Why Poker Is Bad For You

Poker is Good For You Discussion After tilt-slamming the table for being forced to fold AQo because of a broken mouse, I briefly reflected on one of my external motivators for playing poker: learning to. Feb 18, 2019 In this video New Team Gripsed Pro Alex Fitzgerald aka Assassinato breaks down why the human mind is not meant to play poker, and why the primary goal of poker is counter to default human behavior. Apr 20, 2017 Daniel Negreanu's Five Reasons Why You're Losing at Poker. 'Top 5 Reasons You're Losing at Poker.' As he explains, experiencing bad luck could well be part of what's causing the losing.

“My biggest problem lately is how bad I’vebeen running.”

“You’re not running bad. You’re playingbad,” I say, as I peel through their statistics.

As you can imagine, this conversationdoesn’t always go swimmingly. Yet, it happens quite often when I’m coaching.

People will come to me hoping they can getsome new plays to jolt their game.

They tell me they’re running bad. I thenlook under the hood and find they’re making some key mistakes.

What are those mistakes? The most commonones I see are these three:

  • Only 3-betting Premium Hands

Many guys come into the game hungry andlooking for action. They see opponents who are opening too much, and they 3-betthem with all manner of goofy suited connectors, big cards, and small pairs.The loose opener then flats out of position, misses, and check/folds to acontinuation bet.

Bad

You see a lot of younger guys play thisway. They play hard. They play recklessly, but they play to win. They get someresults off of this style.

Unfortunately, many guys then abandon thisstyle. They get hired by a stable which doesn’t agree with their typical game.They get lectured by their friends for playing recklessly. They have a bad run,where their opponents keep picking up hands.

Poker

For whatever reason, you’ll see a lot ofgood aggressive players start flatting with everything but Queens, Kings, andAces when they’re having a momentarily bad run. This just exacerbates andprolongs the run bad.

The problem with flatting all of your playablehands is that then you have to play all your pots multiway, since the big blindnever folds now when getting such a great price. In multiway pots, someone isgoing to hit something, and they’re generally not going to fold. It’s muchharder to bluff. You’re forced to make a hand.

Whenever you need to hit a hand to win,that’s calling gambling. You can do the same thing in Blackjack and Pai Gow.

What separates professionals fromrecreational players is the pots won when no one sees anything. No cards areneeded to pull that off. Flatting preflop constantly removes your ability tocapitalize like a professional.

Finally, it’s bad for you when you havepremiums too. If you never 3-bet, it is going to be hard to get action when youfinally do 3-bet your Aces.

  • Lack Of ContinuationBetting
Why Poker Is Bad For You

Poker Bad Beats Youtube

When a guy keeps running into hands, hesometimes will stop continuation betting. He’s angling to pick up cards or totry a delayed c-bet, but most of the time he’s just not cashing out his equity.

Most of the time, in heads-up pots, youropponent will have nothing on the flop. Unless there’s two cards 9 or higher,or unless the opponent is cold calling from a very early position with a tightrange, it’s likely your adversary has missed the board the majority of thetime.

You have to pick a bet that will fold highcards (it’s usually more than half pot) and fire.

If the guy is a little more clever (orplaying a tighter range) you can bet smaller, as if you want action, and thatmight do the job.

But you need to get the other guy foldingwhen he misses. That’s how you’ll pick up the most orphan pots without cards inNo Limit Hold’em.

Alternatively, another leak you’ll see iswhen a guy flops a good pair or big hand, he keeps trying to trap. He’s had hisbig hands keep butting up against nothing, and he feels entitled to biggerpots. So, he keeps checking back, and letting his opponents catch cards to beathim. His slowplays rarely work. He gets frustrated, wondering why his resultshave changed, not realizing he’s allowed temporary results to affect his oncesolid game plan.

  • Too Much Double and Triple Barreling

When you continuation bet the flop, it’susually because your opponent(s) have mostly high cards and they tend to befolding those high cards.

Therefore, when one or more of thoseopponents has gotten to the turn, they generally have pairs.

People SUCK at folding pairs on the turnand river. In every data set I have ever seen, the average guy just cannotfold.

Bad Poker Face

Sometimes, a tilting player will forgetthis. They’ll have their AKo once again flop nothing, they’ll continuation betand get called, then they’ll whine to themselves, “they can’t have it everytime!” and then they’ll barrel off. Then, they’ll complain: “This dumbasswouldn’t fold second pair!”

Most guys are bad at folding. That’s whythis game is so profitable. The real question is why are you trying to getlow-to-mid stakes players to fold?