The Easiest Way To Make More Money In Poker

There is something you can do to make much more money than you make right now, and it requires zero increase in technical ability.

Doing this will allow you to increase your winrate to levels you didn’t think was possible, and all that it takes is a bit of understanding of how an egde can be generated in poker.

We often say that having an edge is the result of making less mistakes than our opponents. Poker is a zero sum game after all, so if the sum of our mistakes is lower than the sum of the mistakes of our opponents, we will end up with some money in our pockets.

This is absolutely correct.

Immediately after that, what most people start to do is to try and improve their technical ability, so that they can decrease the amount of mistakes that they make. If EDGE = OPP. MISTAKES – MY MISTAKES, then I can increase the result of this equation by lowering the amount of my own mistakes.

That’s why 99% of regulars spend time studying with solvers, reviewing hands, drilling on GTO Wizard, and asking their friends for feedback. Everyone is trying to make their own game better, and getting better means making less mistakes.

Increasing edge by getting technically better is what I would call a Level 1 edge generation method. You’re 100% focused on your own strategical execution at the tables, and by improving your execution at a faster speed or to a higher degree than your opponents, your winrate increases and money flows quicker into your pocket.

This Level 1 is where 99.9% of players dedicate 99% of their time towards edge generation.

I love situations where 99.9% of people are doing the exact same thing. I fucking love it.

I love it because the potential for disruption is INCREDIBLE. The potential for getting ahead of everyone else is latent. If you can find or discover something that no one else is seeing, you automatically build a huge source of edge. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for trends, and in particular views and opinions that everyone perceives as common sense. As obvious. There is a huge prize awaiting those who can (successfully) break out of the obvious.

And this is where a Level 2 edge generation method comes in. This level is about breaking out of the obvious. Instead of focusing on reducing your own mistakes, this level is about focusing on what you can do to increase your opponent’s mistakes. And breaking out of the obvious is a great way to do it.

If everyone is studying in the exact same ways, and focusing on the exact same problems, then you can really fuck people’s plans if, when playing against them, you present them with different problems. New problems; problems that they have never seen before. By throwing these new problems at them, there is a very high chance they will make more mistakes than usual, and if that happens your edge increases.

The best way to do this is by doing what some players call “going off tree”. The idea is very straightforward: you will intentionally make suboptimal moves to take the game to an unknown area where your opponent will be forced to think through his decisions, instead of using his GTO-based heuristics that he acquired studying with solvers. By going off tree you essentially force a “freestyle” execution from your opponent, since he’s likely never studied that particular line. With no prebuilt heuristics for that unknown node, he will be required to develop a solution for that spot on the fly, without much time left to act and multiple other tables to handle. If you are more prepared than them and more familiar with that zone than them, the potential for edge is really high.

This post is not about this though. If you’d like to hear me talking or writing more about going off tree, reply this email with “Yes, do it!” and I’ll know how much you guys want to see this covered.

This post is about the Level 3 method of edge generation.

The Level 3 method is a direct consequence of the realization that EDGE is a relative measure. It’s the result of my opponent’s mistakes minus my mistakes. If my opponents change, my edge changes, even if my strategy remains the same. In fact, it’s even possible to have a bigger edge while making more mistakes – all that it takes is for your opponents to compensate for it.

Level 3 method is Game Selection.

Game selection is about choosing the most profitable games you could be playing at any given time.

You would think that poker players seeking maximum profit would choose to play in the most profitable games for them at every opportunity, right? I mean, that’s the rational thing to do if you say you want to make the most money. If you have options A and B, and B is worth more money than A, you should just pick option B everytime.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens in practice. Poker players, particularly low stakes players, are terrible at game selection.

Part of this, however, is unintentional. It’s simply a consequence of ignorance. When you can’t tell whether option B is preferable to option A, then obviously you’ll make the mistake of picking A over B many times. So, it’s very likely you’re making this mistake right now in your career and you have no idea about it.

The bad news is that this ignorance is really, really costly. It has probably costed you several thousand dollars and several months, perhaps years of mindless grind. The good news is that I’m here to help you not make that mistake again.

I like to divide Game Selection in 6 major subtopics:

1. Site selection

2. Format selection

3. Stake selection

4. Time of day selection

5. Table lineup selection

6. Seat position selection

All of these 6 variables will have an impact in your final winrate, even if you play the exact same strategy in all scenarios.

