I’ve done roughly 750 hours of one-to-one poker coaching over the last two and a half years, and one trend has become evident to me recently among lower-stakes players who are learning the game and trying to take their performance to the next level. It occurs to me that many people who believe they’re taking the right path to poker success are, in fact, more or less attempting to do things in reverse. Yes, that’s right, they’re pretty much doing it the wrong way around, with the harder, more specific parts first and the more useful, broad-strokes parts last. Let me explain.

What do we mean by ‘in reverse’?

In order to define what we mean by doing something in reverse or backwards, we have to know what the right way around would be. In poker, the right way around would – perhaps fairly obviously – be to learn the fundamentals of the game first, and then move on to the more nuanced strategic aspects that take their game to the next level. To first focus on how to become ‘hard to beat’, to use a sporting parlance, and then subsequently develop a winning habit.

For the sake of being more specific, we need to know what we mean by ‘fundamentals’, and this is where we run into trouble. Most people consider the ‘fundamentals’ of the game to be things like, “how big should I raise preflop?”, or “at what stack size should I be playing push-fold poker?” – both of these, and many other questions, have broad-strokes answers that would be useful to your average beginner (you might say “between 2x and 3x” or “15bb and under” could be the answers), but there’s a key flaw in all those broad-strokes answers. They’re based on interpretations of how other people usually play, and thus are limited in their effectiveness.

The flaws in traditional poker learning

What this means is that these broad-strokes answers are, in fact, not broad at all – they’re exploitative strategies based on existing conventions of how other players tend to play. Raising between 2x and 3x is only the best strategy if your opponents are playing a certain way – it’s not inconceivable that you might find a table so tight it could be best to raise 4x with any two cards every hand, for example. I’ve played at such tables in home games.

Someone learning these strategies might be able to employ them effectively against other players playing a more ‘default’ strategy, but will run into trouble whenever they come up against a more unorthodox player, since they lack the decision-making framework to know why these things are correct. They can’t adapt, and they get crushed as a result.

This means we have to change our definition of ‘fundamentals’. The fundamentals of poker are not simply a guide to how to play mediocre poker against your average random casino regular. The fundamentals of poker are the nuts and bolts of how the game works on a theoretical level. Everything from pot odds through to complex game theory questions, from fold equity through to ICM and tournament stack utility – they are the building blocks of the thought processes that will allow a player to construct a strategy for playing against anyone, anywhere, at any time. They’re everything that should go through your mind when making a poker decision, before you even look at your hand or the opponent.

A new blueprint for your game

So with all of this in mind, how do we go about learning poker the right way around? To learn the real fundamentals of the game, without shortcuts, and without making unnecessary assumptions that will leave us coming up empty against unorthodox players? It’s actually surprisingly simple – forget about making money.

Think about it – if you were going to manufacture the perfect poker player in a laboratory, you’d want them to have a detailed understanding of game theory and all the relevant mathematical concepts before they even sat down at a poker table. What stops players from doing this? The desire to sit at the table and have the chance to actually make some money! If you could play just for learning purposes right up until you had learned the fundamentals to a high level, you’d make a ton of money as soon as you sat down.

The ‘right way’ to learn poker is to focus not on what to do, but on how to think – if you can do that, learning what to do with pocket nines facing a raise and a call, or what to do with Ace-King on the button, won’t be necessary. You’ll have all the tools you need to make those decisions. Trust the process, learn the real fundamentals, and let your opponents crush themselves. Be patient – the money will come later.