Nick is a cash game player, content creator and part of 888poker’s Stream Team. Each week he shares his thoughts and experiences as a player dedicated to the daily grind. This week, Nick considers the importance of staying curious, in order to keep improving as a player…
In recent weeks I’ve written about my holiday, and how I’d hoped that it would serve as a reset of sorts, allowing me to find some form at the tables after a gruelling year of losses. You may have seen that my trip did not have the desired effect on my results, and I sat straight back down to more red numbers and a graph plummeting ever downwards.
With the options ranging from ‘give up’ to ‘try something else’, I’ve begun asking myself what I could do to turn the tides. Moving down was the first step, but I need something more permanent that will allow me to compete at my highest stakes again.
In a shocking turn of events that will come as a complete surprise to no one, not playing for two weeks did not plug the many leaks in my game, and I’m still haemorrhaging buy-ins at an alarming and not-so-sustainable rate. To be totally honest, studying the game has taken a significant backseat somewhere along the road of my content journey. Streaming, events and all things YouTube and Twitch have resulted in somewhat of a void where studying is concerned; I just haven’t had the energy and motivation for it.
Guessing is not as good as knowing
In a recent chat with a friend, Ben, he was adamant that my poor form wasn’t down to anything other than a lack of curiosity. ‘You have to be curious’ he insisted. Well, what the hell does that mean? Put simply, you have to take interest in the spots you are put in, and care about why one action may be preferred over another.
A lot of my game recently has been reduced to guessing, for the want of a better word, since I’ve had very little recent theoretical knowledge to fall back on. My guessing isn’t all that bad, but it’s certainly not as good as knowing. And instead of being curious and looking into spots where I’ve been guessing to find the answers, I’ve been satisfied that my guess is the best I could have done. Funnily enough, it isn’t.
But the weird thing about this game, and more specifically studying it, is that once you start committing time and resources to it, you begin to ignite your interest in the game again. I recently went over some hands with another friend who’s just getting back into the game, and he wanted to show me a spot where he’d bluffed off a stack.
He’d flatted 
from the big blind vs an under-the-gun open, and opted for a check-raise on 
. His opponent called, and the turn brought the 
.
‘Range check’, I asserted. One of my more educated guesses, I have to say, since it’s a heuristic I’ve held onto for a while. Once we check-raise these flops as the big blind, the removes so much of our value region that we have to check. It’s such a great card for in position, because our 8-4s are counterfeited by overpairs, and our combos of 2-2 and 4-2s are hugely reduced.
My friend was surprised, but was immediately intrigued (curious, if you will), as to why. He wanted to look up the sim, see how his opponent was supposed to react to a check-raise on the flop, see what happened on the river if the turn went check-check, and explore a myriad of other nodes along the way. That’s a clear sign of a player that’s going to improve rapidly, and leave players like me in the dust.
The turn was in fact a check, but just confirming that is obviously not enough. It was actually pretty fun deep-diving into a spot for the first time in a while, and I think I understand exactly what Ben means when he says that you need to be curious.
Build a platform for improvement
You can’t fake genuine curiosity, but sometimes it’s not until you start to learn new things that you become interested. Maybe that spot comes up in your next session, and you feel excited to incorporate it into your game, having just studied it. That feeling is a very powerful and motivating one, and it’s not one I’ve had in a very long time.
In summary, the key is probably not just taking a holiday and hoping for the best, it’s being curious and taking a keen interest in the things that are going on in the game. There’s nothing wrong with guessing along the way, you don’t need to know everything right now. But the problem lies in when you guess and don’t care to figure out how and why you might be wrong later. Every guess, wrong or right, is a platform for improvement.
Now all I need to do is take my own advice…
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