One of the most difficult aspects of attempting to make the leap from losing poker player to long-term winner is knowing what to learn, and when. Without a coach to guide you, it can be easy to get lost and develop a learning pattern that is somewhat scattered or haphazard. But even with the aid of a coach or a training site, it’s easy to spin your wheels for a long time learning things that just aren’t that useful.

The reality of poker is that certain situations are going to have a bigger effect on your long-term bottom line than others. If you’re a tournament player, your performance at final tables will have a huge impact, as will your overall game selection. If you’re a cash game player, your ability to identify and exploit weak players as quickly as possible will probably be more useful than your knowledge of GTO ranges for playing against regulars, at least at low stakes. So how can we structure our learning to avoid wasted time?

What most people get wrong

A lot of people begin their poker learning process by looking at their own game and trying to figure out where their biggest weaknesses are. This is obviously a pretty sound process in theory, but the problem is that in any domain, our biggest weaknesses are the ones we can’t spot ourselves – the ones that lie in the ‘Unconscious Incompetence’ area of the Adult Learning Model, as identified by Jared Tendler in The Mental Game of Poker.

What we need to do, therefore, is build our learning from the ground up, in a comprehensive style that doesn’t just focus on plugging leaks in the short term, but on furthering our overall understanding of the game so that we don’t have to focus on each leak individually. We can then use this understanding to develop detailed, specific knowledge of the concepts that are most useful to us in the games that we play – this not only corrects previous leaks, but unearths new strategies and opportunities that we would never have noticed by only focusing on mistakes.

Resisting the temptation

The hardest thing about structured learning is to embrace the idea that you’re never going to be able to close up all your leaks overnight, and that your ideas of what you should be studying are not necessarily correct. Just because you feel like you made a big 3-betting mistake the previous day doesn’t mean your 3-betting is the most important area for you to study – it’s results-oriented to think like that.

We have to resist the temptation, therefore, to simply dive into trying to fix whatever issues and study whatever areas are currently gnawing away at our confidence, and start focusing on what’s most important in our games. The simplest example here is that if we play, let’s say, 1,000 hands in a session, we’re going to have a bare minimum of 1,000 pre-flop decisions to make, and that’s if we fold every hand. Most likely it’s going to be closer to 1,300 or 1,500.

Following on from there, we might have 250-300 flop decisions, maybe 75-100 turn decisions, and perhaps 25-50 river decisions. These 25-50 river decisions are certainly important given the fact that pot sizes will be bigger, but our decisions in these spots are going to be even more difficult on average if we consistently make mistakes on earlier streets – we might make more pre-flop mistakes in a session than the number of total rivers we actually see. It makes no sense, therefore, to study river play when we’re still making frequent pre-flop, flop or turn mistakes.

Don’t be fooled by the movies!

The image of poker in the mainstream media has been largely cultivated by movies and television over the years. Films like Rounders, Casino Royale (the movie that got me into poker), Lucky You, and Runner, Runner have – with varying degrees of accuracy – attempted to depict poker in a way that glamorizes and dramatizes the game, where every hand is a huge cooler, a massive bluff or a big suck-out. You didn’t see James Bond taking down any six-big-blind pots with a carefully-timed flop continuation bet, that’s for sure.

This leads many novice poker players to believe that what they have to do in order to win at poker is learn how to make the big bluffs and hero-calls, to be the most aggressive player at the table, and run everyone over. They figure since it’s easy to win pots when you make a big hand, all they need to do is to learn how to win pots when they don’t have a big hand, and the game will be easy.

The reality, though, is that the game is much more mundane than the big screen would have you believe. You might play half a million hands of poker without coming across a decision that requires you to identify the right spot to fold a full house on the river, and if you’re a low-stakes live player, you could easily play an entire eight-hour session without even having to know how to respond appropriately to a normal-sized 3-bet. The commonplace decisions, therefore, are a much bigger priority for beginners.

Progressive complexity

The answer to developing a well-balanced learning process is to be constantly revising and adapting your focus. Begin with simple spots, and progress to more complex ones, but without leaving yourself with any huge gaps in your knowledge.

A tournament player might begin by studying short-stacked play, then move on to basic deeper-stacked pre-flop play, basic flop play, basic turn play, and basic river play. They might then revisit short-stacked play in more detail, and follow up with detailed looks at the other categories. A cash game player might skip the short-stack section, but continue with the same model.

It’s unreasonable to expect yourself to understand a very complex river decision that requires a detailed understanding of your opponent’s pre-flop range choices, before you’ve actually studied the decision-making processes that generate those pre-flop choices in the first place. It’s unreasonable to expect a high win-rate at short stacks before you’ve studied push-fold ranges.

Many people expect these things of themselves at times when it’s just not feasible, and their learning process is skewed as a result. They’re learning inefficiently, and in a way that results in hours upon hours of essentially wasted time, that might have little to no impact on their EV. If you can identify the most important skill sets for you in the games that you play, you might find your leaks quickly fix themselves.