So here’s how it all started…

 Several years ago, I got to see the juggling act of the Flying Karamazov Brothers quite a few times earlier in their career. Their main act involved them juggling nine dangerous objects where the audience was asked to challenge them by presenting any random handheld items for them to juggle.

The best part about this was that it was held in their hometown, so the audience knew about the act and brought crowbars, duct tape rolls, footballs, water balloons, submarine sandwiches, and even toasters. Sometimes there were beer bottles, cigarette lighters and hatchets, which they juggled successfully to the crowd’s overall amazement. Soon, their career led to more outrageous acts of dangerous juggling.

How is this related to poker, you might ask? Well, they were great in what they did. They showed up every single time for work, knowing that they would be taken by surprise while people expected to see a top-notch performance from them anyway. Think about it:

it isn’t easy to juggle dead mackerels without any prior practice in doing so. As in poker, however, talented people can adjust, no matter how hard things get.

Master the situation

Great players can squeeze profit from practically any situation where just good players can’t. Great players can attempt to get away with things that regular players can’t. Great players know that every time they play, they need to come up with something great.

Regular players have problems when it comes to getting outplayed by better players and failing with techniques they shouldn’t even consider trying. It is common for regular players to talk about a “lucky play”, but it is never really about luck. While regular players focus on early hand play, great players concentrate on later hand play.

The power to finish on a good note happens to be essential when it comes to poker since later rounds of betting are bigger, risking more money. That aside, regular players of Hold’em concentrate on pre-flop play. If they raise for their 77 when nobody opened the pot, they might have difficulties understanding why great players oftentimes re-raise when they only have JsTs.

They merely see this is a bad starting hand without seeing how profitable JsTs could be due to the dead blinds money. Plus, they don’t see how great players could possibly win in later rounds of betting. They also test themselves and play poker online.

 

Don’t haunt the pot

Great players know that they shouldn’t try to win each played pot. They merely set up situations that reoccur where they repeatedly give up little edges for less often returns, especially within tournaments of no-limit Hold’em. Great players wish to see tons of flops and are never scared to lose a lot of small pots because of hands like 6s5s. They wait to finish more in rare situations where things actually start to matter.

Although this concept can be better grasped in no-limit poker, it could also apply to hands of limit poker. If four pots are played against a person and you lose three with a single small bet, but win five huge bets in the last one, you will profit a lot. Losing hands and sacrificing pots would be fundamental in being a true winner of poker.

Weak players tend to focus on the pots without caring if their thought process is correct. Whenever somebody states that somebody else was smart about it because he won the pot, that isn’t true. Dumb decisions that make people win the pot aren’t necessarily great; they might have just been lucky mistakes. Sometimes, such mistakes could win someone money, but that doesn’t make him smart. Concentrating on winning all of the money in the long term is what would make people smart.

The end result in money is what truly keeps score in poker.