It’s never been more difficult to play poker, and games are tougher than they’ve ever been. However, it’s also never been easier to learn poker. Everyone who rues their luck for missing out on the poker boom should remember why poker booms take place – a glut of schmucks who don’t know what they’re doing. And by sheer weight of numbers, you were probably a lot more likely to be one of them than you were Phil Galfond.
You can go on YouTube and find thousands of hours of genuinely enlightening poker information
One of the reasons for this is that professionals give out lots of advice for free. You can go on YouTube and find thousands of hours of genuinely enlightening poker information, and even those selling courses give away vast amounts of knowledge without you having to pay a penny.
However, this advice is not always good. There are obviously also lots of terrible players giving poor advice on YouTube, because engaging content is rewarded, not effective poker playing. That’s one story. The other story is that many professionals have been in the game for a very long time, and have very little memory of the lifestyles or challenges of grinders trying to make their way up in stakes, many playing poker at online casinos.
As a result, we frequently get some inaccurate, misplaced, or just plain wrong advice from people who really should know better. Here are many of the reasons pros can often forget who they’re talking to.
Mindfulness
“Don’t forget to step away and take some time away from the game.” You’ll hear this commonly from pros, although it can vary wildly in what exactly it means, ranging from just making sure you’re not obsessing over the game to an unhealthy degree to taking a three-month sabbatical getting matcha enemas in Tibet.
For most of us, this is pretty poor advice. The reason people aren’t where they want to be in poker is very simple – they’re not studying enough. Studying isn’t entirely about putting the hours in (more on that later) but the hours are a bare minimum, and most of us simply aren’t getting enough of them.
It’s great advice for a dead-behind-the-eyes grinder who always keeps an empty bottle next to his desk and would be a no-show at his mother’s funeral if a whale had sat down at HORSE that morning. For the rest of us, for whom life is a temptation from poker and not the other way around, we really just need to knuckle down, log on, and grind out.
Not teaching how to categorize players
Poker pros will vary as to where they fall on the GTO vs exploit spectrum, but the vast majority will advise players at lower stakes to aggressively attack what players are doing wrong. Unfortunately, this advice is rarely followed up on.
most players are actually quite poor at categorizing players
Without the tens of thousands of hours of studying and playing, most players are actually quite poor at categorizing players. A majority of poker players would likely see half of the calldowns a solver would make and instantly label the player a calling station and abandon all bluffs in the future.
And yet, the solver still bluffs. We also have very little to go on versus the individual player. If somebody opens 74 suited under the gun, it does not follow that they must also open 75 suited, and 86 suited. Perhaps they were just bored. Maybe they called down that other guy with ace high because they think he’s a maniac. Maybe they hate him. And once an idea of how a player is becomes lodged in our brains, it becomes very difficult to extract it again. And this is despite the fact we could be doing something much easier and more profitable…
Focusing on player exploits, not field exploits
The flipside of this is that for every piece of advice about player categorization which misses the large, obvious, and necessary disclaimers, there is almost nothing about field exploits. Field exploits are by far the most profitable thing to be aware of in poker, to the extent that poker stables are now basically dominated by teaching players how to use them and very little else.
It’s understandable why pros don’t want to share some of that secret sauce, but a lot of player exploits ultimately derive from what humans are like, not just what 25nl is like in 2025. Players will probably always overprotect their hands when they’re too deep to do so, because nobody likes getting sucked out on and they feel silly when they allow it to happen. Humans are naturally risk-averse.
Five years on from now, people will still be failing to protect check-back ranges and failing to find enough bluffs on most nodes. It is the human condition. It’s also something we have millions of hands of data on, making it a far more reliable exploit than seeing a guy in a random tournament calling down with second pair one time.
Not explaining how to learn
Putting the hours in for study is one thing, but it’s too rarely discussed how to learn. Most people seeking advice from pros are usually time-poor, working a full-time job and have a limited amount of time available to study. That means that working smarter, not harder becomes even more important.
Hand reviews in practice are often a bad way to learn poker
Among poor ways to study are often the ones we see pros do for videos or X threads. Hand reviews in practice are often a bad way to learn poker. At some point one player will likely make a sizing or selection error that takes us out of the game tree, and checking GTOWizard for confirmation of whether a play was ‘correct’ or not does little to expand our knowledge. Drilling hands can be very similar – broad but shallow.
