Is game selection more important than volume?
If you were advising a new player, would you tell them to focus more on increasing their volume or working on game selection?
Last week we released two videos from our popular coach w34z3l where he played both Zoom and regular cash games, and in it we asked in a poll which of the two was the more profitable game.
We added that in Zoom there obviously was more action, which meant you stood to win more from playing more hands and VIP benefits, however with regular cash games you have the luxury of table selection.
The same debate is an interesting one beyond fast fold poker. Would an up and coming grinder be better off in 2016 focussing on table selection and finding the most profitable games, or would it make more sense financially to work on increasing their volume?
Find the juiciest games
Game selection still remains one of the most important lessons in poker. I always like to remind people of the old maxim of the 9th worst player in the world could be a big winner if they only played against the other worst eight, and the 9th best player would be broke if they played against the best eight (And we see examples of the latter happen all the time in poker).
Game selection becomes even more important when you start to play in small player pools, ie. the online high stakes, specialist games like PLO and live poker. Not to mention when you are playing less tables. This is where it is prudent to spend an equivalent amount of time viewing the action from afar as you do joining it.
We also live in a time when high volume players are not being as well rewarded with rakeback as they previously were during the boom years. Like anything else in poker, it's about adapting and this is another reason why focussing on maximising earn rate before rakeback by playing the juiciest games might be worth concentrating on.
A lifetime of experience in months
Concentrating on volume has plenty of benefits too, not just the obvious ones of more hands per hour and more rakeback. One of the great advantages of online poker has been that it has allowed online players to accumulate as much experience as their live counterparts in a matter of months. A popular theory in performance psychology is that you need 10,000 hours to master a craft, and you could easily argue that playing four tables instead of one could dramatically decrease that figure for online poker players.
Playing high volume is also mentally very taxing, which isn't a bad thing. I've worked alongside mental game coach Jared Tendler for years who, among other things, helped a lot of players get to SuperNova Elite. He has shown that improving your volume as a player has the side effect of improving your mental endurance and ability to play for long hours. It also helps people play well under pressure, because they have managed to automate so many decisions that would normally be cognitively demanding.
On the flip side, this does actually make it quite hard for high volume players to concentrate on only one table, for example when they play live. Patience is certainly a skill that the shrewd game selector would develop, not only because they are playing less tables but also the very act of table selection requires restraint.
You don't need to be a mind reader to guess that I was going to end this by saying that the key is to find a balance between improving volume and concentrating on game selection. However, to get off the fence, I actually would say that, for the relatively new player, focussing on the volume might prove the better investment. The reason why the online generation is so much stronger than those who came before them is precisely because the volume they put in has allowed them to automate so many poker decisions which we now consider trivial, but once did not. Even without the obvious VIP benefits that come with high volume poker, the ability to fast track your way to that amount of experience in a short space of times is both priceless and necessary in the modern game.
