A large part of what makes poker such a difficult skill to learn is the sheer breadth and depth of the game. Not only are there a lot of theoretical and practical concepts with which a skilled poker player must be familiar in order to succeed, but in order to improve beyond a certain level, he or she must go further than a mere surface-level understanding of these ideas and delve into the game’s mechanics to discover how each concept relates to all the others.

This can be a daunting task. It can also, however, be extremely rewarding and enjoyable for a poker player to actively acknowledge their own development, and sometimes the revelation of a new concept can lead to an immediate desire to uncover the next pivotal idea that will change their game forever.

But this rush of motivation can sometimes do more harm than good and more than a few novice players have lost their way in the catacombs of poker learning as they scramble to catch up with their opponents and gain a new edge. If you’re in the process of trying to push your game forward, here are a few ways you can make sure your learning is as effective as possible.

Beware of ‘information overload’

Everyone wants to improve as quickly as they can. Nobody likes the idea of having to wait a bit longer for their performance to improve. It’s tempting to believe that with poker being a mental pastime rather than a physical activity, improving your game is simply a case of accumulating knowledge, but this ignores the reality that there’s a big difference between knowing what to do in a certain spot when you look back on it afterwards and possessing the appropriate mental acuity to act on your knowledge in the moment of playing a hand.

It’s why it’s so easy to spot all of the missed scoring opportunities when you watch your favorite sports team play – it’s very different when you’re on the field, and if scoring were that easy, they’d be doing it.

Thus, it’s important to recognize that simply going hell-for-leather to dig up all of the poker information you can is not necessarily the smartest way to approach learning.

If in the space of an average week you find yourself watching five different training videos by three different coaches, posting eight hands on two different training forums, reading three articles by three different authors, completing two chapters of that book you’ve been meaning to finish for ages, reviewing three sessions of your own play, and watching a Twitch stream while you play, then you’re probably wasting about 70% of that time.

There’s no way you could possibly digest that much information effectively, and whatever you did take in would most likely conflict in some way with some other nugget of knowledge you managed to retain.

Ever had your mind flash back to a specific hand you saw in a training video and ended up simply replicating whatever the coach did in the video without thinking about why you were doing it? That usually happens because you picked up the memory of what you saw, but you didn’t pick up the logic in the explanation well enough to apply it. You remembered that you studied something, but you didn’t learn it. Everything you study should be learned before you move on to the next thing.

Learn the fundamentals first

What I’m referring to above is the idea of not going too wide with your scope at any given time – not trying to learn six new concepts at once, for example. What’s also important is not to go too deep into any one concept before you understand the fundamentals.

It’s no good to be teaching yourself what it means to play game theory optimal poker if you’re still struggling to get your head around the concept of 3-bet bluffing or trying to optimize your river bluffing frequencies before you truly understand pot odds. There are some concepts that you will need to get your head around before you even think about others, and getting ahead of yourself will make the initial concept harder to understand in the first place.

A good example of this might come when you look at the different stages of a poker hand. If you find yourself making poor calls on the river frequently or getting into difficult spots on the turn when you face a second barrel, then it’s tempting to look immediately at those streets as a source of a potential leak to be fixed.

However, in many instances, such leaks can actually be caused by an error occurring well before the actual point of discussion such as a turn spot that was made difficult by an overly loose flop calling range or a flop spot that becomes tricky because we 3-bet pre-flop instead of calling.

What this means, of course, is that the pre-flop stage of the game is in many ways the most important part of the game to study. If you still struggle to identify correct pre-flop open-raising ranges, but you’re moving on to trying to identify spots to check-raise bluff the turn, you’re getting ahead of yourself.

Additionally, it’s worth considering that the pre-flop stage of the game is the one aspect of it that is guaranteed to be relevant every hand. We make a pre-flop decision in every hand of poker we ever play and thus any knowledge we gain that relates to pre-flop play is immediately more relevant than any other. We might play dozens of pre-flop spots for every flop, turn, or river we play, so every pre-flop leak will cost us more in the long-run.

The Adult Learning Model

Jared Tendler’s first book, “The Mental Game of Poker,” has become an essential text for aspiring poker players and it contains perhaps one of the most useful concepts in poker learning. It outlines the importance in poker of what Tendler calls the Adult Learning Model.

It suggests four stages of learning development, beginning with Unconscious Incompetence – the point where you start out, having no idea how much there is left to learn. From that point, you move to the next stage, Conscious Incompetence – you start to recognize your weaknesses. These two stages are where most beginners will find themselves in the initial weeks, months, and perhaps even years of their poker career before they begin an intensive learning process.

Most people who have spent some time in poker are somewhere between this stage and the next stage: Conscious Competence. In this stage, you know some of the areas in which you’re making mistakes and you’re becoming conscious of how to correct those mistakes, but you have to work at it in order to get it right.

Once you get to the point where you can get it right without thinking too much about it, you’re at the final stage – Unconscious Competence, the holy grail of poker. If you can learn enough skills to that level, you’ll be a very good poker player.

The key, though, is to get an idea of where you stand with each concept you’re in the process of learning. Following on from my earlier suggestion of not learning too many concepts at once, it should be fairly easy for you to track your progress with each ongoing focus area in your learning.

You start by pinpointing a topic or concept that might lie in your area of Conscious Incompetence and figure out how your thought processes need to change in order to bring it into the Conscious Competence zone. Once you implement those changes successfully, you can then begin to work on bringing this concept and others into your sphere of Unconscious Competence to make yourself a more well-rounded poker player.

Keep track of which concepts are in which zone as your learning progresses and you’ll find you’ll gain a greater sense of control over your development.

A final thought

Ultimately, as long as you’re doing your best to improve your game, you’re on the right track. But in the same way that many people wrongly assume that poker is simply a volume game, learning is all about supplementing a strong work ethic with structured, effective learning processes. In short, it’s about quantity and quality and neither one is a substitute for the other.

Watching one training video a month is not going to be enough to improve no matter how hard you focus on it, but watching five per day is going to melt your poker brain. Just like anything else in poker, and in life for that matter, balance is crucial.