In response to POKhER in the Epiphany thread, I had a few ideas about what he and all new, struggling players should focus their studies on in order to become winning players. What concepts and ideas pay off the biggest with increased understanding for beginners? The OP in that thread thought it was getting reads and stats on opponents. POKhER was suggesting that it might be learning expert lines that are designed to handle specific situations. I don't think so at all. They're good, yes, and they will increase your win rate, but they're vanishingly small compared to other things. Here are the things I said you must understand in order to be a winning player:
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Preflop hand selection - know what to play and where to play it profitably.[*]
Pot odds and outs - know how big the pot has to be to chase what.[*]
Implied odds - know how big the pot WILL be to determine if you can chase. (And to add, know how much you'll eventually have to pay).[*]
Pot equity - know when you can pump strong draws for value, and when the probability of drawing out, the probability of having the best hand, and the size of the pot dictate a call down with a marginal hand.[*]
Betting and raising for value - Know when you're ahead often enough to extract more bets from your opponents. This should probably be higher on the list.[*]
Knowing when to fold and when to call on the river with a hand that might be beaten - This relates to what I said about pot equity, but it bears saying again.[/list]At least one of those things comes up every single time you play a hand, and you'll usually be forced to apply concepts from one or all of them. Since the magnitude of a mistake is directly proportional to the frequency with which it occurs, these concepts by far are the most important. There are a couple more concepts that warrant mentioning, however, even if they aren't quite as important as the above. They are:
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Hand protection - know when to raise to protect, check/raise to protect, wait to raise to protect, and why, if you're protecting properly, you're usually rooting for your opponents to call, not fold.[*]
Hand reading - Put your opponent on a narrowing range of hands and act accordingly. Even if you always assume a very broad range to start with, you'll be doing yourself quite a favor.[/list]Can you win at poker without trying to do any hand reading whatsoever? Maybe. Can you win if you always assume a somewhat loose, somewhat passive opponent and do your hand reading based on that? Absolutely. It's players like this that are the most common. Assuming one of them is a fantastic place to start.
As for lines, can you be a winning player without knowing WA/WB? Almost certainly. Situations where it applies come up infrequently, so any missed bets or additional losses constitute a small mistake. Can you win without other lines? Definitely. The "lines" that are discussed here are usually somewhat tricky plays to extract or save an extra bet in a specific HU situation. At the micros, few pots are HU before the turn, and then if it does happen to be HU, it's probably not one of the special situations that the "lines" were designed for.
As we've all (hopefully) read in
NPA's biggest leak post, the size of a leak is proportional to the size of a single mistake multiplied by the frequency. There are no concepts that come up more often than these, and misapplication can result in some of the largest isolated mistakes.
If you really want to make sure you have all of your fundamentals in order, I've got a new challenge for you. I challenge you to take
Grunch's challenge of responding to 5 posts per day without reading responses. Additionally, however, I challenge you to write a sentence or two in each of those about how that poster properly or improperly applied each of the concepts I outlined above, or else a brief explanation about why a particular concept doesn't apply in one spot. Doing that is a fair bit of work, but it will pay off in spades. Not only will you have the entire forum repeatedly critiquing your understanding of the most important concepts in poker, but you'll be forcing yourself to concretely hammer out the exact and complete reasoning for every action someone takes when playing a hand. The more you do that, the more automatic it will become, not only on the forum but at the tables. You'll get much better at the fundamentals, your win rate will go up, and you'll be much better able to answer questions about the obscurities, too.
Now, everyone loves discussing the hard hands. That's what's most fun and interesting. However, you always want to keep the fundamentals in focus, so never feel ashamed or afraid to post on something basic in any hand post here.
Good luck guys.