Learning to Think for Yourself

A common situation that occurs when I am at a table watching somebody play and the question “why did you do that?” is asked of them, they can’t provide a decent answer. It might be as simple as asking a player why they raised preflop with AQ and their response is “Isn’t it standard to raise with AQ?”. Yes, it is, but sometimes a non-standard line may be the optimal line to take. You should always think about why you make every decision that you do. This not only helps you play each hand better, but it improves your thought process and approach to poker which in turn helps you become a better player overall.

This may surprise you, but having bad reasons for making a decision is better than having none at all. At least if your reasons are poor you can identify this and move on to turn things around and improve on them. If you have no rational behind your decisions then you are nothing more than a blind robot playing bad poker with no hope to improve.

Everyone should try the following exercise when they play and see how their results change: every time you make any decision, ask yourself “why am I doing this?”. Constantly asking yourself this question will prevent you from playing in auto pilot mode and will also greatly help identify tilt. We all know that tilt makes us make bad decisions due to poor thinking. Usually by the time we identify that we’re on tilt we have already wasted away a lot of money, but by constantly re-evaluating our actions we can reveal poor thought processes as they are happening and do something to fix the problem.

There has been a massive increase in the amount of poker strategy being discussed over the past couple of years. What has happened is that some players have worked out what they believe to be ‘optimal lines’ with certain hands in certain situations and these have been repeated thousands of times in books or on forums. As such, a lot of players will follow these lines blindly and think that anything else is blatantly incorrect. It is extremely detrimental to a person’s poker career to think this way.

Never limp. Always re-raise with aces preflop. Never slowplay. These are all common adages that are thrown around the poker community, and while most of the time it is incorrect to limp preflop, or to not re-raise with aces, or to slowplay, it can certainly be correct not to follow these rules sometimes. Being able to identify when such situations arise is what separates an average player from a good or great player.

Going into every detail is outside the scope of this article but I will give one example where I think people follow rules too blindly. The rule is ‘never folds kings preflop for 100 big blinds or less’. While I agree that more than 95% of the time when we have kings we should be happy to get all-in preflop, there are certainly situations where it is correct to fold them. Take the following hand for example:

We are playing in a 10-handed $5/$10 NLHE game where everyone has $1,000 stacks. We are on the button. Under the gun (UTG) who is a very tight player raises to $40. The player next to him (UTG+1) who is also very tight flat-calls the raise. It folds to us and we re-raise to $130 with kings. UTG then announces another re-raise and makes it $350. UTG+1 quickly goes all-in and the action is back on us. Many players would jump at this point and shove their stack in, proudly turning over their kings only to be shown a pair of aces. These are the same people who go on to complain about how unlucky they are always running into aces, when in reality this is a spot where folding is probably correct. We have shown tremendous strength by re-raising an early position raise and yet both UTG and UTG+1 don’t seem worried by it at all. The chances that at least one of them has aces is extremely high and putting our stack in with kings is burning money.

I can’t tell you exactly how to think, but I can say think for yourself. Don’t be a blind robot. Always re-evaluate your decisions. Constantly assess your game. Study your hands. Do the maths. Think logically. Become a better poker player.

by Mark Vos