How High Is Your Poker IQ

In the real world we often comment about people who have “Book Smarts”, but lack common sense. Well, the poker world is no different, and there is an abundance of “Book Smart” players who have no chance of succeeding, because they lack ‘poker common sense’.

You see, in order to truly excel at poker you must have the capability of not only memorizing and learning information, but also the capability to think for yourself and make your own decisions -the acquired information you have learned is simply one aspect of your decision-making process.

You see poker books offer guidelines, not set in stone strategies. It’s impossible to write a 200 or even 400 page book detailing all the aspects of poker: Hell, I could probably write a 400 page book on check-raising alone! There are simply too many circumstances and scenarios you can find yourself in. This is why all poker books should be thought of as guidelines, a framework to assist you in your decision making, not to make the decision for you.

Exactly how many scenarios are there in poker? Did you know that no two decks of cards will ever be shuffled the same (theoretically speaking)? Think about that, there are more combinations of shuffles in a single 52 card deck than there are stars in the Milky Way!

Now factor in the different opponents you will face, and your position, and your frame of mind, and everything else that could be going on, besides the actual randomness of the game. When you consider all of these possibilities you’ll see how poker has an almost-infinite number of situations that could come up, and no book is going to be able to cover even the tiniest fraction of these scenarios. What a poker book can do is teach you the generalities of the game, and help you work through the process of making good decisions.

Because of this, you need to think of a poker book like a cookbook: Just because you followed the recipe to the letter doesn’t mean you can cook like a top chef! With cooking you have to account for different ovens, slight differences in ingredients, and so on. You have to be able to think for yourself and say, “I know the recipe says it has 20 more minutes, but it’s already starting to burn… I should probably take it out now.”

Now a “book smart” person would ignore their common sense, and stick it back in the oven for another 20 minutes, because that’s what the book says to do. Someone with a little common sense would adjust on the fly and take it out. Recognize this trait in yourself?

Poker is no different; no matter what Doyle Brunson or Phil Hellmuth say in their book, sometimes you have to think for yourself: The author isn’t aware of the exact circumstances you are facing (Just like Wolfgang Puck doesn’t know the specifics of your oven, or how small you diced the potatoes). Don’t just read the book and follow the advice: Think about why the advice is correct (or possibly incorrect) and figure out how best to apply it to your game.

What you do is take the recipe, and through some trial and error transform it into something that works for you: And if you cook at someone else’s house you know you will probably have to make a few adjustments again!

Players who understand ‘why‘ they are doing things, are not simply following orders, and can think through situations for themselves have a high poker IQ. Face it, a lot of people go to college for four years, and read countless books, and wind up failing at their chosen profession: And that’s 4+ years of school and upwards of a $100,000 investment! The ability to follow orders can make you a good soldier, but it’s not going to make you general: And in poker the general takes home the money.

So realize this; it takes more than reading and rote memorization to succeed in whatever you plan on doing in life, and this is especially true for poker. Memorizing a couple charts on starting hands and outs, and learning what a check-raise and semi-bluff is, isn’t going to make you a winning player. You need to have a high “Poker IQ” as well.