Poker and bicycles

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 17 December 2009 / Leave a Comment

One of the key points about poker is that, just like a bicycle, you have to keep moving in order to stop from falling. The minute you allow your game to become stale and unmoving, you become easy to read and exploit. This is not just true for how you appear to others at the table, as poker is a game where advances are constantly being made in strategy and optimal play, and keeping up with these discoveries and changes is crucial to staying afloat in the long run.

A great example of this is how much more aggressive tournament hold'em has become. If you were to take a winning hold'em tournament player from ten years ago and put him in a game right now, they would probably not be a winning player. The game has changed so much, with massive strategic shifts in areas like short stack play (many years ago people would regularly fold down to one or two big blinds - something very rare in the modern era), re-stealing frequency (a raise and a re-raise would nearly always indicate big hands before, now both players frequently have something marginal), and flop aggression (continuation bets are now much more common with air), that they would really struggle to adjust their game.

Obviously this sudden change of game does not happen in real life much, but it illustrates the importance of keeping up with trends in poker, as if you do not understand what changes have occurred in the game, your reads will all be well off. As group opinion of 'correct' play slowly changes, so to must your approach to the game, as keeping with the times enables you to have a much greater grasp of people's likely holdings.

There are many ways to keep your game fresh. Rail high stakes games or final tables of big tournaments online; read as much poker literature as possible and watch videos of play; read or listen to discussions about poker on forums or in card rooms; even just playing a different variant to your usual game can make you look at your regular game in a new way.

Poker is a game that is constantly in flux. Strategies change, the herd mentality moves steadily along as general consensus on play waxes and wanes, popular players endorse new methods which then catch on. Absorbing this information is critical to keeping you up to date with the latest goings on, and adapting to change is one of the most important things a player has to do to stop themselves falling.

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