26 Apr 2024 mental game studying discipline The online poker industry has changed a lot in the last 20 years. The number of poker rooms has grown, the average level of players has risen, and, as a result, a lot of poker schools have appeared. Nowadays, almost anyone can reach a high level of play if they take their training seriously. Today we will look at the most effective options for learning cash poker online and take your game to the next level. Ways to learn cash poker There are three most effective ways to train cash game: Classes with a coach. You can find them on poker forums and specialized sites like GetCoach. The chosen mentor already has a lot of experience in the game and will help the beginner / advanced player to identify and correct gross mistakes in strategy. Poker courses. These are projects where cash poker training is offered on a paid basis. The format is simple and effective: students take a course under the supervision of a coach or a whole coaching team, get access to the group, where they can communicate and ask any questions. CFP (Coaching For Profit) Baking Funds. These are the most serious projects in the field of poker «education». The funds (poker schools) have a consistent teaching methodology, a team of coaches, and provide professional software. They also sponsor players by providing funds to play. Most poker foundations teach MTT poker, i.e. how to win tournaments, but there are some that specialize to crush cash games. Coaching For Profit: Starting Career w/o Bankroll You can learn to play poker on your own (create your account, enter your email, first name, last name, create password, etc.), but it will be a long process and it will hurt your wallet. After all, mistakes in this game are expensive, and you will have to learn about them through experience. The advantage of personal training and poker schools is that they have a well-established teaching methodology and provide everything necessary for the player to develop more quickly. Why individual cash game poker coaching is priceless If it is crucial for you to achieve results in poker in the near future, there is no better way to improve your game than practicing with a personal tutor. The fact is that self-study requires high skills of personal effectiveness in the field of education. And even possessing them, sometimes it is difficult to separate the really important and useful from the secondary, which eventually leads to a large expenditure of time and effort with loss of motivation to develop further in poker. This happens because of the insufficient financial result compared to the invested efforts. Of course cash game pokercoaching is an additional expense, but the result can quickly become tangible: there will be inspiration and motivation to play and develop, and on such «wings» it’s much easier for the player to achieve a significant result, which will be a reason for him to develop in this profession further. It also happens and vice versa, that after lessons with a coach, the player realizes that poker is not his environment. It’s life and everything possible. A qualified coach dispels various illusions of the student and directs him to the path of disciplined work to crush cash games. If a person is not ready for this, he simply quits poker or leaves it as a hobby, thus freeing up a lot of energy for other activities, energy that could have been wasted on poker during years of ineffective self-study. Most importantly, the entire workout is dedicated to you. Here what else does the trainer and his masterclass can teach you during individual sessions: Gain up-to-date knowledge. Fill any existing gaps in the math aspects of the game. Correctly prioritize game skills. Develop discipline and a responsible approach to the cash game; Structure accumulated knowledge. Properly customize the game schedule. Understand the methodology of effective self-education. Properly organize working time. Learn quick ways to implement new strategic skills. Identify the psychological factors that reduce the quality of your game. Get information on how to work through these factors and take your psychology to the next level. Example of teaching a cash game with a trainer For better understanding, here is an example of classic coaching sessions. It may include next: The student's hand base is dealt with in detail. Homework with useful free materials is assigned. Deviations in statistics from the optimal preflop poker strategy are calculated. Detailed explanations on this topic are given. Deviations in postflop statistics are determined through a large number of stats. The coach explains how to correct them. Win rates in EV / BB, as well as in different positions and stack sizes are checked. The weak parts of the ranges are identified through HM3 filters. The trainer visually shows the student's minus actions. Obviously, this is far from a complete list. It is all individual and depends on the specific situation. The coach may consider strategic deviations in the player's playing ranges, leaks in sizing, gaps in the mathematical components of the game, lines of play on postflop, building logical chains of analysis of the game situation and so on. The coach also works out weaknesses in poker strategy, checks the level of discipline of the student, explains how to use statistics correctly and optimally, sets the range of opponents and other important aspects of cash games. Working on poker psychology As practice shows, playing in tournaments is much easier. If you are just learning, the learning process will be easier and less costly for you. Playing cash games, you gain experience and knowledge faster. By the way, more players move from cash to tournament poker than vice versa. From a psychological point of view, cash is a more complex poker discipline. That's why, in addition to proper technique and poker strategy, psychological barriers must be overcome. This is one of the underrated stages, as you will eliminate most of the problems at the stage of their inception. In his training sessions, the coach notices signs