In most cases it is the little things that when combined together form your earn rate in poker. This is why players at say the NL50 level are doing as well as many of the players at mid-stakes levels…….why is that? Quite simply it is because they are doing the little things very well in large quantities. So just what sorts of mistakes do break even and losing poker players make? Well actually they make lots of them but the key thing here is that each one is very easily corrected.
For example too many hands that are being played out of position is one such mistake. Another is playing in a way that is too conventional. In years gone by then a sound grasp of conventional theory was enough to take you an awful long way. These days then the arrival of the internet may have brought untold millions of people into poker that previously wouldn’t have played it but it has also sharpened those very same players up as well with an almost unlimited number of educational resources to feed off. You do not have to play very high these days to find players that know poker quite well.
Only the other day I was watching a $0.01-$0.02 game where one player was calling one of the other players a “fish”. Clearly this was a player that rightly or wrongly perceived himself to be better than his opponents. There is only one logical explanation for this and it is because of education. This player obviously knew more about poker than many people give micro players credit for. So even at the micros then you need to show respect to your opponents and your earn rate is still built in increments rather than players making big mistakes in big pots against you with non-nut hands.
I also think that one of the main issues with playing online poker and moving up through the levels is one of your existing game not being strong enough when you move up. Clearly when you play at levels like NL50 then you will need to play a different game to the one that you were playing at the NL2 levels or $2 games. Also when you play NL200 then you will need to play differently again to when you played at NL50 and so on.
It is these differences that make players stumble because you are in effect not only having to learn a new game but you are also having to play far tougher opponents. A level like NL200 may be only two levels above NL50 but it is four times the stake level and that is the key component here. In my opinion NL200 is four times as difficult to get a good earn rate at than NL50 and anything that is four times as big or four times as fast or four times anything is considerably greater. If you were driving at 30mph then you would feel like you were hardly moving.
However a simple x4 multiplication means that you are now driving at 120mph and any motorist will tell you how great a difference that is. If you jumped from a 5ft wall then you may think that is fairly high until you try jumping from a wall 20ft high. The small wall may leave you with a twisted ankle at worst while the 20ft wall could kill and would probably leave you with some sort of injury.
This is not a bad way to look at level increases and moving up a level in poker needs to be done with caution. In my opinion then you are better off learning to beat a higher level game than the micros while still playing the micros. This leaves you without the problem of having to learn a totally different way of playing poker. This is why I advise people to learn how to beat say players at the NL25 and NL50 levels even if by doing so you are not beating the $2 and $4 games for as much as you possibly could be doing. So the best way to build an earn rate is to prepare for playing higher levels of play.
An earn rate can be comprised of lots of different things like rakeback, sign up bonuses, rewards, playing a short stack strategy or simply by playing a strategy that is different to what your opponents expect. Whatever you do then one thing is certain and this is that as you begin to move up through the levels then your opponents will not only know the same theory that you know but they will also be expecting you to play conventionally as well. This will happen far sooner than you ever thought possible and even micro level players know the game fairly well.
Carl Sampson is an 888poker pro and poker ambassador