Instead, a lot can be learned from looking at one hand and changing a lot of the parameters. What if there was a flush draw on the board, instead? What if the highest card was an ace, not a king? What if the turn paired the board? Studying the difference between these and recognizing and rationalizing the patterns that follow is by far the most useful study time you can spend. But it doesn’t fit into a quick tip for a video or tweet, so we rarely see it.
Not explaining how to find good groups
The problem with this is that while a study group can be vital to unlocking your potential as a poker player, joining the wrong one can also be a career-ender. To make matters worse, it’s far more common that you’ll end up in the latter than the former, simply because there are far more groups out there with idiots sharing terrible advice and reinforcing poor behaviours than there are of wizened, seasoned masters giving out alpha on a daily basis.
Focusing on hand selection, not frequencies
This is actually a common practice among bad discord groups, where hands will be picked apart for discussion on whether the precise blocker was optimal for a calldown, avoiding all discussion whatsoever about how often we’re supposed to call here at all at equilibrium, let alone in this situation versus this player.
Amateurs talk about hand selection, pros talk about frequencies. But not when pros are giving advice, they don’t. Hand selection is what people want to hear about, it’s sexier, and it looks a lot cleverer. But frequencies are simply far more important, and get about 5% of the airtime.
Forgetting the turn and river
On a related note, his is a small one, but no less annoying for that, and it’s indicative of how useless and difficult short-form quick tips can be from pros. You’ve probably seen ten different videos telling you how you should be using 54 suited as a bluff on K33. How many videos have you seen telling you what to do when the turn is a 5? Or a Jack? Or if it’s a 2, we bluff, and then it’s a 5 on the river? Do we have showdown value? What if it was double suited and neither one got there?
Not a lot, because it’s too long and too difficult for most shorter-form content. But without this knowledge, the checkraise on the flop becomes far, far, far worse a strategy, because the hand doesn’t end on the flop. For some reason, most videos on the subject out there seem to think that it does.
everything that happens in poker must be understood fully in the context of everything else that didn’t happen
You’ll notice that a lot of these have the same root cause – the curse of short-form content. While pros shouldn’t be expected to give away hour-long lessons for free, the nature of having to fit everything into a few minutes of video or a short thread on X means that a lot of crucial points are going to be missed. Due to the nature of the game, everything that happens in poker must be understood fully in the context of everything else that didn’t happen. It’s almost uniquely unsuited to learning from short-form content.
Most pros are a long way from lower stakes games, so the disconnect is understandable. Bankroll challenges are absolute torture, and every pro who has ever done one has the same piece of advice: don’t do it. One piece of good advice every pro will give is to avoid wasting time at the micros. But for the hinterland between penny stakes and real games, good advice is often hard to come by.
FAQs
Why do pros give advice that doesn’t work for beginners?
There are three main reasons. Firstly, most pros haven’t played in smaller games for a long time, and what worked for them coming up may not work any longer. Secondly, some pros are very good at intuitive strategies and putting things into practice, but not great at articulating that to other people. Lastly, most pros are chasing limited attention on social media sites, and don’t have the time to go into as much detail as poker strategy demands.
Is exploit > GTO always right?
Exploits make more money than GTO, but can sometimes be more difficult to implement. The problem with exploits is often stated that it opens the player up to be counter-exploited themselves, but in smaller stakes games, this is less likely. The bigger problem is that the player is likely to misidentify players or use the wrong exploits against them. GTO is an important foundation for understanding how to exploit players in the first place, and exploits should always start out with reads on the field, not individuals – they’re backed up by far more data and are much easier to implement.
How do I know if my peer group helps or hurts?
It can be difficult to tell, but results are always a good metric. Be wary of any group of players that have been stuck at the same stakes for a long time. Groups should also be willing to share interesting new strategies and edges – hive-mindedness can be a serious blocking effect to unlocking players’ true potential. Lastly, the people should be willing to engage seriously about poker. Even if the talk in the rest of the group is casual and fun, when it comes to talking strategy, it should be business only.
Are poker instincts reliable?
While pros and coaches will almost exclusively focus on poker strategy, you’d be surprised at how many will advise players to go from their reads. Even GTO-focused, precise coaches will often accept a non-standard play from a player if they claim they had a read, even if they can’t quite explain why. It’s a real thing in poker and it happens occasionally – but if you think you’re picking up reads constantly, then you should seriously question whether they’re accurate or not.
