To commemorate my first ever blog post on this website, I wanted to rant about a topic I’ve been thinking for a while, which is – preflop.
If you go to a lot of coaching sites, the idea of preflop has been filtered down to “just memorize it”. While I do see the value in memorizing these preflop charts, without understanding the nuance of these charts to begin with, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
I put an image of a funnel on top to make an often made analogy of preflop to river being a funnel.
All of your post-flop assumptions are coming in from your pre-flop so without a proper understanding of the widest part of the funnel, how could you accurately narrow down the user input by the end of the river?
This is why just “memorize it” doesn’t work. Using the preflop ranges as an example, in my opinion, we should be starting with the fundamental question – why should we even bet or fold in the first place? In live games, we often complain of “showdown monkeys” who refuse to fold, but I feel like these people have the right idea in mind – why even bother folding a hand? What’s the problem of literally never folding any hand you’re given?
Anyone that’s played poker will know instantly that betting any two hands is a losing strategy as you will often get dominated and outdrawn, but this is assuming your opponent can correctly identify your tendencies. So how do we even navigate this as we can’t read another person’s mind?
Well we could either:
A) Assume our opponent’s playing a logical GTO pre-flop strategy off of our memorized charts or
B) take other factors into consideration.
For example, why does the preflop ranges and its bet sizings change with the size of the effective stack? Well we know it’s indirectly associated with the concept of the stack to pot ratio and the value of certain hand classes and its playability post-flop. But why does that matter? Because the ratio will in part shine light on whether you’ll be able to fully realize your equity and if you could or if you should get your stacks in by the river. But why even bother with this if you know your opponent is inelastic to bet sizing and will just call down anything regardless?
Because….
Because we are trying to be a thinking player.
But why even bother being a thinking player?
Because it turns out, this isn’t even about winning money or poker at this point. It’s about being someone that is willing to understand that shit literally happens in life, but it’s up to you to try and navigate the chaos through your own framework.
And if you’re wrong, you’re wrong! That’s life.
But I’ll be damned if I just memorize some charts and play without any logic, which is why I will no longer be advocating any kind of rote memorization when it comes to preflop.
But then again, I’m a random guy who has yet to break a plateau of 5 figures in profit so take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I’ll revisit this once I can consistently make 6 figures off of poker.