Learning Path Warm-Up
ICM Skill Quiz
Take quizUnlike tournament poker, where stacks tend to get fairly shallow quite fast, cash game stacks tend to grow as the game advances, creating more complex situations with every passing minute. This is one of the key reasons why even the best players worldwide make many cash game mistakes by not adjusting properly for different situations.
If you regularly play poker cash games, you have probably grown quite accustomed to seeing players make mistakes all the time and maybe do not even notice some of the things.
Therefore, let’s take a closer look at some of the most common poker mistakes you may be making yourself and talk about how you can fix them and improve your overall results in the cash games.
Regardless of how good you are at poker, you will lose quite a few pots, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. Even the best player in the world will get stacked at a cash game table quite often, and this is simply the product of the game’s variance and simple math.
For that reason, you need to be able to sustain losses and wait out the “long run,” as this is the only way to achieve the results you are hoping for.
Many players in poker cash games try to build up their bankrolls faster by playing in the biggest game they can find, but this can easily backfire in some very serious ways.
You will put yourself into situations you can’t handle if you play in games you don’t have a bankroll for.
When facing big bets or decisions for your entire chip stack, making the right call will be next to impossible, as you may not have enough money to reload if you lose.
Proper bankroll management is one of the key skills you need to develop if you want to be a successful cash game player, and playing higher than you can afford is one of the top poker mistakes you want to stop making immediately.
Instead, make sure to start with lower-stakes games, practice your skills and build up the bankroll along the way, and do things the proper way if you want to have any real chance at success.
Another one of the more common cash game mistakes has to do with game selection. Many players fail to pick their fights and play in any game on offer. If you have been playing poker for a long time, you have probably seen players jumping at any opportunity to play, regardless of the opponents involved in the game or other factors.
If you want to optimize your results and ensure you get the best returns from the time you spend at the tables, game selection should be one of the things that concern you the most.
Playing in the right games will win you tons of EV and make you a bigger favorite, increasing your hourly win rate, decreasing your variance, and making your life a lot easier.
On the other hand, if you sit down in any game that’s being spread and hope to beat the best players around by chance, your fortunes may turn for the worse.
Be careful and meticulous about your game selection, and never jump into a poker game without knowing exactly what you are getting involved in.
Similarly, you should be prepared to leave a cash game if it gets worse as the weaker players leave and their spots get filled up by pros, as this is not a situation you want to be in.
You can make many types of poker mistakes, but not paying attention to what's happening at the table is one of the worst ones, as it can be so easily avoided.
When you are involved in a cash game, you should be 100% present and pay attention to everything that’s going on.
Make sure you know who is winning big and who is stuck a lot, and try to figure out how this affects the general playing style of the players in question.
Before you make any play, take a close look at the stack size of the players in the hand and those behind you who have the option to act after you've made your play.
Being attentive and careful will keep you from making further mistakes, such as committing yourself against a short stack or folding your cards when a player's all-in was only a few more chips.
These mistakes happen quite a lot at live poker tables, and they all have to do with a lack of attention and playing too fast without any real reason.
It’s been quite some time since poker players discovered the power of aggression, and while aggressive poker styles have evolved over the years, the consensus is still that playing aggressively is better than playing passively in most situations.
Yet, passive preflop play is a very common trait of many cash game players and one of the most common cash game mistakes you will spot on a regular basis.
Some more extreme examples of passive cash game play include limping into pots preflop or not applying the squeeze play often enough.
Limping is a strategy that should rarely be used, yet many live poker players limp with their hands on a regular basis and believe they are actually outplaying their opponents by doing so.
Cash game players also tend to call preflop raises way too much, especially when there are players who have called the raise in front of them.
In such spots, you should tend to fold or squeeze with many of your suited hands, such as KQs, JTs, 87s, etc. Yet, this is a spot that players often miss.
By playing passively in scenarios like this, you will leave equity on the table and allow players to beat you with hands they would have easily folded had you only played your cards more aggressively.
