It Took Eight Months for Phil Gordon to Say Something Useful

[shipitfish]

Someone bought me as a well-intentioned gift, Phil Gordon's day-by-day page poker calendar, called Poker: The Real Deal. I always feel bad not using calendars people give me, so I have dutifully used it throughout the year. Each day, it gives a pithy comment to “help improve your poker game”. It had yet to say anything that good; most of the advice was simplistic things about limit poker that anyone who has read a poker book once knows.

But, yesterday, it gave a piece of advice that I often see experienced players forgetting over and over:

A good poker player can beat just about any low-limit game. If you are not consistently beating the madmen and morons at the $3/$6 table, you probably are not going to be able to succeed at the middle limits.

I have so often heard “good” players say they can't handle $2/$4 anymore or the people play so bad I can't beat them. I do agree that beating players that bad is as boring as your worst high school teacher's lecture, and that sometimes those low limit games make it really difficult to beat the rake. Other than that, though, this advice is spot on and everyone should take it to heart.

I sometimes use low limit games to challenge new parts about my game; Negreanu and Ivey both suggest playing below your stakes and trying to win “every hand” as an exercise in reading people well. (Negreanu claims that you're doing well if you try this and stay even over a long session.) But, the important thing is: no matter how far you are along in your poker development, you should be able to sit down in any small stakes game and be able to beat it.