How Rare Mistakes Can Kill Your Winrate

Last week I posted the video “Top 3 Strategy Tips To Crush Poker In 2024” in my YouTube Channel. 

The second item in that list was “Stop donating money to nits”.

This was a huge thing that blocked my development as a poker player. As I tell the story in the video, 7 years ago I spent several months straight losing at 50nl Zoom, which generated an accumulated loss of over 80 buy-ins.

That period was really stressful for me. Not only because of the losses, but most importantly because of my expectations. Because of my entitlement.

I thought I deserved to win at 50nl. I had crushed 25nl zoom before moving up to 50nl. I studied with solvers everyday. I had gotten coaching from better players than me. I discussed hands with my friends. I was intelligent.

“How is it possible that I can’t win in this limit” – that’s what I would ask myself, consciously or unconsciously, everyday. I really couldn’t understand it, and worse – I couldn’t accept it.

In fact, I remember vividly that in one of my 1v1 coaching sessions from that time, I heard from my coach: “I don’t understand how you are not beating 50nl”. That only made it so much harder for me to accept my results. If not even a more experienced midstakes player can identify what’s wrong with me, what are my hopes of figuring this out? I was trying everything that I could, and yet I couldn’t see any progress. Note the time frame from the graph above. That’s 5 straight months losing an average of 16 buy-ins per month.

It was brutal.

Luck eventually decided to shine brighter for me, however, and the graph for the rest of the year completely transformed itself:

I went from a -2.5bb loser to a +3bb winner, practically overnight. 

What I changed in my approach was that, based off strong feedback from one my friends (who was having better results than me in exactly the same games), I decided to start folding everything on the river. I decided to make my life’s mission to fold every single bluffcatcher on the river, whenever it wasn’t a very clear call. And to my great surprise – it fucking worked.

It was only several years later, after successfully establishing myself as a solid midstaker winner in PokerStars Zoom games, after building my staking business and coaching hundreds of players, that I finally understood why that worked. It worked because it served as an antidote to the completely unforgiving nature of this game. 

Poker doesn’t give a damn about how many hours you have spent in the lab, how many hands you have reviewed, how many hours of coaching you’ve gotten. It doesn’t care about your fancy river bluff check-raises and flop overbets. All of that obviously matters, but the point is that there is one thing that matters above all else. There is one thing that can either make you or break you as a professional poker player. And the crazy part about it is that this one thing is only necessary a small fraction of the time. 

You could play several thousand hands without needing to display the characteristic and the capacity I’m going to reveal in a minute. You can do everything else right, but if you fail at this one thing, then everything else may not be enough. Everything else may go to waste.

This one thing is your capacity to not make big mistakes. 

In the context of calling off nits on the river (or any other big river mistake for that matter) the math is really simple.

Imagine you are facing a 60bb shove in an 80bb pot on the river and you hold a bluffcatcher. For you to breakeven against this bet, you need to win exactly 30% of the time. If your opponent is balanced and you call, then you make nothing – no win, no loss. If your villain, however, is a big nit who underbluffs, and for some reason in this spot he has only 15% bluffs, then the EV of calling his bet is -30 big blinds per hand. Every time you call him off, you lose (on average) 30 big blinds. Now imagine that such situation happens once every one thousand hands – that’s 0.1% of the time. If you play 50k hands/month, those situations will happen in a total of 50 hands. Despite happening so infrequently, your losing calls in these 50 hands are costing you 3 bb/100 hands of winrate.  

This is crazy. And it gets worse.

All big pots offer potential for big mistakes to be made. 

For example, if you decide to bluff shove your missed draw for 60bbs into a 80bb pot on the river in a 3bet pot, and your opponent is a calling station who’s only gonna fold 30% of his range (instead of the 42.85% you’d need to breakeven), then shoving your bluff loses you 18 bbs per hand. If we hypothetically say that such spot is only going to happen 0.05% of the time, or once every 2 thousand hands, then the impact on your winrate is -0.9 bb/100. That’s almost 1bb/100 less of winrate for 25 mistakes/month – roughly one mistake per day. 

This is what I meant when I said that poker is unforgiving. You could literally play 99.9% of the hands reasonably well and still come out a marginal winner, or even losing player, all because you’re fucking up in the remaining 0.1%. 

This is one of the reasons why I have reviewing big pots as an integral part of my job as a poker coach. I love doing Database Reviews to see my student’s overall performance across the game tree, and statistics help me quickly visualize whether that student is implementing the correct strategical gameplan for all the different spots. That being said, the 0.1% spots don’t appear in the statistics. They simply don’t happen often enough to cause major discrepancies in the data. The only way to find them is by going through hands individually, analyzing the unique contexts of each play. 

