ADAPT OR FAIL

Whether it is business, life or poker one thing is certain....you must evolve and adapt in order to survive. Imagine for a minute a businessman who has a range of clothes shops who never changes his line from season to season and from year to year. Slowly but surely his stock just gets more and more out of date and are no longer stylish. So if his customers do not want what he is offering then his business dies. Or how about the new businessman in the same industry who is selling a line of clothing from the outset that no one wants. His business never even gets off the ground in the first place.

But we must also adjust as human beings in the great game of life as well. A person that never adjusts and adapts gets left behind and is seriously handicapped. It is the ability to adjust that is one of mankinds greatest strengths but yet this is something that many people in poker fail to take on board. They need to start because adjusting and adapting to what is an ever changing environment is absolutely essential for survival.

For most people of course, they don’t need to make these changes to succeed in poker. This is simply because most players out there cannot beat the game anyway either because of technically deficient games, poor money management, personal indiscipline or whatever. That is akin to a would be businessman starting up and having absolutely no clue whatsoever about business. Correctly adjusting to the ever changing environment should be the last thing on his mind because he needs to seriously educate himself in the ways of the business world first.

Any student of mine would tell the readers that I am a very big fan of analogies. This is because they help tremendously to highlight points that would be otherwise difficult to fathom for many people. But the kind of people that I am aiming this article at are all the online poker players and live game players for that matter who have had an initial degree of success either recently or in the past and believe that they have got the game cracked.

You can never have a game as complex as poker cracked all of the time without adapting to changes. Twenty years ago, a good solid limit player who had a very good knowledge of hand values and position could grind out a living quite easily. It may not have been a great living but if your primary goal was not to have to get a “proper” job then you could be successful just playing sound solid poker and nothing else.

Many games were loose and tight aggressive players were paid off often enough to earn their keep. When online poker hit our computer screens back in the late nineties then we had another poker boom all over again. Suddenly waves and waves of new players with insufficient skills were playing poker in ever increasing numbers over the next few years. But suddenly, the conventional pro’s and old timers were faced with a far different poker arena.....the virtual arena!

Gone was the ability to pull angles on their opponents or make money from tourists based on very obvious tells. Now they had to have technically proficient games and many of them that were successful live game players struggled online. But the longer that online poker was around, the different the players that were playing it were becoming. A slow gradual process it may be but the fact remains that today’s average online poker player bears no resemblance to the online poker player of six or seven years ago.

Wherever you go these days you seem to be bombarded with poker. My local petrol station has even started selling “poker kits” that have playing cards, chips and a playing surface in the box. I cannot travel around my home town anymore without seeing some massive billboard advertising some online casino or poker site. In England we have premier league football teams sponsored by online card rooms and even programmes on television are sponsored by them.

But on top of all this exposure is an absolute arsenal of learning material. Whether it be books, magazines, DVD’s, websites, televised poker, online tutorials or whatever, the novice poker player does not even need to leave their own home anymore to get their poker education. You don’t even have to pay for education these days as online card rooms and many magazines and websites hand it out for free.

It may not always be good advice but one thing is certain, it is still making the average poker player better and more skilled. So what does this mean, well for one it means that the players who are slightly higher up the food chain who have been grinding out the minimum wage are getting wiped out through a levelling of the playing field.  This also means that in order to be a successful player these days, you have to be a better player on average than several years ago.

But thinking about this logically for a minute, this had to happen. If we make yet another analogy with sports stars then you will see what I mean. Take a look at football and compare clips of footballers of the present era with footballers of say the seventies and even someone with an un-educated eye in football could not fail to spot the difference in skill in the average player. Today’s professional footballer is quicker, fitter and more skilled than his counter part of even twenty years ago.

I first started to take a keen interest in professional Snooker back in the early eighties when it was huge in England. But the number of professionals at that time was very small compared to what it is now and in fact turning professional and getting professional status was very difficult. But when the rules changed allowing literally anyone to turn pro, a vast influx of new talented players flooded into the game. Now there are vast numbers of professional Snooker players compared to twenty years ago.

What this meant was that many of the old guard were very quickly feeling the pressure from the ever increasing number of players. To win tournaments they now had to get the better of more players and the more players that there are doing anything, then it stands to reason that the average quality of player will rise. This is not just supposition either because the facts and figures back it up, the number of high breaks in tournaments today is significantly higher than what it used to be.

You only have to look at the world records for athletics events down the years to see what I mean. Forty years ago, it was a tremendous achievement to run a four minute mile. Today, average runners in your local athletics club can do it with ease. But poker has really only become massive over the past few years. Sure, it has always been around but the money was never there in any significant amount and nor was the ease at which you could play either. All that has changed now with tournaments paying six and seven figure sums becoming a daily event. With that kind of money available then many people are going to be looking at increasing their skills in order to get that money. Everyone has access to the same learning material more or less so do not think that you are one step ahead of everyone just because you have read a few books.

They might have got you an edge but chances are that they haven’t. If your opponents are reading the same books then where is your edge? Also what if you have mis-interpreted what you have read and are incorrectly applying it? You simply cannot always assume that you know what you think you know. Even if you have learnt the material correctly then who is to say that subtle changes within the modern poker environment could make what you have learnt redundant.

Poker is evolving now and those changes are happening far more rapidly because we are now dealing with ever increasing numbers. The people who are coming into the game who have perhaps never played poker seriously in their life are changing our environment whether we like it or not. You only have to look at the mass of six handed cash games and the diminishing number of full ring games to see what I mean. Imagine that several years ago, you were the type of tight aggressive player that liked full ring games of at least eight players but especially when it was nine and ten handed.

You could sit there and wait and the cost of the blinds per round was quite low. Now, full ring games are a rarity on many sites but what is our full ring game player going to do? Either he learns to play semi-short handed or short handed or he dies out. Because I have been involved in online poker more than most (since 2000 in one capacity or another) then I have seen changes that anyone new to the arena would be unaware of.

But thinking about it logically, changes were bound to happen. I could earn a living online in 2002 and I only had about one tenth of the knowledge that I have now. If I knew now what I knew then, it is unlikely that I could still beat the game today. I saw the changes happening and reacted to those changes, If I hadn’t then I would have simply died off like any other animal that cannot adapt to a changing environment.

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