Winning Poker Players

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Winning Poker Players

We always hear of bad beats and hard losses, we also hear of major wins at events such as the WSOP and WSOPE. What we don’t hear of are the players that simply win. Many players are unknown and have no name; they are not famous for a major tourney event win or even from an online gaming giant sponsorship. Simply they are Winning Poker Players. Sure we have the likes of the high stakes rollers that play on major sites we see win all the time but what makes an ordinary Joe instead of a Joe Hachem a top notch winning poker player?

Winning Poker Players have many attributes that set them aside from the losers; they don’t care about fortune and fame but fortune and profit.

Winning Poker Players can be systematically cut into three basic categories online poker players, live poker players and online and live poker player combination. These categories can be further cut into tournament and ring game players and further dissected into a poker variant category, stake and player amount. Why do I bother typing what seems a load of nonsense? I type this as Winning Poker Players know their thing. Let’s use an example of a Winning Poker Player I know. I will dissect him!

Toni A_ _ _ _ _ n

1. Plays Online

2. Plays Ring Games

3. Plays No Limit Hold’em

4. Plays $100/$200 Blinds PLUS (depending on his bankroll)

5. Plays Heads-up ONLY

This internet poker player has an average profit of 13k a day and is unknown to the world. He makes that profit as he has made his game HIS; what works best for him.

Don’t be fooled though! There’s more to it then this! To be included in the winning poker players list, a player must know his/her poker strategy, odds, probabilities, statistics and opponents. Most importantly they must run themselves like a business keeping track of swings, hand ranges, results, bankrolls, profit, losses, expenditure, taxes – as I said, like a business. Professional poker playing for a living and being a winning professional player takes more than just the click of a mouse as one makes a raise!

There are also some other attributes a player must have that was indicated by one of the world’s biggest winning poker players. He is a winner in EVERY way. This somewhat more applies to those who do play live and some of the list to those who also who want a name as a winning poker player. Here is a list for those who wish to jump from an ordinary Joe to a Joe Hachem. Those who watched a certain TV series will know all about this list ;-)

1. Reading People

2. Focus

3. Bluffing

4. Composure

5. Recall

6. Endurance

7. Courage

8. Charisma

I will close on this blog post with the following random thought. I know one man and one lady who have all of this as part of their game (some people may know who by reading between the lines); this makes them winning poker players all the way! Kudos to anyone else out there with these attributes. I know I sure as hell try my hardest to follow this type of strict conduct and code.