I believe that this unforgiving nature of the game is part of the reason why so many players don’t reach their full potential. They have the technical capacity, they have the passion and the desire to move up and develop, but their execution falls apart under the pressure of big pots. Cognitive biases take over, and the player convinces himself to take actions that he often times immediately regrets. 

This is also part of the reason why I always, always preach that the first step into a poker player’s development is learning theory. 

The examples I gave above are examples of an opponent deviating from theory (nit underbluffing, calling station overcalling) and you failing to adapt correctly. But this problem of big mistakes can also happen when your opponent is playing close to optimal. There are several circumstances where an investment is super losing, even against a balanced opponent. Below you can see how losing a bluffcatcher can be on the river when it contains the worst blockers, even against a GTO player:

Learning and understanding theory allows you not only to avoid these super losing theoretical plays, but also helps you identify potential imbalances in your opponent’s strategies. If you understand, for example, that in order to be balanced with their bluffs someone needs to play very unorthodox hands on early streets, which you almost never see, you can make an assumption that they will be underbluffing by the river, which then allows you to make the correct adaptation and avoid making a -30bb call.

The point I want to bring in this post is that you can’t afford to make big mistakes if you want to develop a solid winrate. Your winnings from the other parts of the game will get destroyed by them. 

To achieve this goal, I recommend subscribing to the idea that you should avoid, at all costs, Greyzone Investments.

Greyzone investments are decisions at the tables that you make without any confidence at all about their effectiveness. These are the decisions you make out of impulse or because of emotion, instead of rationality, in big pots. These are the investments you make when you are tired, frustrated, tilted, insecure or too confident. These are the plays you make when you’re desperate for results; trying to run someone over; trying to execute fancy plays you haven’t studied. 

Can you conceive investing your real life money into something you have no idea about? Think of it like buying a property you don’t even know the location. Or buying shares of a company you don’t even know the business model. 

Sometimes we allow ourselves to do that. For example, buying bitcoin could be considered a greyzone investment for the vast majority of bitcoin holders. Most people don’t understand the technology behind it, the financial principles involved in a digital currency, and all the other technical aspects of the asset. That being said, if the upside is tremendously high, and you expose yourself to a risk you feel comfortable with, then there is sufficient asymmetry that you could justify putting your money into it, even if you don’t understand it fully. 

The problem in poker however is that most poker players constantly put their money in situations where the upside is marginal at best, and the risk is huge. They invest into assets (read ‘lines’ or ‘plays’) that they don’t understand, which sometimes leads to an insane amount of risk for little return. If you keep making investments of huge risk for little return, don’t act surprised when your money flows out of your pocket. It couldn’t be otherwise. 

Just like an (honest) financial expert would tell you to invest your money in assets, business models and markets that you understand, I have to be the one to tell you: focus your execution at the tables in the lines and plays that you are competent at. If you have the option to go with line A (let’s say check-call), in which you have some confidence and idea of the profitability, and Line B (let’s say, check-raise), which you feel could be really nice but haven’t ever studied in depth – go with the check-call. The check-raise may seem nice until you make a huge blunder that costs you an entire day worth of profit. Go with line A, and then the next day, in your study time, devote some hours to studying the check-raise – essentially turn a greyzone spot into a spot you understand strategically.

The moment you start investing in Greyzones is the moment your winrate drops 50% or more. And this might even be an euphemism.  Does that mean that there is no room for experimentation in poker? Of course there is. However, experimenting with new things on the fly should be reserved for a phase in your career where your theoretical and quantitative intuitions are at a high level. This will allow you to quickly identify the risk/reward ratio of the different plays you have available. When you’re still inexperienced, when your theoretical fundamentals are still not solid, you might mistake a high-risk low-return decision for a low-risk high-return decision. And that will be catastrophic for you. 

The very first step into becoming the best poker player you can be is developing a solid gameplan. A solid gameplan consists of an actual plan on how to play postflop, according to the most important theoretical concepts in poker. Once your game is theoretically sound, you should then start studying population tendencies so that you can develop exploits based on facts. Once you have successfully applied exploits based on factual population imbalances, it means you have reached a level where both your theoretical intuition and exploitative intuition are sharp. It’s exactly when you reach this level of expertise that you can allow yourself to figure out the risk/reward ratios of plays you have never studied before, right there in-game. You’ll be equipped with enough knowledge to do it on the fly with great accuracy.

Before that, though…not a good idea. Avoid greyzone investments at all costs. If you don’t have confidence on your execution, give up on the investment. Choose something else. Fold against the bet. Give up the bluff. Let it go.

If you can avoid Greyzone Investments completely in your gameplan, I’m 100% confident your winrate will get an immediate boost. Then, as you develop as a player, allow yourself more flexibility, proportionally to your skill level and risk tolerance. That’s the smart way to grow.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Until then – keep it simple.

Saulo