Poker Skills
Phil Ivey has them. Daniel Negreanu has them. Phil Helmuth definitely had them and probably still does. Actually, any successful poker pro has them, even unsuccessful pros have them, but you may not have them. What are they? Not buy-ins, not sponsorships, not television presence but skills, plain and simple poker skills.
Skills are not easily learned in poker and it used to be true that you didn’t learn poker skills you earned poker skill. There was truth to this because you couldn’t practice poker like you practice a sport. In sports, you can mimic game situations and skills, but in poker you can’t apply the pressure of putting your money or tournament on the on the line unless your money or tournament was on the line. Sure you can read about what to do, but you won’t know what to do, until you are actually playing and applying what you’ve learned. Just as it’s impossible to be able to kick a ball by reading how you do it, you have to try poker. And it used to be there was nowhere for you to practice. Nobody plays poker unless there something to be won.
To an extent real money poker is more like taking penalty kicks to settle a big soccer game. You can practice all the kicks you want but until you are on the spot in that big game you can’t mimic the pressure. Sometimes, you make the kick, sometimes you don’t but every player that has taken one such kick in that environment is far more prepared than a player that hasn’t.
Therefore, earning poker skills requires experience. Some players used to say that requires paying tuition. Every buy-in lost was a chunk of that tuition. You couldn’t really learn to play poker until you had something to risk. There is and was a lot of truth to that. Course now there are game simulations and free rolls with stakes that are put up by other people. Suddenly, with the birth of online poker, the world changed and players could learn the game without paying to do so–to an extent.
There are no limitations for some. A special few players that claim to have never invested a dime in acquiring their skills can say they never paid real money to acquire skills. Annette Obrestad is said to have built her bankroll by playing and winning free rolls online. Then she took those winnings and gambled them successful to win more money until she was a millionaire. She started a business, herself as a poker prodigy, from an investment of absolutely nothing.
While it’s okay to aspire to that, don’t think just anybody can do it. Anybody can to an extent, play free rolls to learn the game, maybe profit some and then move up to real stakes. There they can learn real money aspects of the game like managing a bankroll, handling a short-term loss without losing your mind, your game, or your newfound bankroll, and learning how to play with better players.
Fortunately, there are bad players at every level, but at the higher levels as you progress they are a far higher concentration of really good players. Acquiring the poker skills necessary to play with them means mixing it up with them. It’s insane to think you’d never lose, and be in a spot where you’d have to put cash back in. It’s poker. In the short run, even the greatest players in the world experience droughts or painful runs of luck.
Learning how to deal with them, is in itself a lesson and an acquiring of additional poker skills. While today’s poker world does have more learning than earning, there is still a good bit of both. Fortunately, unlike the old poker world, before the internet poker boom, you can learn a lot more before you have to start earning it.