I started out playing poker thinking everyone was bluffing, then I transitioned to thinking you really had to pull a bunch of big moves to win. But as I played more hands I realized that both were far from the truth. Poker was really about playing the player and just taking each decision seriously. So how do we take each decision seriously? I think posting helps, but I think its a lot about acceptance. Accepting certain factors and accepting the responsibility to figure out what to do with the data by yourself. I haven't transitioned into a nit or anything like that, but I'm way more willing to just wait for hands and assess what's going on. Then there is variance. Having to dedicate yourself many hours per day to meet certain personal goals despite the odds or despite the luck was also a challenge in and of itself.

Let me know how you thought poker was difficult. I'm interested in hearing your story.

Personally I think the most difficult part of learning to play poker is lack of feedback. By this I mean that if you try to make a change to your strategy it is really difficult to determine if you have made an improvement or if you have made things worse. This is absolutely a direct result of the variance in poker. You can change your strategy for the better, get crushed for a few sessions and start questioning whether you really improved. Conversely you can make an IÂ’ll-advised adjustment, run hot for a while, and convince yourself that your adjustment was the reason instead of just dumb luck.

Contrast this with a game like chess (not that IÂ’m saying chess is easy to learn by any means). If you change the way you play chess, you will find out really quickly whether or not your change was an improvement. Improved strategy always (or at least almost always) equals improved results. This is not the case for poker, at least in the short term.

What to do then? Well that’s why studying GTO strategies is important. Not to blindly memorize them or to try to copy it and play an exact GTO strategy, but rather to understand a good baseline strategy that can be used as a starting point for your actual strategy. GTO is actually a bad name (the more technically correct term “Nash Equilibrium” would actually be much better) since it implies that this is an optimal strategy in all poker games. This is not true. GTO is simply what results of two players start out playing arbitrary strategies and each makes optimal adjustments to exploit the other’s strategy. The EV gain from changing your own strategy to exploit the opponent’s get smaller and smaller until an equilibrium state is reached where any changes you make have no effect on your EV (and same for your opponent). The strategy that yields this is GTO.

This strategy then is a good baseline and understanding why it is what it is allows proper adjustments. For example if an opponent is a loser passive player who calls too much, we can bet more hands for value and bluff less. But bet more value than what, and bluff less than what? Well, more value bets and less bluffing than the GTO strategy. Similarly for other adjustments for other player types.

Poker is difficult, because to play successfully a player must find a way to overcome or compensate for natural, unavoidable cognitive biases, such as loss aversion, sunk cost fallacy, confirmation bias, and so on. These biases affect everyone's thinking, yours and mine alike, with every hand we play, and to be successful it is necessary to find ways of making good decisions and executing them in spite of the powerful influence of these cognitive biases.

(See Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman to learn more about these biases and how inescapable they are.)