By Lou Krieger | Published on April 26, 2010

Poker’s Most Common Mistakes, Part 2

This is the second of a two-part series about common mistakes made by poker players.

#8. Putting Your Opponent on a Single Hand, Rather Than a Range of Hands.

I always get a charge out of opponents who say something like, “I knew you had AK,” when I show down big slick and win a pot with it. For one thing, it marks them as a really poor poker player. Consider this. If my opponent knew with certainty that I had AK, which gave me top pair with the very best possible kicker, and he had a hand that couldn’t beat it, why did he call? Either of two reasons would suffice. For one, he wasn’t really sure what I had. He may have suspected I had top pair-top kicker, but wasn’t certain and was very reluctant to throw away what otherwise might have been a winning hand. Another possibility is that he had no idea at all what I had, but his insatiable and costly curiosity pushed him over the line and he called that one last bet.

The truth is you almost never can put a player on a specific hand, especially not before the flop. The best you can do – and what you should do – is to put your opponent on a range of hands, and keep narrowing down the range based on the cards that appear on future wagering rounds and the actions your opponent takes.

To put your opponent on a range of hands, you first have to understand something about his playing proclivities. Ask yourself what he’s likely to raise with in early, middle, or late position, both as the first player to voluntarily enter the pot, after one or more players have called, after there’s been a raise, after there’s been a call and then a raise, and after there’s been a raise and someone else has called.

If you don’t have these answers, and they’ll vary for each opponent, you’ll have to assign some default options for the opponents you know nothing about. And when you do, be sure to modify these default positions based on the knowledge you gain from observing what kinds of hands your opponent actually tables, and the kind of wagering action that took place during the hand.

Once you can place your opponent on a range of hands, you need to begin to play against his entire range of hands. But you shouldn’t do this just with the cards you happen to hold at that moment; you need to play your range of hands against his range of hands. If, for example, you simply play each two-card starting hand based on its own inherent strength, your opponents will quickly discern how you handle big pairs, big connectors, and all the other hands you might play. To counter that possibility, you might usually raise with pocket Aces, Kings, and Queens – and to throw in some deception, raise the same amount with 98 suited and pocket sixes.

While you’ll be tossing those sizes and 98 suited away after the flop the vast majority of the time, when you do flop a big hand with those value-added hands, you’ll win a lot of money if you can trap your opponent with a big pocket pair, big kicker or better yet, two pair, when you’ve flopped a set or a straight.

The idea of putting your opponent on a range of hands is so important that it’s worth a future article all by itself – maybe even a series of articles or even an entire book – but for purposes of this list, just make sure that if you catch yourself thinking in terms of single hands instead of ranges of hands, sit up, start over, and begin analyzing your hand and your opponents in terms of playable ranges and wagering accordingly.

#9. Playing Your Own Holdings as a Single Hand, Rather than a Range of Hands.

This is so closely related to the previous concept that it could have been included as part of it. Poker beginners often bet proportionally to the strength of their hand. When these players attempt to become deceptive, they fall into the sin of playing Aces and Kings like they were weaker hands. Instead, they should play some weaker hands like they were Aces and Kings, which is generally a better way of engendering deception than giving your opponents a free or very low cost chance to draw out on you by playing your strongest hands as though they were weaklings, but never playing weaker hands like they are pocket Aces or Kings.

#10. Calling When You Should Raise.

While not as common or as significant an error as calling when you should have folded, failure to raise when the time is right will cost you money in the long run. One key to successful poker is to charge your adversaries for the opportunity to draw out on you. In a fixed-limit game you can only charge them as much as the betting limits allow, but in a no-limit game you can bet enough so that the cost for them to draw exceeds their chances of completing their straight or flush. When that’s the case, the long run supports bets of that nature. Even if your opponent gets lucky this time, he’ll lose in the long run when he’s drawing to longer odds than are offered by the payoff.

When you structure your no-limit bet so that the pot is offering even money on a call, but the odds against your opponent completing his hand are 2-to-1, you’ll win in the long run. And that’s what poker is all about. Make ‘em pay to get there, and charge ‘em what you think the traffic will bear.

#11. Hopefulness.

Hope is the death of poker players. That’s not the case in other endeavors, when hope can play a major role in accomplishing goals, in survival, and in providing the wherewithal to persevere in the face of incredible odds. Hope is food for the human spirit – the sustenance that tells us to never give up, never retreat, and never surrender.

