One of the wisest pieces of poker advice I ever received was “the $1,000 mistake will hurt you, but the $10 mistake will kill you.” The implication being that it’s the small, repeated errors that will silently chip away at your win rate and keep you from ever truly succeeding in the game. After all, you will play far more small pots in your poker career than large ones.
With that in mind, here are three poker mistakes of the $10 variety that will keep you stuck in an endless cycle of boom and bust, as well as how to avoid making them.
Calling too wide from the Big Blind
Sitting in the big blind, you watch an early position player raise to 3x the blinds and get two callers before the action gets to you. You take a quick peek at your cards hoping to see the pocket rockets, but instead find a trash hand, say K7o or 53o. In a spot like this, there is often a natural impulse to call nearly any two cards because you’re closing the action. However the reality of the matter is that to justify the call, you still have to win the hand a minimum of 17% of the time.
And while a player like Phil Ivey or Tom Dwan might be able to hit that percentage at the right table, it is unlikely that you (or I) can do so consistently enough anywhere but maybe at our weekly home game. This is because we’ll often find ourselves out of position with marginal holdings and have no clue where we stand in the hand (imagine a board like KQ8A9 or KJT85 and ask yourself how happy you would be calling three streets with K7 here). So rather than calling because of “pot odds,” make sure to consider your ranges through the scope of an entire hand and avoid turning a 2BB preflop mistake into a much larger one.
Flatting the Small Blind
Although there has been a resurgence of small-blind preflop raise calling at the higher limits over the past couple of years, it is generally done by extremely competent players who are doing so to keep their ranges well balanced. However, until you reach that point of having to consider the impact of each action within multiple preflop and postflop ranges (and if you don’t even know what that means, it’s definitely not something to worry about yet), flatting from the small blind “to keep the pot small” will only cost you money in the end. Instead, reduce the positional disadvantage of playing out of the small blind by 3-betting the vast majority of your playable hands and make the focus of your off-table studies be how to continue from there on various board textures.
Opening too wide from early position
A good UTG opening range at a full table of at least decent players is somewhere in the range of AQo+, ATs+, A5s, 77+ and 98s+. That means if you’re opening hands like A8s, KQo, and 65s, you are playing far too many hands and will likely A) start facing increased aggression from anyone who’s paying attention and B) find yourself facing difficult flop, turn, and river decisions out of position (since only the blinds have a worse position than the UTG player after the flop), both of which will turn your “$10 mistake” into a potentially much bigger one. Instead, keep your early-position ranges tight and allow hands such as A5s and the highest non-broadway suited connectors to act as your “bluffs.”
By making the focus of your game eliminating “small” mistakes such as these, you’re likely to find that the big wins have a way of taking care of themselves!
Will Watson is a writer, poker player and enthusiastic student of the human mind.
Contact me at: willwatsonpoker@gmail.com
