What type of poker player are you

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Jeffrey | Poker and Life, Poker Articles

Submitted by Professional Poker Player Adam Breit, this article belongs to the Poker and Life series.

What type of poker player are you? Adam wrote the following article about the subject

There are a lot of ways to approach poker and these result in different types of poker players. The first way people play poker is the easiest and most entertaining. It is the approach of the gambler, the true addict. This is the man that goes to the casino with $1000 in his pocket, ready to be spent on fun. Somewhere deep inside his mind he knows he will probably lose a lot of money, but this doesn’t bother him at all. Why? He ignores all the little voices that tell him he will almost certainly lose. He tells himself there is a chance he will come home with a shitload of money, and all of his problems will be gone. He dreams about showering his wife and children (or himself) with gifts. Clearing the bad conscience he built up from all of his previous visits to the casino, where he wasted his family’s money. But naturally this rarely, if ever, happens. And every time it doesn’t he tells himself; “oh well, at least I had fun”.

This is the tragic kind of poker player and rational beings obviously do not agree with this kind of idiocy. Especially when you can actually win money with poker! In my opinion poker is a sport and not a game. It is like playing tennis in a club your whole life, but never actually training and getting better, never winning any prize money. It might be fun, but the entry fee is $5000 a year. In my opinion poker should never be approached like that; it has to be taken seriously and there is no way around it.

One exception can be made when you’re the second kind of poker player, the rich boy. Then you have all (or at least, a significant portion) of the money in the world. It is like a world where Nuclear Fusion works, and electricity is almost free, like the air we breathe. Losing money loses its significance, since you have near unlimited access to it. “Paying for playing” doesn’t count anymore and you can finally have careless fun with this game, without being anywhere near afraid you will end up in the gutter thinking your life through, telling yourself you did your best but just weren’t smart enough.

Of course this can only happen if you are rich in the first place, which you probably aren’t since you are reading a strategy blog! So first, before we can become the second kind of poker player, you need to be the third kind of poker player. The smart poker player.

And don’t think the only thing you need to be is smart. Even with an IQ over 140 you will not make it on your own. You need guidance. Read books, talk to friends who played the game before (but ignore their boasting, it is almost always untrue). Try to find some good poker blogs and strategy databases until your mind is completely full. Then sleep and go again. After which you should start to play poker, at the lowest stakes. Also, try to have the best computer software installed to track your and other people’s play.

In short, don’t be arrogant and build up slowly. Treat it like any other sport, except that this sport’s muscle is the brain, which is far more fun to stimulate. And do not forget; poker will not only affect your income and stress levels; it will affect your entire life.

Adam B.

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