The Biggest Mistake You Can Make in Poker

What separates great poker players from average players? I've been asked that question a zillion times over the years, and my answer is always the same: Great players make fewer mistakes than anybody else. Furthermore, top players know they're making a mistake while they're doing it, not after it's done.

Before I make a play at the pot in a poker game, I always ask myself, "Should I do this now, or should I not?" Sometimes, I just say, "The hell with it, I'll just do it." And I pay for it! But I know I'm making a mistake while I'm doing it. Amateurs play hands that they shouldn't play and they don't know they're making a mistake.

If you don't know you're making a mistake, how can you learn from it? Knowing when you've made a bad move is an instinct that develops from what you've learned over the years. When you see that a play doesn't work, chalk it up on your mental blackboard so that you can learn from it. Pay special attention to the hands that you play when you're out of position. New players make basic mistakes, such as playing a 10-8 suited from early position, or playing a pair of deuces and then calling a raise with them.

Most of the mistakes that amateurs make in no-limit hold'em are made with hands with which they call raises. I repeat, they call raises with hands with which they shouldn't call. Here's a scenario that came to me from "Joe," a great split-pot player who has just started playing no-limit hold'em. He had just busted out of a big tournament in about 50th place, and he told me about the hand that sent him to the rail. The player right in front of the button raised to $5,400. Joe was in the big blind with the K J and already had $1,600 in the pot from posting the big blind. He was kind of low on chips with about $34,000 left in his stack. He called the raise. The flop came Q 10 4. They got it all in. His opponent had pocket queens and Joe lost the hand when he didn't hit a flush or a straight.

"You made only one mistake in the hand," I told him.

"What was that?" he asked. "I flopped a draw to a royal flush!"

"It definitely wasn't your play after the flop – it was your play before the flop," I replied. "You're not supposed to call a raise with that hand. When you get hands like K-Q, K-J, K-10, Q-J, and Q-10, remember that they're all trap hands.

And, invariably, whenever you call a raise with them and get a flop to them, you go broke with them."

"You mean, I've got $1,600 in the pot and I call $3,800 more and that's a mistake?!" he asked.

"If you're calling while knowing that you probably have the worst hand, that's a mistake," I answered. "And more people make that mistake than any other mistake inno-limit hold'em."

When people ask, "How do you survive so long all the time?" part of my answer is that I'm not going to make the mistake that Joe made. I'm not saying that I won't go up and over somebody with that hand. I might even go over the top of them with a 7-2, but I do it because I've put them on a bad hand, not two queens. But do I call a bet with a trouble hand? No. Invariably, you either get some kind of flop to it and lose your chips, or don't flop at all to it and have to throw the hand away, losing the chips with which you called. Joe was out of position; he had to act first after the flop.

And with that kind of flop, he was gonna play the hand no matter what. He was a dog to just about anything before the flop: If the guy had raised with an A-K, he was a dog; if he had raised with an A-4, he was still a slight dog. He was a dog to any kind of hand unless the raiser had something like two tens, in which case he would be in a coin-flip situation.

Even then, he's still an underdog. Or, suppose the guy had raised with an A-J and a jack flopped. Again, Joe is gonna go broke with the hand.

Compare your pluses to your minuses with these trap hands, and there aren't many pluses. Most of the time, you're not going to flop to it anyway, so you've gotta check. And you can't call any kind of a bet. If you decide to bluff at the pot and run into a better hand, you're gonna lose that money. The pluses just aren't there.

Dana Smith, my editor, told me that in her interviews with more than 100 top poker players, most of the bad-beat stories she heard started with, "I was in the blind." That's because the majority of mistakes are made when players call raises from the blinds with hands with which they shouldn't call. Once you put your blind money in the pot, it doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the pot. If you have the mindset that it's not your money any longer, that's a good way to think.

As Tom would say in closing, I hope to meet you in the winner's circle one day soon – provided that we don't lose our chips by calling raises with the wrong kinds of hands.

T.J. Cloutier is the co-author (with Tom McEvoy) of Championship No-Limit & Pot-Limit Hold'em, which is available through Card Player. His new book, How to Win the Championship, is due early in 2006.