EN 
DE Work on Yourself and Be Boringly Skillful: Dan Cates Advises
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From time to time, various well-known poker players hop on a popular trend and share their experiences and advice with the community. While some limit themselves to a single post or thread, Dan Cates published two threads on different days — and we’ve compiled his advice on one page for anyone interested.
Five Qualities You Need to Develop for Success in Poker
Cates’ top five characteristics of the best poker players, based on his experience, are:
- Extreme accountability
- Being open-minded
- Being obsessed with learning
- Understanding the importance of the mental game
- Constant underestimating of yourself
Each item on this list has a clear rationale according to Dan — let’s go through each one.
Extreme Accountability
It is a necessary trait for success in a game where the temptation to blame variance for everything is too high:
If you go out in the woods and start chopping wood, you will immediately see results tied to your skill of chopping wood. Poker is a game where accountability is much harder to attempt. We can play extremely well and still lose. Play poorly and win. Make a mistake and blame variance. Results do not always equal skill. This makes it far easier to look for excuses.
In Cates’ experience, the best poker players in the industry all follow the same pattern:
Making mistake → blaming themselves → look for what to improve → growth
They are helped in this by high self-awareness and the ability to keep themselves accountable no matter how tempting it may be otherwise.
Openness of Mind
The second most important trait, without which players simply stop developing:
Poker is a highly complex game; even the best learn new things regularly. If you learn from others, drop your ego, and always seek a better answer without bias from what you’ve learned so far, you will go far in poker.
By maintaining an open mind, successful poker players protect themselves from ingraining their mistakes in stubbornness and ego. Without this, long-term success is impossible.
Obsession with Learning
What makes a successful poker player is not a love of the game, but a passion for studying it — deepening knowledge, finding and eliminating errors, and expanding understanding of mathematics:
The best players in the world all went through a period where they studied a lot. If you want to be better than most, you need to know more than most, simple.
The quality of learning is of great importance too. It has to be high quality, ideally combined with working alongside top coaches and players who are at a level above you.
Respect for Mental Game
While the average player spends all their time perfecting the game’s mathematics, a top poker player allocates their time to work on their psychological capabilities:
Poker can be extremely challenging mentally. Imagine telling a none poker player that at the end of the month, after doing a good job, he owes his boss 10k. Mental and financial pressure, constant self-doubt, and all kinds of emotions are very present in a poker player’s day. Therefore, it’s extremely important to build a strong mental game and learn to deal with emotions.
There is no universal formula for working on mental gameplay — different things work for different players, and an experienced mental coach or therapist can help you choose the right ones.
Underestimating Yourself
Poker has the ability to both attract people with big egos and to boost a player’s self-esteem by allowing random chances to work in their favor.
This is why, according to Dan, people who consistently underestimate themselves instead of overestimate them are particularly successful in it:
This is a common trait among successful people. Doubt rather than overestimating yourself. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be confident, but thinking you’re always the best makes growth much harder.
Long-term success cannot be achieved unless you stay in check with reality when it comes to your abilities, responsibilities, and limits.
Four Boring Skills of Solid Poker Pros
Possessing certain qualities isn’t enough to achieve success in poker — players also need to develop certain specific skills that separate true professionals from mere mortals.
Dan identifies four such “boring” skills that he has observed in his most dangerous opponents, especially at high stakes:
- Getting the most out of your value
- Skill of folding
- Understanding the source of your money
- Picking up small, uncontested pots
While their brief description gets the point across quite clearly, Kates does explain it in greater detail for those who might need it.
Getting the Most Out of Your Value
Understanding the sources of value is not enough to succeed — you also need to be able to apply your knowledge in practice:
Our win rate comes from the top of our range. There are spots where good players get villain’s whole stack while the average player doesn’t even get half of that. Use massive sizes, thin value betting, and understand when to fast and slow play. Those are things you need to work on.
A good coach or experienced player can help you develop this skill and stop you from repeating mistakes.
Skill of Folding
While it’s certainly important to know exactly how to play decent hands, knowing when you should fold them is often far more important:
down third pair is televised. 95% of the time, we are just folding. Focus on understanding what thresholds we want to defend in different spots. Start to adjust as soon as your opponent is making mistakes.
Don’t fall in love with your hands: remember that your job is to play them as well as possible — which sometimes means folding them.
Understanding the Source of Your Money
As Dan Cates is sure, understanding where your money comes from is one of the most important skills:
A strong reg opens from EP, you have TT on the BTN, in the blinds are 2 fish. What do we want to do? 3-bet versus the aggressive reg, face a 4-bet a play a massive pot. No obvious not, we always call, play a boring SRP and get both fish in.
Solvers and calculators can help develop this skill, as can a good coach who can clarify when you need to play “boringly” and when you need to be more creative.
Picking up Small, Uncontested Pots
Small pots may seem insignificant one at a time, but they happen more often than big ones and have a big impact on your results:
Again, it sounds boring, a small pot, nothing major, but accumulating them has a massive impact on our win rate. Attack spots where the villain capped himself. Checking twice out of position, checking back in spots where most players would always bet their strong hands. Take advantage of capped ranges!
Just as the devil is in the details, your long-term success hides in the developed skill of methodically winning small pots that weaker opponents will never fight for.
To become successful and make money from poker, you need to constantly improve — so, don’t be shy about asking for help from more experienced players and coaches: that’s how people move forward.
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