Discipline is the key in Texas hold’em poker
The fact of the matter is this, you do not need to be a great poker player to amass money playing poker! You do not need the game of a Phil Ivey or a Tom Dwan to make $50,000 a year of even $100,000 a year. This can be achieved simply by multi-tabling lower levels and being on a good rake deal and getting all the bonuses that you can get your hands on. But there is one overwhelming asset that you will need in order to get this money…..well two actually.
You will need to have a strong winning poker game and you must also have strong discipline. Every time I play low stakes No limit Texas Hold’em then I see horrible play all over the place. I often used to think that the games online had got tougher and they have but I still think that there is money to be made at no-limit play.
If you can maintain discipline and fold more than your opponents in full-ring then you will make money as long as you are not making huge post flop errors. No-limit hold’em is such a tough nut to crack and what confuses many players is that there are untold numbers of variations of how to play the game. This confuses the novice and intermediate players who mix up concepts from deep stack play with short stack play, cash game play and tournament play, limit poker from pot limit and no-limit and full-ring from short handed and short handed from heads up.
The list is long and it highlights that poker can be very difficult to crack when attacked from the wrong angle. The problem with the average person is that they do not put the necessary work in or they are not aware of what the necessary work is. Or you get other types who think that sophisticated and glitzy software packages will get them where they need to be. There is no doubt that trackers will improve your poker game but they simply cannot substitute for a good technique.
What they also cannot substitute for is a lack of discipline and you can have all of the coaching in the world but if your technique is poor and your discipline is non existent then you will not make money or you will not make money and be able to keep it. That is the key issue in poker, it isn’t difficult to win poker pots. Good cards will win pots and aggression will win pots but it is keeping the money that is the hard part. Many players lose discipline in other ways and the most common is being too aggressive or aggressive simply because you are either greedy or you want something to happen.
What tends to happen then is that the player loses money by being overly aggressive and gets himself into the hole for $50 when he should only have been down $10. So when he wins a $50 pot then he ends the session breaking even when he should have won $40. These differences separate players who play for a living from those that recycle money or lose.