The Importance of Preparation in Poker

I don’t know if the Boy Scouts think much about poker, but I know they have a motto:

Be prepared.

As far as poker goes, this is great advice. Most poker players probably don’t think much about how to prepare, but it’s important.

In this post, I take a detailed look at some of what it means to pay attention to preparation in poker.

Winning at Poker Inevitably Involves Preparation

If you were going to play in the World Series of Poker Main Event tomorrow, would you do anything to get ready for it?

If your answer is no, I’d question your veracity. After all, you’d need to at least prepare how to get to the event. Even if you live in Vegas, you need to get to the casino where the Event is being held. You’ll need to set an alarm to make sure you wake up in time. You’ll want clean clothes to wear.

These seem like minor preparations, but I’d suggest they’re important means of preparing for a poker tournament. Skip any of these things and you’ll be distracted and unable to bring your “A” game to the table.

Poker is a sport like any other, and you would expect football players getting ready for the Super Bowl to get a good night’s sleep and eat some healthy meals before playing, right? You’d expect them to practice? And you’d expect them to pay attention to their nutrition, right?

Even the most talented natural athletes must prepare for their sports. And even though poker is largely a mental endeavor, a health mind resides in a healthy body. If you don’t take care of your body, your mind won’t function with the kind of efficiency it needs to for someone who wants to win.

Also, in poker, information is the biggest edge you have over your opponents. This means you need to get as much information about poker in general, the game you’re playing specifically, and about your opponents as you can.

Different Ways Poker Players Can Prepare to Win

In Poker Winners Are Different, Alan Schoonmaker points out 10 ways poker players can and should prepare.

He suggests that they should prepare by developing their knowledge and skills. This can involve reading books, participating in forums, and getting coaching, among other things.

He also suggests that those playing real money poker should stay healthy. The basics of good health aren’t complicated, even though the diet and fitness industry might like you to think so. I read a great article a couple of years ago by someone who just followed the US Government’s recommendations regarding what to eat.

The results?

He had more energy, lost weight, and saw his cholesterol levels improve. Go figure.

If you read many of the popular diet books on the market, they’ll suggest that the US RDA information is woefully inaccurate, but if that were the case, he wouldn’t have seen his health improve so dramatically. Go science.

You should also prepare for specific events by knowing the details about that event. Choosing the best game for someone with your skillset is another way to prepare. I’ve seen countless poker pundits suggest that game selection is the most important skill a wannabe profitable poker player can develop.

But preparation gets even more granular than that. Choosing where you sit is a consideration, too. Schoonmaker even suggests that you should prepare before every hand AND prepare for future poker games.

The final item on his list of things to prepare for in poker has to do with long-term development.

How to Improve Your Poker Knowledge and Skills

A lot of poker players will never win because they’re not willing to put the effort and time into becoming a more thoughtful player. They might hate reading or studying. Some of them might think they’ve got so much talent that they don’t need to study.

These players can (and will) point to old-time poker legends who didn’t have poker books to study.

Of course, the fact that none of those old-timers’ opponents had access to these same resources had a lot to do with why they were able to win without that kind of study.

You can improve your poker knowledge and skills by reading some poker books and paying attention to what you’ve read. You can also subscribe to Card Player magazine. You can find streaming videos of all kinds that can broaden your poker education.

You can participate in poker discussions on the internet at any hour of the day. You can hire poker coaches and poker tutors to help you improve your game. You can use computer simulations to see how profitable your decisions are in the long run mathematically.

Even if all of that sounds like more trouble than its worth, you need to realize that you’re going to be competing with players who are taking advantage of those tools. It’s impossible to stay competitive with them if you don’t do the same.

A poker player from the 1970s would stand no chance against a poker player from 2021. The sport has changed and the level of competition has changed, too. That sounds like a bold statement, but if you think about the changes in other sports, it will make more sense.

After all, how many pro football teams from the 1970s would stand a chance against one of today’s teams?

Runners get faster. Weight lifters get stronger.

And poker players get smarter and better-informed.

That’s how history progresses in any sport, not just poker.

The Importance of Being a Healthy Poker Player

I mentioned it earlier, but it’s worth reiterating. A healthy mind resides in a healthy body. If you’re not taking care of your health, you’re not at your best as a poker player.

I used to think a lot about how search engine algorithms work. I even did some consulting on the subject for some big websites. When I explained how to think about ranking factors and whether something were a ranking factor or not, I would always suggest that the website owner think about it this way:

If everything else on the page were equal, would the change to this one aspect of the page make it a better result than the other page?

For example, if you have 2 pages about Texas hold’em, and everything on the 2 pages is equal, would a page with an illustration rank higher than a page without an illustration?

