then your losing hands starts playing on your mind. Instead of meeting aggression with aggression, you are now meeting aggression with passivity. What was a raising hand is now a limp and see hand. Overcalling is the table norm, and you are now right there in the mix, over calling when you should be raising. Minute by minute your stack dwindles, almost imperceptibly because it is only a few chips at a time.

If this sounds like your game, all is not lost. All the Holdem books in the world can only take you so far. After the books it is up to you to play correctly for the table you are at, not the table the author had in mind as he wrote his book. Holdem is not a game for automated play. If it were computers would hold their own in a Holdem game as they do in chess.

Holdem is ever changing and almost always a dynamic game. If you are not asking yourself, ‘what is the proper play’ each time you enter a pot, you are making a mistake. If you limp simply because they will fold if you raise, you are making a mistake. If you are not watching for small changes in the table dynamics, you are bleeding away chips.

The Holdem books are not wrong, but they may not be right at this moment of the game. Holdem books simply can not cover every possible thing you need to know at the moment. There is no Holdem book of checklists that tell you if there two drunks, one aggressive, and five average players use the technique found on page 172.

It is your responsibility to yourself to do your best to adjust to the game you are sitting in. A books author already has his money; he did his job the best he could for what you were willing to pay him. When you sit down and put your chips on the table, do not let your brain go to sleep along with your backside, or when you stand up, one of them will be a lot lighter.

In smaller poker rooms, or during slow times Chip Runners, the Brush, and Floor may all be the same person. This was one of those slow times. There was a player who was friends with the Floor on a player to poker room basis. The player was playing almost every hand and replacing his lost chips for the minimum amount each time. This meant that every ten to fifteen minutes the dealer was calling out for more chips and the Floor/brush/Chip runner would make the trip to the table to exchange cheques for cash.

The Floor arrived for the fourth time in an hour to deliver chips to the player. Frustrated the Floor asked the player, “Are you going to quit chumming soon? I found this question very funny as did some of the other players! Chumming is a fishing term. You throw something in the water to attract fish. While looking for the food they were attracted to fish will hopefully bite on your bait and become hooked. Generally the bait is worth a lot more than the chum being used.

What the floor was implying was the player was chumming with chips. The Floor was cautioning the player to slow down before the player ran out of money to buy chips with. Because he was going through his money so quickly, it was becoming difficult to impossible to win his money back. For players like this those words have no meaning.

Incorrect Chumming is something many of us do. We generally chum using different baits than money. Supervisor to employee relationships is a favorite chumming area for a number of people. They go through their working year showing up late, arguing over little things, and generally making life difficult for their boss. Then when it comes time for raises to be given out, these same people are angry that they either did not receive a raise, or received a very small raise.

Relationships too are where many people chum when they should not. One party or the other does not respect the other person enough to be responsible in their actions. Be it dating someone else, not arriving when they said they would, or not doing something they said they would do, such as return a phone call, it is a form of incorrect chumming. On the other side of the relationship, some people chum with promise baits they have no intention of giving fulfilling.

Incorrect chumming covers a whole area of things we do, but I think my few examples make clear what chumming is, and it is easy to decide whether we are incorrectly chumming or not. Chumming the right way can lead to a happy life full of reward and pleasure. Incorrect chumming is certainly a recipe for disaster. If you chum, chum responsibly.

I have found and other poker players have also confirmed that the game of poker has changed or improved major areas of the rest of their lives too. What you learn at the poker table, or in some cases are forced to unlearn carries over into other parts of life that seem to be unrelated.

Decision making and poker go hand in hand. When you play poker, you have to make constant decisions about your hand. A poker hand is a good hand for one round of play, and the next time you are dealt the same hand you throw it away and are glad you did. During the play of the hand, other players actions cause you to evaluate your hand and go through the decision making process again. After some time the decision making and constant evaluation of your next action becomes second nature.

As this process is ongoing, decision making and constant hand evaluation carries over to personal life. One day you realize you are making life decisions based on different criteria than in the past. You find you are using a new toolset, different criteria, and thinking about the consequence of action or non action before you make it.

