You would be surprised how many small mistakes a person can make in a short session

It's pretty inefficient to aim to play mistake free poker.

As someone who consistently put up decent volume of poker, I very rarely play my A game. Funniest thing about that, too, is when I recognize that I am playing my A game, I usually run bad, or probably play too loose because I feel on top of my game.

If you're playing too loosely ... is it really your "A game" anymore?

only if you're as loose or looser than your bad opponents

For the most part the biggest differentiatior between a winner and crusher is who knows how to play the small and medium pots better, especially heads up. A mistake here isn't necessarily losing the pot though which is an important distinction.

Very true. One extra $10-20 value-bet an hour (even if it only wins 60% of the time) can be *huge*.

I'm hitting the 1k mark in hours since beginning of 2015, and I am demolishing the game I play. However, I definitely make small mistakes at least once a session, if not more.

Its weird because fundamentally and technically speaking, I think I am okay. Its easy to think you're "the best" when playing against droolers day in and day out, but out of sheer boredom I find myself getting mixed up sometimes with hands in spots where I shouldn't be. Its also easy to extrapolate (if you aren't brain dead) how those mistakes can be very costly in the right set of circumstances.

I am far from perfect, but that's kind of the beauty in playing live poker isn't it? I am just thrilled that my regular pool of players are all garbo (even the "winning" regs)

A game to me is that I am hand reading well.

If I am reading hands well, why not play more hands?

You said "too loose" which implies you play too many hands to be profitable. It's great if you're reading their hands well but if you still don't have the right cards to profit from it...

Not sure what we are talking about anymore, but ok.

Broseph - I have been thinking that for the last 6 months

Nits play their hands face up. Does this mean we want to be giving them action just because we know they have overpairs?

I know what you meant though. Generally, if we know where we are at in every hand, we will have the edge over the table and be able to pick our spots to steal, go for thin value with higher efficiency, etc.

If we're 400bb deep, then hell yes I want to play every pot with an ubernit who only plays overpairs

Isn't the notion of recognizing mistakes we make ourselves kind of results-oriented?

If we do something... making a decision in the moment - knowing all the context - when does it become a mistake? When the guy calls our bluff? When he shows a bluff after our fold? The result doesn't make it a mistake. Or is it when we get home and check PokerStove or 2+2 and are shown/told it was a mistake?

(After all, we don't purposely make mistakes, do we?)

I agree 100% jake, I was wondering what in the world do people consider to be "mistakes" in poker?

I would venture to guess that what you think are mistakes likely are not, and the majority of your actual mistakes are going by unnoticed.

Trying to quantify mistakes per X is meaningless since the word "mistake" is being used somewhat ambiguously.

Just review your hands and big pots after your sessions -- plug in ranges, do da mathz, anaylze reads and try to come to objective conclusions and figure out if you think you made a correct play or not. You will never stop making wrong decisions in poker, the big winners simply are able to minimize how many they make comparative to the competition.

I'm actually surprised how many mistakes I make where 2 minutes after the hand I realize a different line would probably have been better, generally not because of results - I try to question plays when they work out well for me, too. I think the reason for these mistakes is both the pressure in the moment (I often think a little clearer right after the hand) and just not having quite enough time to think everything through.

Some mistakes we need to sit down and walk through the hand again, either on the drive home or here or whatever. When we actually think through a reasonable range (or the range we had during the hand) and plug in the numbers, sometimes we just mathed wrong. Or we realize that one of our assumptions was wrong.

But there are a lot of smaller mistakes that we can see pretty quickly. Autopilot calls or bets that 5 minutes later seem wrong, or 10 seconds later when we're raised and we realize that we don't have a plan.

I'll complete at least 80% of the time in MW pots (I play 1/2) for just this reason. Outside of these hands, my VPIP is about 15%, so I'm already nitty by live lol standards. Making a show of, "Alright kids, let's play some cards!" is worth a buck every now and then.

FWIW, I think I get in a lot of +EV spots because fish see me as one of their own, and that means playing with a lot of leaks

And you gotta remember that if everyone makes the same mistakes, you're not actually losing any money.

RP u swim with the fishes too?

mermaids.

Not sure that's true in a raked game?

Grakekills,banrake,ldoG

You seem to do fine.

Lolz!

GhurtsbruhG

I just found out about a room I could play in that spreads a 1/2 game with no rake and no tips where each player pays $8 an hour. Is this an improvement over a 10% $5 max $1 drop structure?