After doing so much teaching over the last few months to save up for my new car (see my last blog for details) I have learned a great deal about what it is I do to make money. Teaching not only helps me review things, it helps me understand what I'm doing and why, and I often learn new things during the lessons. During today's lesson it really hit me how much everything depends on everything else to really have a complete game. I'll do my best to explain what I mean here.

I was talking to my student about tilt when it first occured to me that it might make a good blog article. You see, I avoid tilt by studying constantly so that the correct play is automatic as often as possible. If I know for sure what the right play is, then it's very hard for me to do anything else. <READMORE>Tilt for me is a loss of creative play and a lack of attention. I don't make wild stupid plays or terrible calls, I just stop taking advantage of situations I would normally make a profit from.

All that study tends to mean that most of my decisions can be made quickly, giving me more time to study the table and think about my opponents and how they are playing. It makes odds calculations almost immediate for me, and means that they are (almost) always accurate, so I don't make bad mathematical mistakes. Odds calculations that took me a few seconds or more when I first started playing are often not even necessary anymore because I've done them so many times that they are memorized.

Studying the game also helps me learn more in that extra time that I have to watch the table. You know when you see a player make a play that couldn't be right with any hand? When you have more time to study the table, and more knowledge of the correct plays you can pick up more and more of these things. You start to learn more and more about players from small things that a less studied player might not notice or be able to learn anything from.

After the first hand you play at a table you might know that one player played a weak hand under the gun because the flop came QJT rainbow and he checked and folded to a small bet. What hand did he have that missed the flop so badly and was still playable in early position? You know for sure that he plays loose in early position, and most of the time he will turn out to be a bad player. You know that he isn't hyper aggressive and that he sometimes folds to continuation bets. You can't be sure of anything, but you have some pretty good ideas about him after only seeing one hand.

If you're playing on a medium or small site that allows datamining and you play there often you may run into opponents that you don't have stats on. If they make a play against you that wouldn't usually be smart if they knew how you played then you can assume that they haven't been datamining either and may not use stat tracking software at all.

Once you have some knowledge about your opponents you can put it to use because of your good study habits and hard work. You know a guy is loose, he raises 1/5th of his stack in early position, and you have AA. You know the blinds are tight and you're on the button. You have occasionally seen the big blind call big raises, so rather than disguise your hand you reraise the minimum and trap the original raiser into the pot heads up.

The flop comes Q43 and you have watched the guy enough to know that he didn't have QQ or he would have reraised all-in. He's been loose, but not so loose as to make a big raise from early position with 33 or 44. If he does have one of those hands you are destined to lose all your chips here anyway in most cases, so you don't worry about them.

You know Hold Em well enough to know that without one of those hands he has 2 outs at best to catch up to you so you check behind him on the flop. You also had enough time on earlier hands to watch the table and see that he will move in if he is checked to twice. In a fairly safe situation like this one you can slow play and get his whole stack better than 90% of the time with very little risk.

After you win the hand (you call your opponent's all-in bet on the river) another player tells you that you shouldn't slow play aces so much, and that you are a fool. You know enough to label him a "Professor" in your notes, and because of that you will know how to play against him in the future. You'll also remember that he thinks you slow play too much, and you can abuse that belief in future hands as well. Do you think he'll call an all-in check raise from you on the river with a scary board? Not without a monster he won't!

When that exact situation comes up you can calculate instantly what odds you are getting on your bluff and whether it's worth doing. The estimates you make of your opponent's hands are accurate because you have been paying attention and have good hand reading skills. You can easily determine whether the bluff is a profitable one.

Of course while playing this game you are tracking your opponent's statistics with PokerTracker, collecting a bonus from the site, and collecting data on your own game that you can analyze later to find any holes and plug them. You also use that data to find fish and put them on your friend's list, and many of them you will have notes on so that you can abuse them again later.

Later in the session you take a brutal beat that cuts into your profits, but you know about variance and how frequently it happens, so you stay solid. You know the right plays and you execute them, so a minor bought of tilt just slows you down a bit rather than causing you to throw off the rest of your profits.

Each thing you learn affects more than just that one facet of your game. They all work together to make you a well rounded player who can handle any situation. I only touched on a few facets here, there are far too many to talk about them all, but hopefully you can see what I mean. My only hope is that if I keep improving I will have that truly complete game that some of the great ones have and the ability to play my best game all the time that truly seperates the champs from the chumps. I'll keep working on it, and you should too.

I'll see you at the final table,
Fox

This article sponsored by PokerFox.net where we turn players into winners and winners into pros.

</READMORE>