Where your money comes from

If you are a winning player, you should have an idea about where your money comes from. I'm not talking about knowing if you make your money from playing hold 'em or omaha or if you make more during the day or night or online versus live. While all of these things are important to know, what is often overlooked in my opinion is how you made that money. What this basically boils down to is determining if are you outplaying your opponents or if you are simply capitalizing on their mistakes (or both).

Lets assume you play an ABC variety of poker and you are playing in a no limit hold 'em cash game. It is folded to you on the button and two novices are in the blind. You look down at A-K. You raise 3xBB, small blind folds, big blind calls. Flop comes K-6-3. You value bet on the flop, turn and river and the big blind shows you Q-6. Clearly, you didn't do anything special to win this pot. The money that was won was a result of the inexperience of the big blind. You often hear people say that you can't bluff amateur players. This is because they do not know how to fold a hand like in the above example. What if you had held A-J? Surely, you would raise on the button and make a continuation bet on the flop, but would you fire the second and third bullet? I guess that depends on what kind of player you are.

The point here is that you can make money at the lower limits by continually exploiting your opponents mistakes. While you may be able to pull off a bluff of two from time to time, it probably won't be a profitable play in the long run against a bunch of rookies. However, as you move up in limits or begin to encounter good players who are exploiting these rookies as much as you are, you will find that you will have to make adjustments to your game to win money from more experienced players. At the higher limits, players make fewer mistakes and there is less money to be won via someone else making a mistake. It is at the higher limits where you will have to employ more "fancy plays" to win. However, I would recommend avoiding fancy play syndrome at lower limits.