How good do you need to be?

In order to be a poker pro or to make significant money from the game then how good do you need to be? Well at the highest level or even at the middle stakes levels then poker is all about understanding what strategies your opponents are using and how to find a way to defeat those strategies in the poker games that you play in.
  

Let us say that your opponent likes to raise from position and then c-bet flops with most of their range heads up. Clearly then this is an exploitable strategy because of the simple betting sequence of raise-bet. If you always know that a sequence will go raise-call-bet then the bet becomes meaningless. In fact this is probably no more than a standard line taken by your opponent in a heads up situation.

So you do not need a very good hand to continue here as the hand comes down to a battle between your nothing against their likely nothing. So bluff raises and floats then become part of your range of possible moves to combat their lines. So clearly then the game of online poker becomes like a super advanced version of the game of rock, paper, scissors where selecting strategies not just to beat your opponent on this move but to beat their line of thinking and method of operation come to the fore.

In this context then poker becomes difficult to grasp for many people who have been brought up with hand charts and how to play certain hands in certain situations. So asking how to play a hand in a certain situation is really a case of asking the wrong type of question. Higher level poker is much more multi-layered than that and you are not even scratching the surface of playing poker when all you are asking is a question that is nothing more than on the first level of complexity so to speak. This is why many players struggle to jump from low stakes poker to higher stakes poker because it involves learning a whole new game.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk