Why Can’t I Break Through? (Part 2)
Last week, I talked about excuses — factors you might think are holding your poker career back, but in reality, aren’t.
Today, I want to talk to you about some things that may very well be roadblocks in your way as you try to climb to the next level.
Let’s dive right in!
Trick or Treat
(Happy Halloween!)
In softer poker games, you can become a winner with simplified strategies built on rules and tactics, which I like to call tricks.
You can do so without really understanding why certain moves work or how poker is supposed to be played in theory.
A trick might be, “3-bet light against late position opens,” “overfold to river check-raises,” or “raise pre-flop and bet twice with basically everything.”
As you move up in stakes, the average skill level of your opponents tends to increase.
Each and every trick at the poker table has a ceiling.
At some point, the players you’re up against can no longer be tricked. You have to actually outwit and outplay them.
So, if you’ve found yourself doing well at $2/$5 but are struggling at the $5/$10 tables, the first thing to ask yourself is whether your game is built on tactics or on knowledge and logic.
Here are the two most common “tricks” that I see lead people to early success before they hit a wall playing against tougher competition. Interestingly, they’re very different from each other:
1. Aggression
Aggression, even somewhat blind aggression, works really well against many weak players. It’s hard to handle someone who’s applying a lot of pressure. It’s hard to play back an appropriate amount. It’s easy to fall into the trap of simply getting out of their way, which is precisely what an aggressive player wants.
Bad aggression can make you a winner at low stakes. Smarter over-aggression can make you a winner even in some pretty big games.
But, as you keep moving up, you’ll eventually encounter players who are skilled enough to not only handle your aggression, but to take advantage of it.
2. Nittiness
Most players in low-stakes games are too loose. Playing tight ranges against them means you head to the flop with the best hand more often than not.
Most players in low-stakes games also don’t pay enough attention to you or your tendencies, which means that they’ll still call you down with top pair even though you’ve literally never shown down a bluff.
So, nittiness works for a while. You don’t put in money bad, and you get enough action when you have the goods.
As you move up, people will soon recognize that you can be pushed around. More importantly, they’ll see that you only play good hands, and you’ll stop getting action. They will fold top pair to your double barrel. They’ll never call you down light.
All of the sudden, you’re folding and losing a lot of small pots, and you’re no longer winning the big pots to make up for it.
At some level, there’s simply no substitute for doing
the work and getting really good at the game.
But perhaps your game itself, or lack thereof, isn’t what’s making your shots at the $5/$10 tables go poorly. Maybe you have the knowledge and understanding and logical abilities to beat bigger games, but for some reason, every time you try it goes poorly.
What else could it be?
Tricking Yourself
In an analytical, mathematical game like poker, one concept is often overlooked: The mind is a powerful thing.
There are many ways that your mind could be ruining your chances of making it at the next level. Let’s talk about a few of them.
1) Confidence
You’ve won at your stakes for a while now. You can approach most sessions with confidence, knowing that you’re skilled enough to win.
When you move up, even if you believe you’re good enough to win there too, you can’t be sure.
You go from playing with confidence to thinking things like:
“These players are tough. I probably can’t get reads on them.”
“If I bluff here, he’ll probably figure it out.”
I call this “False Idols Syndrome.”
Your opponents, all the way up to the greatest in the world,
are humans who err. Don’t turn them into gods.
What do you think happens to your execution when you have thoughts like this?
Do you really believe that you’re implementing your knowledge and skills in the same way you did in games you were more comfortable in?
I don’t.
2) Identity
Along the same lines, sometimes our identities can lead to bleeding confidence.
Perhaps you’ve thought of yourself as a $2/$5 player for so long that even when you step up and play $5/$10 for a week, you still consider yourself a $2/$5 player.
This is another, sneakier form of not believing in yourself.
And when you don’t believe in yourself, when you don’t trust yourself fully, you limit your strategic options during every hand you play and you interfere with the thought process that made you successful in the first place.
3) FOBP
I’ve written a previous post about Fear of Big Pots. I’d suggest checking that out if the following resonates with you:
As you move up in stakes, the pots get bigger than you’re used to. As a result, the fear and discomfort many of us face when the money involved gets more meaningful happens much more often.
Like with FOBP occurring in 3-bet or 4-bet pots, you also might have a barometer of sorts, set by your intuition based on all of the hands you’ve played, that a certain strength of hand is worth a certain number of dollars.
That barometer needs to be recalibrated when you move up in stakes. For some of you, that’s not fully happening.
You see $500 in the pot, and think that you need
two pair or better to put more money in.
That intuition may have served you well at the game you used to play, but now it’s holding you back and tightening you up far too much.
What to Do
The bad news is there’s no easy fix for these challenges.
The good news is that awareness is at least half of the battle.
Recognize when you’re doubting yourself or falling victim to False Idols Syndrome.
Notice when your body tenses up at a certain pot size.
Admit to yourself whether or not you’re using tricks that work or strategies that are calculated and adaptable.
Then, keep tuning into this newsletter, and I’ll continue to share thoughts and strategies for improving your game, both by improving your strategy and your mindset.
See you next time!
