I’ve always been curious about how new poker players and low stakes poker players view their poker potential. I know there are some people who greatly overrate their potential, who say “I’m going to be the best player of all time.” I also bet there are some who are more modest, telling themselves “I bet I can get to the point where I beat 100nl, and that would be pretty good!” I was like the latter. I’m not the type of person who was amazing at everything. I always thought I was smart, and I did achieve above average grades in school, but I wasn’t a braniac. I’m not the arrogant type either. So when I started having some success at poker, I never thought I would ever get to the point where I’d play high stakes poker. But guess what? .

Of course, I love that I was wrong. But why was I wrong? Why did I feel like I didn’t have the potential to be the best? Besides the obvious underinflated self esteem, a lot of it had to do with misguided views on what it takes to be a good poker player.

A few years ago as a 100nl cash game player, I thought the biggest attribute a player must have to be great is inherent genius. I looked at the guys who were winning tons of money at poker and I saw some general qualities. One major one was they all seemed to have incredibly high intellectual aptitudes. This seemed like a must to be a great poker player, because success is so much contingent upon hand reading skills, adapting, and theory knowledge. But I didn’t think I was a genius, and therefore was never going to get to high stakes. Looking back on it now, I was totally wrong. Having a high aptitude can help, but it isn’t instrumental in becoming a great poker player. There are two much more important qualities you must have to be successful.

1. Being able to see poker theoretically instead of in a vacuum.

Most poker players believe that there is only one unknown variable in a hand of poker: Your opponents hand. It took me awhile to understand that there are actually two: Your opponents hand and your hand. It isn’t important to know complicated math or understand some high level theory. The truth is, poker theory conceptually isn’t that difficult to understand. The hardest part about theory is seeing its existence. In the first two years of my poker career I simply was trying to play the hand I was dealt the best I could. I thought a good bluff was simply putting money in the pot when I thought my opponent had a weak hand and extracting value when I had a strong hand. But advancing to higher levels of poker requires you move past this perspective. The hand you are dealt is nearly irrelevant. The important aspects of poker knowledge don’t have to do with how you play KK in a 3bet pot, but how you should adjust your flop raising range to a constant cbettor or how many bluffs you should add to your river shoving range when a player is a little bit of a station.

2. Understanding others deeply

Sometimes, people ask me how to go about getting better at hand reading. A lot of it has to do with putting in a lot of hands and simply remembering generally how people play. But there’s another aspect of hand reading: Understanding your opponents. I always felt like I had the keen ability to understand people at a deep level. I had fun analyzing my friends and families motivations for their behavior, and I’d often space out from the world around me and go into deep thought about just that. Poker is all about understanding other people. You have to have an idea of when someone would want to fold. When do they want to call? When do they want to bluff? In a nutsinho video at leggopoker.com, he reinforces this thinking while explaining bluffing. “When I bluff, its not as important whether I can represent a hand or not, its more important whether my opponent would think I would bluff or not here.”  For example, maybe your range evaluation up to a certain all in move by an opponent puts him on only ONE hand that he would play this way for value, while he would get to this situation with air a lot. This situation is normally an easy call…. until we take in to consideration our understanding of our opponent. Maybe we know this opponent well enough to know he doesn’t ever bluff in this situation, so we make a tough fold. Going from a good winrate to a great winrate is all about being in a situation where you are highly compelled to call and folding correctly or vice versa because we understand our opponents at such a fine level.

Poker isn’t so much about genius as much as it is about having the right perspective and adopting the best learning strategy.