Poker's dirty little secret

I've talked about poker's dirty little secret before, but it bears repeating. Here it is: to succeed in poker, you need to play against players who aren't as good as you. Succeeding at poker doesn't mean you're all that good, it just means that there are a bunch of players out there who are worse than you, and you've managed to find them :-) The most reliable way to find players who are worse than you is to try a whole lot of different poker styles and flavors. Once you find your best poker style and flavor combination, use it as your bread and butter (i.e., make it the one you play the most).

One of the strangest things I've discovered about poker is how many good players choose to play for small stakes, even in play money games. It's hard to win at small stakes, and even if you do, the reward is hardly worth the effort. Instead of banging your head against the wall, the solution is to move up in stakes, where you'll find both more bad players and bigger rewards :-)

A close corollary of favoring higher stakes over lower is to favor tournaments with larger fields over smaller. The larger the field, the more bad players you'll get the chance to play against.

Here endeth today's sermon :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9    53      60   12    32        0
MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9    63      50   12    15        0
SNG   NLHE    17000  3000       9    95      18    4     3    61200

delta: $-158,800
MTT with rebuys NLHE balance: $19,616,500
2017 balance: $20,542,475
balance: $31,960,305