How to Implement Changes in Your Game

It’s one thing to take a look at your game and figure out what changes you need to make, but it’s quite another to actually implement those changes effectively. Many people stumble during the process – they know what it is they need to change, but trying to change it does more harm than good. They take one step forward, and two steps back, and they end up worse off than where they started.

Is there a way out of this cycle? Of course – it’s just a matter of knowing where to focus, and avoiding the cognitive dissonance and ‘fuzzy logic’ that can come with being trapped between two schools of thought. Here are a few pointers to help you structure your learning and ensure that your game maintains its forward momentum.

“Don’t rush the process, trust the process”

This is a phrase often used by well-known motivational speaker Eric Thomas, and it’s particularly relevant to poker. With our constant struggle as poker players not to be results-oriented, must also come a corresponding focus towards the process by which we expect to achieve results. If we stay attentive to doing the right things, we’ll get the right results.

However, when you’re trying to change the things you’re doing, you can’t change them all at once. You can’t work on improving your three-bet bluffing at the same time as also working on your river check-raises and your turn calls – it’s too many things to think about, and you won’t be able to isolate the results to figure out if you’re actually doing any better with one thing since you’ve changed all the others. Changing one thing and keeping others the same is the only way to truly work out what’s producing positive effects and what isn’t.

Changing too many things at once is often what leads to cognitive dissonance (i.e. holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time) – you might be studying game theory and telling yourself you need to make a river call because you have the top of your range, but you’re also working on learning to make bigger folds in important spots, so which takes precedence? Do you ‘need to call’ or ‘need to fold’? Tough to decide.

Start preflop and move on from there

Keeping in mind that we’ve established the need to focus on changing one thing at a time, we obviously have to pick the right things to focus on. Everyone wants to learn how to make ‘sick’ river bluffs and hero calls in big pots, but these skills aren’t going to be necessary any more than once or twice a session if you’re lucky. If you’re going to pick one thing to focus on to start with, it should first be an aspect of your preflop game.

A positive change to your preflop game will manifest itself across every hand you ever play – after all, every hand has a preflop stage to it, while very few hands go all the way to the river. If you’re not sure where to start, stick with what will be the most useful, which will always be preflop. Similarly, if you’re a tournament player, start with your short-stack game – if you can’t make good push-fold decisions when you’re 10bb effective, you’re going to struggle to construct appropriate river bluffing ranges in 50bb+ pots, and short-stack play is a part of every MTT you’ll ever play. Even the worst-structured live tournament you can find features a lot of short-stacked play, while only the high-buyin, well-structured events will allow you to play 100+bb deep post-ante.

Track, evaluate and adapt regularly

Finally, the only way to know whether the changes you’re implementing are actually producing positive effects, is to track your progress using whatever metrics are available to you. This will be significantly easier if you’re an online player using HM2 or PT4, since you can simply track your win rate over an appropriate sample of hands. For live players, it’ll take a little longer to measure results, and you won’t have such a specific set of statistics, but it can still be done.

Regardless of the games you’re playing and the format you choose, if you’re not regularly evaluating to make sure your graph is trending upwards, you might be convincing yourself things are better than they really are. You might be telling yourself that your new, more aggressive approach to three-betting is really paying off, or that your river bluffs are getting through more often, when the reality might be the exact opposite. If you do discover things aren’t shaping up the way you like, then simply react, adapt, and make a new change. You don’t control the results, but you do control your decisions, and you also control how you manage your decision-making process.