Qualities of a Poker Pro

The title of this thread is also the title of a thread on the twoplustwo.com poker forums, where we have been discussing what qualities a player must have be a successful pro.  There seems to be general agreement that experience should be near the top of that list.  I disagree.

I posted the flollowing on 5/25/2014:

Experience matters only to a point. If you have been playing for 10 years, that experience doesn't matter much if you're not doing the right things.

Getting really good at something is hard. There is almost always grunt work to be done, and it isn't glamorous or fun. Yo-Yo Ma, one of the most famous classical musicians in the world (he has played at the White House and been a character on the Simpsons--how many cellists can say that?) has been known to spend six straight hours in his hotel room practicing scales.

What does that have to do with poker players? We have to do our grunt work. We have to memorize odds and outs. We have to know equities, and we can't estimate how much equity we have in a hand unless we can put villian on a range.

I do a lot of brute force memorization. For example, one pro says in his book that when he is playing deep, if the situation is right, he will open with 20% of his hands, including small pairs and suited connectors from every position.

So, I played around with PokerStove. I started with all pairs and suited connectors. Then I added high card combinations until I had 20% of possible hands. I broke that down by position, assuming that the weakest high card hands in that range would be played in the later positions. Then I put those ranges on 7 flash cards (positions 1-5, cutoff and small blind, and button) and I memorized them.

Now when I encounter a player like that (Normad Chad says that Daniel Negreanu has suited connectoritis) I will have a very good idea what his range looks like. Or I could use that range against certain tables or players, or just to change gears and keep everyone guessing.

Of course my way is not the only way. I work a lot with poker books. Others buy very few books and prefer to spend more time on coaching sites. But the truth is that there are lots of people out there that have played for ten years but didn't get better.

Playing for ten years isn't the same as doing the work required to be great. Most of those ten year veterans don't run equities on Pokerstove, or review their hand histories, or learn what a 10% range looks like, or study tells, or sign up for a coaching site. The word for that is fish.