For a good poker player focus becomes an important poker playing skill. A good player will focus on the game in general and the other players in particular. Just as in life, everyone at the table goes through mood changes which changes their decision making, and focus. A player with good focus picks up on these subtle changes and turns them into an advantage. Over time focus spills over into personal life. You start noticing situations that may be important that before poker you never payed attention to. Your work life will become more interesting and satisfying as you are more attuned to opportunity and challenge which used pass by unnoticed.

Playing poker is also great for life management skills. Poker provides immediate feedback on many areas of every day life. Playing poker teaches money management by default. Play every hand, and within minutes you will find yourself out of money and leaving the game. Play too few hands, and you still lose your money, only slower. Play the hands you should play and play them correctly, and as time goes by you realize you have extra money.

Where I think poker really makes valuable life changes in life management is in anger management. At a poker table emotions are something every returning poker player quickly learns to manage. One learns quickly that letting your temper take control of your chips, leaves you angry and broke. The feedback is immediate and apparent when you play angry poker.

Being too emotional also receives immediate feedback. After winning a pot or two in quick succession many new players forget that it was a turn of events that made them successful and not superior poker skills. When players forget this they often turn a good win into a devastating loss. Often an inexperienced player starts playing on emotion, loses all their chips, and digs into their wallet or purse for more money with the idea of recouping their losses.

Recouping losses that resulted from emotional play leads to more loss, and eventually they run out of money, and emotionally crash and burn. Some players realize a day or too later what happened, others never do. Those that realize what happened to them start working on their emotional play. Changing emotional play at the poker table also changes life management skills from making emotion based decisions.

For a few people, poker has negative connotations. For many players, poker has improved their lives in ways they never would have had the opportunity to have exposed to so quickly and clearly. Where else can one immediately see the results of incorrect decision making, lack of focus, and life management skills and not derail their whole life?

As life would have it, some things never really change, even though most things do. Some weeks ago the weather was terrible for longer than I can sit in the house and do nothing. I had been using Holdem simulator software for fun, and I had changed the way I was playing. It was making a difference even though it did not seem correct for the table conditions I thought I was playing against at the poker room.

Poker is like chess, or any other game of skill, where the players are evenly matched at the beginning. For every strategy there is an equally effective counter strategy. My problem with my game was the game had changed and my strategy did not. For those of you who play Holdem, I started out again at $2-4, and now have a bankroll to move up to $4-8. I am showing a win in most sessions, although that is all relative, and means little other than I can play a little bigger when I wish.

It is always easier to see what is going on from the outside, when we are not personally involved in the situation. I think this is a lot like our eyesight. Over our whole development as human beings it was important for men to see a long distance and not close up. For women it was more important to have fine detail vision for close up tasks. I imagine this was because of the division of the tasks that were done. The men hunted, and the women gathered, made clothes and such.

My thinking is my little hiatus from Holdem gave me a chance to step back an look at the situation from a distance. What I had been doing was using my fine vision and expecting different results from doing the same things. The results over time may not have been that bad, but they were not have been optimal.

The same is true in our work. If you look around with a detached manner at the people in almost any work place, you find people using their fine vision performing their activities. Because they are looking at a very small picture of their work, they are missing out on the bigger rewards that they should be working towards.

For example, if you there are two similar stores of any type in your vicinity that both have the same products, say a grocery store, you usually have a favorite. Using our fine vision, reasons why we prefer one store over the other are varied. The prices are cheaper, the store is newer, parking is easier, and the list goes on and on.

This is usually the reason people feel they like one business better than another, but it is not always the truth. It may well be that if on the same day, if I walked into one grocery store and bought twenty items, and then drove to the store I did not like as well, and bought the same twenty items, the second store may have the same or cheaper prices.  So there goes any arguments for why we prefer one grocery store over another.

What really goes on is with our fine vision we enjoy the way the stock people or cashiers talk to us when we interact with them. Using our distance vision, and distancing ourselves from the situation it is easy to see the only real difference is service. If our favorite cashiers leave the store, we may find we do not like our favorite store as much anymore. In fact, the prices (really the way we are being treated) are getting higher, and the competitions prices start to look better to us. What a difference a little distance makes in how we perceive our world.