of certain markers that indicate a player's suboptimal perception of events at the table. After what he sees, he directs the student to watch or read text / video materials on a particular topic. Reasons why a mental game coach is good for: Sort yourself out and learn to control your behaviors and actions in different emotional states. Find psychological reasons for failures and problems in your life. Accelerate the maturation and maturation of the psyche by working through aggravated areas. Resolve inner conflicts. Motivation and energy will reach a new level. Quality of life, psychological stability and harmony will improve. Improvement in the psychological component will definitely lead to an overall improvement in your condition, which will be appreciated by others. This we will tell you from personal experience. Periodic consultations with a good psychologist are 100% necessary. Where’s harder to become a pro — comparing cash & MTT In the GTO era, the poker community is once again asking the old question: which discipline is harder to succeed in — cash or MTT? This question has always been (and will always be) highly debatable. There will probably never be a common opinion here, but it can be useful to discuss this topic. Any single hand in a cash poker game is almost always more difficult than in a tournament because the stacks here are usually deeper. An effective stack of 100-200 big blinds is harder to play with than a 30 BB stack, because with deeper stacks you have more options in terms of bet sizing, and you're more likely to have to make decisions on all poker stages. For this reason, a tournament player will have a harder time getting acclimated to cash games than a cash player in MTTs. However, tournament strategy in general involves many more variables, so your skills should be much broader here: You must be able to play deep, medium, short and micro stakes; You should know the concept of ICM and be able to play the bubble; You must understand the nuances of multiple formats such as progressive knockout tournaments and satellites; You should be able to play full table, short table and heads-up; You have to make more decisions not directly related to the hand: late registration, final table deals, and more. From a psychological standpoint, you have to play well throughout the tournament, not being able to sit out or leave the table when things don't go your way. Not to mention the fact that you may have to contend with a tilt if you get knocked out of the tournament and can't continue playing. In a cash game, each individual hand has a much more extensive decision tree, but the same spots are repeated over and over again. In a tournament, you'll often find yourself in a situation you've never played in before. For example, playing K-K in cut-off position early in a tournament is not the same as playing K-K on the heads-up table, or two spots before the final table with a 25 BB stack, or with a micro-stack on the final table when the small blind has gone into a sitout due to a disconnect. The point is that an experienced cash player will see the same spots often enough to make many difficult decisions on automatic. Cash players can often rely on their experience in these situations. But this is much less true for tournament players: they have to improvise a lot more and make decisions on the fly, even though their decision tree is often not as large. In cash, the opponents are stronger, but the game is easier to calculate. Now do you understand why real-time assistants (RTAs) are more dangerous for cash games than for MTTs? In a cash poker game, such a solver can easily access calculated hands similar to the one you're in — simply because it has a large database. The MTT discipline is certainly not immune to RTA, but since there are so many more variables in tournaments, the solver will have to do many times more calculations to find the right solution, and that's where the power of modern computers comes in. Francesco Campioni: Cash Games or MTT? A similar comparison can be made between chess and poker. In theory, chess is easier to win because there are fewer variables. This is why chess was calculated by artificial intelligence 20 years earlier than it started to happen with poker. However, poker is a harder test of general intelligence because it requires more reflective thinking. Does this mean that elite poker players are more «advanced» than chess grandmasters? Not at all! If we talk about mental abilities, perhaps chess players are more advanced. This poker game has gone through many more stages of evolution and has been around for many centuries, which implies higher complexity at the highest levels. But if you target the same artificial intelligence to learn both games from a very beginning, poker will be much harder for it to master. The same can be said about cash players compared to MTT players. Probably the best poker players of today are cash players, but if a genius is taught to play poker from scratch, it will be more difficult for him to reach the world level in tournaments than in cash. Why do you need a cash game coach? This is a relevant question not only for newbies who are just about to register a new account in a poker room or go to their first offline series, but also for players who play successfully at absolutely any limits, especially microstakes. It’s usually at this time that you get the feeling that you will be able to roll mountains and win your first million very soon. We recommend that you don't give in to your emotions and do the smart thing: spend some of your winnings on poker training with the help of professional tutors. If you want to get quality cash training, it would be best to join one of the schools. The foundations know how to turn beginners into professionals. GetCoach is considered one of the best teams at the moment. All the projects on the list provide decent training and profitable CFP backing. If you are planning to train, contact our agent and get favorable terms of cooperation. It’s everything you need to know before you start!