When starting out in poker, one of the biggest obstacles for many players is a lack of confidence in their own game. Every decision is laced with uncertainty, and even a short run of bad results can lead to a complete dissolution of a player’s faith in their own abilities.

The reason for this is much simpler than people realize – of course, it’s natural to be lacking in confidence at something when you’re a beginner, especially when you’re fully aware of your own inexperience – but it does go deeper than that. Many players fall into the trap of not even giving themselves the appropriate platform for improvement and long-term success, and effectively crippling their chances of success right out of the gate. Let’s take a look at how that happens.

The most common mistake for beginners

First and foremost, a lot of beginners start out playing stakes they can’t beat. They look at game selection in terms of what games they think they can afford – much of which is dependent upon how much disposable income they have to spend – rather than in terms of what games they can beat. The biggest problem with this is that if you’re mostly playing against opponents with more experience than yourself, you’re most likely going to lose money, even if your opponents themselves aren’t actually very good.

Furthermore, if you start out in poker by losing consistently, you’re going to find it very hard to build up any kind of stable confidence. You’re going to feel like it’s not even possible to win at poker, and you’re certainly not going to have a balanced idea of what variance is like in the short term – it’ll feel even harsher than it actually is. Your learning will be stunted, you’ll struggle to make any progress, and you may even end up quitting if you go broke and can’t afford to redeposit.

The foundation of this game selection (or bankroll management) mistake is that people get caught up trying to make money, rather than trying to improve their game. This is a misdirection of focus, since your number one priority as a poker beginner should be to find at least some form of the game at some kind of stakes – whether it’s online or live, tournaments or cash games – where you can actually stand a decent chance of winning, giving your bankroll additional longevity and allowing you some breathing room. Even if your winrate playing $0.01/0.02 cash games online is 50 cents per hour, that might be better than losing $1 per game playing $5 SNGs, or even losing $5 per game taking shots at $50 MTTs.

Giving yourself a platform for improvement

One of the biggest issues with playing the wrong types of games is that it makes it increasingly difficult to actually get better and make more money in the long term. If you’re a losing player, your bankroll is under constant threat, even if you’re playing moderately low stakes, and this means you’re racing against time to get some results before you lose your platform altogether and go broke.

To make matters worse, the lower the stakes you’re playing, the more likely it becomes that you’ll have to deal with increased levels of variance, which makes it much more difficult to really tell if your play is progressing in a way that increases your EV. This is less true in cash games, but in low-stakes online MTTs you’ll have to deal with huge field sizes of over 1,000 players very frequently, and even in live MTTs you’ll have the obstacle of terrible no-ante structures and high rake to deal with at the $100 buy-ins and under.

If your goal is to improve in the long term, you need to be able to grind out volume and get experience, putting in repetitions at playing the specific situations that come up most commonly, in order to play those situations more effectively. You can’t put in repetitions in a way that allows for stepping away from results-orientation if you’re effectively forced into improving faster than is natural by the fact that any potential lack of progress threatens your bankroll.

Recognizing the games that will produce rapid growth in confidence

The first step to becoming more confident in a specific situation is to know that it’s something you’ve encountered many times before. Of course, this comes with having put in volume over the long term, but it also comes with having put in consistent volume at games that place you in those same situations.

For example, if you’re a cash game player but you like dabbling in MTTs from time to time, if you split your time between the two you’ll find that the amount of time you spend playing short-stacked in MTTs takes away from your ability to gain confidence in playing deep-stacked poker on the turn or the river. Similarly, if you’re playing a mixture of 6-max and 9-handed situations, you might find that switching between the two gives you half as much experience in each one.

One other underrated factor is the importance of focusing on the specific situations that crop up most frequently – every hand you ever play will have a preflop section, while not every hand will get to the river or see a showdown. This is particularly true in tournaments – every tournament carries with it the potential for being short-stacked for a long period, while not every tournament involves any great deal of deep-stacked play.

You may even find that 50% to 70% of your overall hands occur at stacks of 25 big blinds or below, depending on how many turbo tournaments you play. In this respect, it is much more beneficial to focus on short-stacked preflop play instead of complex postflop situations if you want to produce immediate and substantial improvements.

The components of good game selection

A player with good game selection focuses on several things – their overall winrate or ROI in each game, the degree of variance with which they are comfortable, and the practical considerations affecting their choices such as time available and study resources. For tournament players in particular, good game selection involves playing smaller-field tournaments where your ROI is highest, in an attempt to reduce your likelihood of a losing session from something like 75% down to around 50-55%.

If you don’t believe me about these numbers, do some work with a variance calculator – even some of the absolute best and most consistent MTT players don’t have a ‘winning session’ percentage of more than 45-50%, and many players with huge profit margins in the long term are only winning around 30-35% of the time on any given day. For cash game players, while your expectation is to profit more often than you lose, you might only profit on about 55-75% of days, depending on your overall winrate.

With this in mind, it’s worth noting the impact that this reality will have on a beginner’s mindset – it can be incredibly difficult to build stable confidence when you’re losing more often than you’re winning because results start to dominate your thinking. After all, each losing session puts more and more pressure on your bankroll, and if you’re already playing the lowest stakes possible, how can you go any lower?

It’s necessary, therefore, to approach game selection from a long-term perspective – we want to play with a bankroll that can withstand the swings of the game in question, while picking games that give us the best platform for future improvement. If we don’t have that platform, our chances of success in the long term are compromised, and our end goal of actually making decent money in poker gets further and further away.