Adjusting to ICM at Tournament Final Tables

Posted by & filed under Articles.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of ICM as it relates to tournament poker, now is the time to start. Understanding ICM is as crucial to long-term success in poker as your ability to pick good spots to 3bet light, choose the right flops to continuation bet, or decide on a preflop shoving range…. Read more »

When Incentives Conflict: Check-raising Static Flops

Posted by & filed under Articles.

  Our first incentive on static flops is to check-raise a polarized range of hands – meaning, a range of hands that is clearly delineated as very strong value, or weak bluffs, mostly hands that have backdoor equity at best. The simple reasons for this are twofold: These flops don’t connect well enough with our… Read more »

Navigating The Tournament Poker ‘Season’

Posted by & filed under Articles.

  The poker calendar, thankfully for those of us who play the game for a living, is a packed one. We can argue all day about whether or not poker counts as a sport (my personal opinion is ‘no’, if only because the dictionary definition of a sport involves physical exertion), but there can be… Read more »

Strategic Self-Awareness: Understanding Your Own Ranges

Posted by & filed under Articles.

  One of the biggest leaps in any individual’s understanding of poker is when they make the step from being able to understand their opponent’s ranges with reference to their own hand, versus understanding their own ranges in great detail. It is this step that usually results in a massive improvement in performances, since the… Read more »

Exploring the Poker Game Tree

Posted by & filed under Articles.

The phrase ‘game tree’ is one with which many beginner- or intermediate-level poker players are unfamiliar. Its usage is becoming more commonplace as our understanding of poker theory and strategy grows, but it remains a mysterious and misunderstood concept in the eyes of many. Since even a rudimentary understanding of this concept can provide a… Read more »

Applying the Kelly Criterion to Tournament Poker

Posted by & filed under Articles.

  If you were paying attention to poker Twitter on the night of Mayweather-McGregor, you’ll have seen plenty of pros discussing the wagers they made on the fight. While some were admitting to having placed bets amounting to massive portions of their net worth on the ‘sure thing’ of Mayweather winning, others could be found… Read more »

Heuristics: The Key to Faster Poker Learning

Posted by & filed under Articles.

  It’s easy to be impatient during the poker learning process – we all want to get better at poker as fast as possible, win all the money and reach the game’s highest heights. We all want to soak up as much knowledge as we can, and put it into practice as fast as possible…. Read more »

Profitability Thresholds IV: The Pyramid of Profit

Posted by & filed under Articles.

Over the past two and a half years I’ve written three articles for TPE on the theme of ‘Profitability Thresholds’. Loosely speaking, they’re all in an attempt to figure out which spots we should take, and which we shouldn’t, since there’s so much debate out there on the idea of ‘waiting for a better spot’…. Read more »

How Poker Leaks Become Self-Perpetuating

Posted by & filed under Articles.

  You’re reading this article on a poker training site, which suggests two things – firstly, that you’re a poker player, and secondly, that you’re a poker player who’s interested in improving their poker game. Unfortunately for you, only the first piece of information is needed for us to know that you have leaks in… Read more »

Does Your Output Match Your Input?

Posted by & filed under Articles.

  One of the most consistent trends I spot amongst people who are putting time and effort into learning poker and improving their game, is that their inputs into the game don’t match their outputs. In other words, what they put into poker doesn’t match what they get out of it. That’s a broad statement… Read more »