In this article I’m going to discuss some of the crucial segments of the path to becoming a better poker player. Hopefully this will give you some insight to the steps that many of the best players in the world took to get them where they are today.

First I’m going to start with the questions I am asked the most. I get emails every single day from people wondering: What should I do to get better at poker? or What’s the number-one piece of advice you would give a beginning player? and my answer is always the same. Learn. If you are really serious about becoming a good player, you should always do everything you can to become a better player. We’ve all heard the axiom “Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master,” but do you know what is misleading about it? Any serious pro will tell you that you cannot master poker in a single lifetime: The game is too complex and there are too many different scenarios. Even the best players in the world will tell you they still make mistakes in every single session they play.

When I first started playing, I read every book I could get my hands on. I read thousands of posts on www. twoplustwo.com made by other professional players, and I spent hours every single day discussing hands on AOL Instant Messenger with my friends. I absorbed each bit of knowledge that I possibly could. But most importantly, I never stopped learning. Even to this day, I am aware of many of the leaks in my game, and I work to fi x them. And every time I fi x a leak, I fi nd two more. If you take a similar mindset, constantly critiquing every situation you are unsure about and striving to fi nd the right answer, you will evolve as a poker player. It is only a matter of time before you become a successful poker player if you are always improving your game.

It’s hard to teach someone the early stages of becoming a poker expert. You fi rst have to get a feel for the game and the relative hand values in different situations. There is a comparatively basic tight aggressive style that players tend to learn when they are starting: the style the books teach. Sure, all the books teach different things, but for the most part, the advice in them is very similar.

Once you have a feel for a good tightaggressive style of play, I think the next step is learning how to adjust to the specifi c game in which you are playing. I remember a discussion online a few years ago that is a perfect example of this. Jason Strasser, a very aggressive cash game player, pointed out what was obvious to most people: Players in high stakes cash games at the time were too loose; they raised too many hands. The good players evolved and learned to reraise more often, taking advantage of their loose opponents and taking down the pot a high percent of the time.

But Jason then suggested something at the time to this particular group of players that has since become obvious. If the good players are using liberal 3-bet standards, then you should be using somewhat more liberal 4-betting standards. (Quick lingo crash course: The blinds (also known as forced bets) are the fi rst bets in any poker hand. A raise is the 2nd bet. A reraise is called a 3-bet, and if you reraise a reraise, that’s called a 4-bet. In most online Limit games, a 4-bet is a cap, but in some live games, you can 5-bet cap. In No Limit games, there is generally no cap to the number of bets.) To the group of players participating in the discussion, this observation was profound. The mid and high stakes cash games became signifi cantly more aggressive seemingly overnight, and the 4-bet bluff became a common play. The players who were really good at adjusting then started 3-bet bluffi ng less, and even occasionally 5-bet bluffi ng a VERY risky (but occasionally still profi table) play in No Limit cash games.

That is just one example of the ways in which you should be constantly adjusting. Take online tournaments as another example. Over the past two years, the play has become extremely more aggressive prefl op. Note that I do NOT mean loose. They are different things. The smart players then started raising pre-fl op to smaller amounts. Why was that smart? Because if raises are rarely just called pre-fl op, we can accomplish the same thing with our small raises. If our opponent wants to reraise us, he still has to risk a large amount of chips, especially when compared to our now smaller standard opening raise. The reason why opening to a small amount can be incorrect is because the proper adjustment to smaller raises is calling more often, especially from the blinds where the pot odds become much more appealing. If for some reason, the players are adjusting correctly calling more often, and raising less then you can readjust and make your pre-fl op raises bigger again.

There are all kinds of adjustments you can make. If your opponent often fl oats (calls) you on the fl op to try to take the pot away from you with air on the turn, you can bet the flop and then check-raise the turn.

This play can be done either as a bluff or with a big hand, and against the right opponent it can be effective either way. Some adjustments are more obvious than others. If your opponents are constantly overbetting the pot, you should play hands like suited connectors less often, since it is important to get cheap cards with those; but play hands like small pocket pairs more often, because you generally know by the fl op whether or not you are willing to play for your whole stack. Let them overbet. When you hit your set, you will punish them.

I’m going over these situations very quickly because I’m not trying to teach you about the proper adjustments to make. I want you to see the importance of constantly analyzing your opponents’ tendencies, and trying to adjust to a strategy better suited for the specifi c opponents you are playing against. This is a skill that successful cash game players tend to pick up very quickly. Even if you don’t realize it, this is something you have done before. Maybe you were in a game where no one ever bluffed, and all the sudden a bluffaholic sat down. The adjustment there is super obvious. Fold less often to the bluffer. You probably have done that without even thinking about it.

While this article doesn’t contain the magical secret to make you an expert poker player, I hope that it will give you some insight into the journey that you need to take to become one. Becoming a perfect poker player doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it doesn’t happen at all. The best you can do is improve your game as much as you can every chance you get. This process should never stop, especially since the opponents you play against are always changing. You should constantly be adjusting your game, trying to fi gure out new ways to combat the styles of your opponents. If you are always looking for new ways to improve your strategy, there is no limit (no pun intended) to how great of a poker player you can become.