Although hope supports a lot of what we accomplish as people, winning at poker is not on that list. Players who hope are players who base their actions on hunches, who wish rather than analyze, and who continue to call in the face of long odds that are not nearly offset by the size of the pot being contested.

In the 50-year old ballad, Springhill Mine Disaster – a song that tells the story of some miners who survived a cave-in in a coal mine – originally sung by Ewan MacColl and more recently by U2, the lyric goes;

Three days past and the lamps gave out

And Caleb Rushton got up and said

There’s no more water, or light, or bread

So we’ll live on song and hope instead.

While hope may have gone a long way toward keeping those miners alive for a week and a day in a dark and airless chamber deep in a collapsed mineshaft, it won’t do you much good at the poker table. If you need some poetry to keep hope at bay during your time at the poker table, a better choice might be “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” the inscription at the entrance to Hell taken from Dante Alighieri’s allegorical epic poem that was written sometime between 1306 and 1321.

#12. Playing too Big for Your Bankroll.

How often have you seen someone who is losing move up in stakes in order to get his bankroll back where he thinks it ought to be in the least possible time? Sometimes it works, but most often it’s a complete step in the wrong direction. When your bankroll has been beaten down it’s time to drop down in stakes in an attempt to keep your bankroll large enough to survive the predictable swings and variance that’s likely to befall you in any game you play.

Moving up carries with it the chance that your bad run of cards or poor play will conspire to destroy your bankroll completely, and if that happens, how will you get back in the game? You’ll either have to borrow the money, get a job, or watch from the sidelines, and none of those choices are very desirable.

Better than that is dropping down, winning, rebuilding your bankroll, and then moving back to the limits you prefer.

#13. Not Being Accountable for Your Results

Don’t blame the dealer; don’t ask for a deck change, and don’t blame anyone else at the table for the results you achieve. Poker is a blend of skill and luck and your short-term results may be due to one or the other, or a combination of both, but regardless of the source of your losses, only you are accountable for your results at the poker table. You can’t lay the blame anywhere else but squarely on your shoulders.

If you do take responsibility for your achievements and failures, you are likely to assess your results with an eye toward improving, and having even better results in the future. If you deflect and deny accountability, there’s no motivation whatsoever to try to improve, and in the long run you’ll fail to make progress while your opponents are improving all around you.

In relative terms you’re taking on water and sinking fast. It’s not a pretty picture, but one that’s easily rectified. All you have to do is hold yourself accountable for whatever you achieve, and if you aren’t pleased with what you see, improve your play, upgrade your skills, and do better next time.

#14. Failure to Keep Good Records – or Any Records At All.

Closely related to avoiding accountability is the failure to keep good records. If you don’t keep good records, or if you don’t keep records at all, how in the world will you know how you’re doing? You won’t have any idea in a traditional casino game. You will online, because you can see your bankroll grow or shrink – or even disappear altogether – but records are more helpful than an aggregation of your results. They will show you which games you perform best in, and whether your cash game or tournament play is more productive for you.

If you’re serious about your poker play, you have to treat it as a business, and a business that fails to keep records is as business destined to fail.

#15. We Have Met the Enemy (and he is us).

You are your worst poker enemy, as Dr. Al Schoonmaker would say. Your toughest poker adversary looks back at you in the mirror daily. To improve your poker skills you must first be brutally honest about them. There is always room for improvement, and it’s up to you to examine your skills, determine your shortcomings and then decide how to go about raising your game to the highest level within your reach. But you need to be accountable for your results, you need to keep good records, and you need to realize that the vast majority of challenges you will overcome on the road to becoming an excellent poker player probably reside within you.

These are only 15 of the common mistakes found among poker players. There are many more. But for now, there’s plenty to keep you busy identifying your weaknesses and leaks, developing a plan to raise your game and putting the plan into action.

Here’s where the Japanese concept of kai-zen comes into play. It’s the philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement in business and even life in general. If you look for incremental improvements in your poker skills, your game will improve, and if you are able to improve at a faster rate than your opponents are improving, you will catch and pass them on the high road to success.

Go forth and fix. And remember to have fun. After all, poker’s a game and you have to enjoy it to play your best.