Players often talk about the poker mistakes they spotted in their games, but many don’t know how to exploit them. Whenever you see a player playing too tight, too loose, or too aggressive, you should start thinking about how you can make that work to your advantage.
Exploiting other players’ mistakes is a legitimate way to increase your poker win rate, but only if you are doing it correctly.
However, poker players often respond to mistakes by making mistakes of their own by playing too many hands against loose opponents, folding too much against nits, and much more.
If you want to deviate from optimal play and exploit your opponents, you should make sure that you know the exact methods you can apply.
That said, exploiting cash game mistakes of others is highly encouraged and recommended, just as long as you know what you are going for and how to get there.
To be a truly successful poker player, you must learn how to balance your ranges and hide your actual holdings from your opponents.
While some players will pay you off every time you have the nuts, and others will fold way too much to your bluffs, most opponents will at least try to sniff out some bluffs and fold some relatively strong hands.
For that reason, you will have to learn how to balance your ranges to hide your bluffs and make your value bets more successful, which means not playing your cards too face up.
The biggest poker mistake players make in this regard is that they don't bluff enough on certain board textures and only use the most obvious bluffing hands, such as flush draws and open-ended straight draws for it.
This makes your betting and raising range too value-heavy and means your opponents can exploit you by folding to your raises often and being right most of the time.
Instead, you should include more hands into your bluffing range, introduce turn bluffs into your arsenal, and find other ways to play your hands tricky to confuse and throw your opponents off their game.
Multiway pots are very common in cash games, especially in live ones. Unfortunately, they are also notoriously difficult to play correctly.
Since multiway pots come around so often in live cash games, many common cash game mistakes happen in these situations. If you want to be a successful cash game grinder, you should learn how to play multiway pots better and study this game segment very extensively.
Some of the most typical multiway poker mistakes include raising hands that are too weak to raise, folding hands that have enough value to continue with, or calling with hands that should be raised.
The best cash game players know which hand classes work best for each of these plays on different board textures, and you should study these things yourself if you want to improve your cash game results.
No matter how good you think you are or how weak your opponents may seem, it is always a good idea to study the game and keep improving.
You should never quit studying poker and should always be looking for new ways to exploit player tendencies or fix the leaks in your own game.
The exact method of study will depend on the type of cash games you are involved with. While online players should spend more time with GTO solvers, live cash game players may try to analyze their hands from a more exploitative standpoint and join a training site like Pokercode to help with this.
In either case, make sure to dedicate some time to improving your game and learning new things about poker, or you will lag behind the opposition faster than you would have hoped.
Perhaps the biggest problem that most cash game players encounter is the fact that stack depths are always changing in a cash game environment. With stacks going up and down all over the place, it can be difficult to adjust to the effective stack and remember all the strategies you need to apply in different situations.
However, if you want to be a good cash game player, you must learn to deal with this common problem and adapt to different stack sizes properly.
Your 100 or 200bb baselines will be a great start, and you will have to learn how to adapt to deeper stacks, as players often sit at cash game tables with over 500bbs in their stack.
Also, make sure you know how to play properly against shorter stacks and how the lack of implied odds makes various poker hands worthless against players with few chips in front of them.
Out of all the poker mistakes you will see made in cash games, quitting too early is one you would not expect, but it is quite common, especially in live cash games.
Live games tend to get heated as time passes and stacks get deeper, which means that playing later in the game is usually better.
Ideally, you will want to be there for the entire time, so you can know which players are winning and losing, who is on tilt, and who is playing what style of poker.
Quitting too early will often mean leaving tons of equity on the table, as weak recreational players will often make incredible poker mistakes late into the night.
As long as you can stay sharp, avoid drinking, and don't have to get up too early in the morning, there is very little reason to leave a good game, just as things are getting interesting.
If you have the feeling you need to sharpen up your game then Pokercode is a great place to start. Sign up for a free account and set your first steps towards becoming a better poker player.
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