Four poker resolutions for 2022
Dara O'Kearney shares some ideas for how to end the next 12 months a much better player than you are today.
Play smaller fields
My first piece of advice is for tournament players and it is to concentrate on smaller fields. We all eye up the glory of winning a SCOOP or WCOOP sized event with a life-changing prize, but those are very high variance.
If you concentrate on fields with 300 runners or less you will have a much better year, on average, in terms of profit, mindset and improvement.
Small fields are much easier on your mental game because you will make final tables much more often. I know good MTT regulars who have losing years because they specialise in large field MTTs.
More importantly you will improve as a player because you will find yourself on more bubbles, final table bubbles, final tables and heads-up scenarios in your poker year. You will get more valuable experience for the times you do take shots at large field MTTs.
I explore the topic of smaller field MTTs in more details in this PokerStrategy article .
Study repeat spots
It's tempting to put all your efforts into reviewing strange uncommon spots that left you scratching your head, but that is not the best use of your time.
The quickest way to improve in your poker study is to drill down on the most common spots you find yourself in - stuff like Button vs Blinds, Small Blind vs Big Blind, UTG open vs Big Blind defence, 10 big blind shove ranges, and so on.
These are, after all, the spots that come up most often and thus you need to have them mastered. Concentrating on these spots in your study means you can make the right decision automatically at the tables. It also means you free up more mental bandwidth to use your time bank on the less common spots when they come up at the table.
I explored this approach to study in more detail in this article from earlier this year.
Study calls
If you want some more specific advice on what to study, your calling ranges should be first on the list. That includes your defending ranges but in particular the hands you need to call an all-in.
A small folding or betting mistake is not that costly, because it is usually a smaller pot anyway. A small calling mistake of an all-in can cost you a fortune, because you are playing for stacks.
This is even more pertinent if you are an MTT regular and the calling error is near a bubble or on a final table. A bad call can cost you two, ten or twenty buy-ins in equity near the end of tournaments.
I went into depth on this in this PokerStrategy article from earlier this year and the numbers can be staggering.
Learn GTO, even just a little
GTO can be daunting for people to start thinking about and there are a lot of misconceptions about it. Even if you want to be an exploitative player and you are game selecting for tables where that makes the most sense, GTO can teach you a lot.
I still play an exploitative style when the games are soft, but GTO has shown me so many things including the best hands to bluff with, the best hands to bluff catch with and how to approach bet sizing.
All quite simple things that serve me well whether I am playing in a soft game or a GTO regfest.
The biggest misconception might be that you need to master GTO, nobody can. But everyone, even an amateur, can pick up useful insights they can incorporate into their own game.
Dara O'Kearney's new book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is out now.