In the context of site selection, there are 4 criteria you should observe when choosing which sites to deposit and play on:

1. Rake

2. Percentage of whales

3. Table cap

4. Rakeback offerings

Numbers 1 and 2 are very self explanatory. Everything else equal, you want to play on sites with the lowest fees. The higher the fees you have to pay, the lower your profitability. If fees between sites are equal, then a determinant factor will be what’s the amount of very bad players in that network. The more whales you can find, the more money you’ll make.

A good source of information for the rake charged at many different poker platforms can be found on primedope.com. Here is a screenshot of how much rake the major poker sites charge for a 100NL 6-max cash game:

The percentage of whales in a network can also be measured. All you need is to gather data on the player pool you would like to analyze, count the total number of active players and then filter for whales only. Divide the latter by the former and you have the percentage of whales in that player pool.

I have done this analysis in the past for midstakes player pools over 4 big poker networks and this is what I’ve found (data from 2-3 years ago):

We can see from the print that, on 888 Poker, 48.75% of all unique players in the pool were whales (filter used is 50VPIP or higher). This is a huge difference compared to the 29.29% of WPN and the 35.52% from iPoker.

The logic for the last items 3 and 4 is that those variables impact the amount of professionals in the player pool. Regulars like to play multiple tables, and they like to play high volume. So when a site allows a lot of tables at the same time and offers rakeback to it’s players, there will be lots of professionals trying to capitalize on that opportunity. More regulars competing for the recreational players means lower average winrates.

The second variable from our list above is Format Selection.

Within cash games, which is the modality I specialize on, there are 2 major formats you can choose from: regular tables and zoom tables (or any other name, line Zone, Snap, Blitz, Rush & Cash – every platform has their own name).

Within NLHE as whole, you can choose from many modalities of poker besides cash games, like tournaments, spin & go’s and sit & go’s.

Each modality will have it’s own characteristics, including the quality of the field. It’s not difficult to realize for example that tournaments are softer than cash games when we compare similar buy-ins. There are more recreationals per table in a tournament than in a cash game, which can make it more profitable when comparing what the same person with unique skills can achieve.

Since I don’t have much experience with other modalities, what I can say about cash games is the following: avoid fast fold games, unless you are a top 5% reg.

Fast fold games are great for:

1. The poker site, above all else

2. The top 5% of regs

Recreational players play tighter ranges on fast fold formats. Their impatience and desire to play hands can be satiated with a fold button that gives them a brand new hand instantly. This makes them lose slower compared to regulars tables. Edges get decreased, average winrates for regulars shrink and everyone plays more hands. This results into more rake for the poker site.

That being said, a small percentage of regs will achieve awesome winrates. If you can make 5bb/100 while playing 70k hands or more per month, you are going to make a lot of money. If you belong to such group, then fast fold formats are awesome for you. That’s what happened to me, as I was able to achieve 4.8 ev bb/100 in almost 2 million hands of midstakes zoom hands. I belonged to that top 5%.

Chances are, though, that you don’t belong to this group. I could just say “if I did it, you can do it, go for it!”, but I’ve done enough player pool analysis and winrate analysis to know that doing so is not statistically likely. I’ve coached and staked hundreds of players in the last 6 years and unfortunately haven’t seen many people achieve the same. Therefore, unless you know for a fact you are one of the few exceptions, you’re much better off playing regulars tables, where you’ll have control over the most important variables for game selection (and as a consequence, profitability) in cash games: table lineup and seat position.

I go in-depth into these 2 variables for profitability (and all the others from the list above) in the module Game Selection of my course The Lowstakes Blueprint. In that module I show you, using real data from millions of hands, what kind of winrate you can expect when playing at a table with varying types of fish (from below 30 VPIP all the way to 50 vpip+) and varying positions relative to the fish. By following the protocols from the course you’ll be able to immediately increase your winrate. If you want to know more about the course, including the 2x Refund guarantee included in the offer, check it out here.

The gist of it is: you should be playing more often against players who are significantly worse than you. It’s very likely you’re not doing this enough. And let me tell you something: it’s one of the biggest mistakes you can do to your career.

If you want to maximize profit in poker, you should absolutely reduce your mistakes, or play in a way that increases the mistakes of your opponents. But above all else, always remember that your money comes from other people’s pockets. The worse your opponent’s are, the more money you’ll make. And this alone can be the difference between struggling and crushing.

| In the topic of maximizing your profits, once you sit with a big whale you need to know how to extract the most out of them. So check this Play & Explain where I focus exactly on how to maximally exploit recreational players:

                               How To Maximally Exploit Recs | Play & Explain

Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Until then – don’t play the game. Play the Metagame.

Saulo