Would a page with a unique image rank higher than a page with an image that appears on multiple other sites?

If you apply the same thinking to poker, you’ll inevitably start thinking about things like this:

If you have 2 Texas hold’em players at the same table who are the same in terms of training and intelligence, who’s going to be more likely to win? The one who got drunk the night before, or the one who stayed sober and went to bed early?

The one who gets regular exercise, or the one who doesn’t? (Regular exercise improves blood flow, which means your brain gets more oxygen.)

When I’m trying to win at poker, I want to get every possibly tiny edge that I can over my opponent. If I can be healthier than my opponents, I want to be. This won’t compensate for a lack of knowledge or skill, but even my ability to study and learn about poker is going to be affected by my overall health.

I’ll leave specific health recommendations to the professionals, but I can provide some general guidelines:

• Get plenty of rest.
• Get some exercise.
• Eat right, which means mostly plants, and don’t eat too much.
• See a doctor when you need to.
• Don’t forget about your mental health.

How to Prepare for Specific Poker Events or Tournaments

I never gave much thought to preparing for specific poker events or tournaments beyond making sure I had enough money for the buy-in. I learned that I actually had lots of ways I could prepare beyond that.

For one thing, every cardroom has its own rules for how it handles certain situations. I don’t want my opponent to have an edge because she understands what the cardroom’s house rules are better than I do.

Also, if I’m playing in a tournament, I should know before it begins what the blind schedule is and what the payout structure is. These affect strategy decisions throughout the tourney. A piece of winning poker is avoiding mistakes.

Advanced poker players also spend some time strategizing by learning about what their opponents are like. Schoonmaker points out that using spies to find out about the other side is suggested as far back as in Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War.

Think about other sports, too. Even if you’re not a football fan, if you’ve ever seen a football movie, you’ve seen coaches and players reviewing film footage of their opponents to try to scout out the competition.

Poker should be taken as seriously as other sports. This means preparing for specific events.

Game Selection Can Be the Difference between Winning and Losing

Many losing poker players could be winners if they would choose different games to play. Often, they’re unrealistic about how skilled and/or talented they are, so they choose games they can’t beat. If you really want to win at poker, spend some time assessing how good you really are and what level of competition you can realistically really expect to beat.

Keeping written records is one way of objectively getting a feel for this. If you have written records, you can see in black and white how well or how poorly you do in different games. You might be a strong limit hold’em player at a full table, but you might lose money consistently at no limit short-handed tables.

You should also pay attention to what’s going on at your table. Sure, you want to sit down at a table with lots of weak opponents.

But those opponents come and go, and it’s a mistake to not adjust based on which players have replaced them. Some easy games might get hard when tougher opponents sit down. Sometimes it’s time to switch tables.

How to Prepare Once You’ve Sat Down at a Table

You should start out by watching the action at the table before you start playing. You should know what kind of table you’re playing at. You want to know who the weak and who the strong players are. Which players are liable to fold, and which players are going to call down to the river no matter what happens in the later rounds of the hand?

Concentrate.

Focus.

You should categorize the table as a whole. At a largely loose table, you should play tighter than the rest of the table. At a largely tight table, you should player looser than the rest of the table.

You should also categorize individual players. You should know how tight or loose and how passive or aggressive your opponents are. If you don’t know your opponents’ tendencies, you’re not likely to win against them.

You can find plenty of blog posts on the internet explaining the different kinds of poker players and the best strategy to use with each of them.

You also need to make quick preparations for every hand. You’re going to be accounting for a wide variety of factors and doing so quickly.

These factors include your position. This is a big weakness in my own game, as one of my buddies has been telling me for years. In fact, your position is probably at least as important as what cards you hold.

You also want to pay attention to what size stacks your opponents have and what your opponents think you play like.

If you don’t know how much money is in the pot or how many players are still in the hand, you won’t be able to make an educated decision about how to play your hand.

I once played in a Vegas poker game with a player I knew from Dallas nicknamed Rock. He raised from early position, and I went all-in from middle position with AQ suited. I knew from his playing tendencies and his nickname that if he was raising from first position, he was probably holding solid cards.

But I was so excited to be playing cards in Vegas that I overplayed my hand immediately. He flipped over pocket aces and busted me on the first hand I played. I had to rebuy.

I just wasn’t paying enough attention.

I wasn’t well prepared.

Conclusion

Preparation is crucial to winning at poker. Learning how to prepare is at least as important as learning how to play. This is especially true of tournament poker.

I hope this post has given you some ideas about how you can better prepare as a poker player so you can win more often.