A decent poker player continually memorize things. Things about his opponents, their game, their expertise and so on. Sometimes players memorize things when they are not even aware of it. Like a shark that needs to keep active to keep alive, poker gamblers must keep learning or they are dead meat.
It’s not that hard to get a decent level of adequacy as a poker player: you play hands like A K when you get them; you play when you have fair pot odds; and you don’t tilt like the Leaning Tower of Pisa because you lose one single pot. This basic level of competence is within the perception of most players who read this. But, becoming a winning player requires the player to be always learning, absorbing and adapting.
Winning poker is all about self-control and situational analyses. Without self-control nothing else matters, but once you have that under control, successful poker decision-making is the consequence of correctly analyzing the situation you find yourself in. Like in most things, the more you know about something, the better decisions you make.
Successful gamblers are like sponges in their ability to absorb information, but even more than just being possible to take in, organize and figure out the information around us, gamblers should strive to search and find data. Imagine you see a player get caught bluffing. You can observe everything he did and profitably use all that data in the future. That’s learning – but it’s also a little passive. Whether you really are seeking out things to learn when you’re playing, you probably should have known that the bluffer was bluffing even before he showed his hand the first time he was caught. It means that the bluffing player gave off enough information prior to his bluff for us to know he was bluffing when he did it. All the info is there, we just have to figure out how to decode it.
Of course it’s not always possible to crack every gambler’s code before he acts. However, our brains should be always meeting the information that helps us draw fair conclusions, and we should often be able to expect what our opponents are going to do – sometimes before they know what they are going to do.
For example: You put one gambler on a flush draw, with no hope of having the better hand without making the flush. Reading this specific situation is rather simple. A further hard thing is to correctly conclude how likely the flush-drawing gambler is to bluff should he miss his draw. Reading the fellow for a bluff after he bluffs, that’s basic, great poker. Figuring out what a gambler is about to do before they do so, that isn’t so easy – but that is what we should be trying to do.
In poker we make money by anticipating our opponent’s actions. This idea most constantly comes into play when we are out of place, primary to act. We have to do something before our rival does. When out of place, it really is a profitable thing to have some idea of how our opponent is going to act whether we check and how he’ll act if we bet. No matter how short the time you’ve played against your opponents, they will have given you some information, in code, which you should have been looking for, that you should have tried to figure out, that you should be possible to exploit to better expect their moves.
Learning leads you to codebreaking. Codebreaking leads you to anticipation. Anticipation leads you to profitable action. Learning = money.
