Three Important Things We’ve Learned From Jonathan Little’s Stream
What do you need to do to crush online MMTs like a beast? Established poker coach and professional player Jonathan Little has three answers for you - all at once. He shares them on his latest stream on Twitch and YouTube, so we took the liberty of creating a short summary for all those lovers of text-based learning. Enjoy!
Secret #1: Choose Beatable Games
As Jonathan says in the first part of his stream:
A nifty thing about online poker is that you figure out pretty quickly if you are a winner or a loser in the game, because you play many more hands per hour. If you're playing live poker, you may play 25 hands an hour in a tournament, maybe 30, whereas when online you can play more like 40 or 50 hands per hour.
So you figure out in theory twice as fast if you're winning or losing. And that's if you're only playing one table at a time. So it is vitally important that you play in games where you have an edge because you're going to get demolished if you don't.
As you can imagine, you can’t crush at poker if you don’t choose your games wisely. As Little suggests, you should only play games when you're certain you have an edge. To ensure this, players need to spend a lot of time studying poker — otherwise, you’ll just be guessing the whole time without any real knowledge or solid understanding of the game.
Without sufficient poker knowledge you'll easily find yourself in situations when your opponents have the upper hand. Thus, they'll have an edge, while you'll just be blindly guessing in hopes to breaking even.
In order to buy some time and figure out your poker strategy, you also should consider starting your poker journey with low buy-ins:
Essentially, the games online are way tougher than they are alive at comparable stakes, so you need to start playing really small initially. A lot of people don't like this. They want to think that they're way better than they are, they don't want to study — they want to hop into big games. And it doesn't work.
Jonathan also recommends tracking your results by using tools such as Hold'em Manager or Poker Copilot. These help you keep track of all the information in your poker sessions. Still, what's most important — these software helps to identify your own weak spots, you can work to overcome either individually or with the help of professional coaches.
Secret #2: Don’t Hesitate to Play a Lot of Tables
Any poker journey begins with playing against people who already have some experience with the game. Thus, your primary goal here is to get take in as much as you can — as Jonathan says:
You are going to want to make a point to learn to play as many tables at the same time as you reasonably can.
The last bit, when Little says, "as you reasonably can" means that you should play as many tables as you can without it affecting the quality of your game. You don’t need to open an endless amount of tables and compete at who can click the fastest — quantity should never take precedence over thoughtful.
Thus, Jonathan recommends simultaneously starting a small yet comfortable amount of tournaments — it can be even be just one. Then, you should slowly increase the amount when you realize that you handle it without breaking a sweat and still keep an eye out for valuable information:
You do need to pay attention to things like hands people showdown at the river. In online poker you can click a button to show the hand history and it will show you what they had.
It's very very important so make sure you're paying attention to the things that actually matter like relevant information and not things like: «This guy raises a timer two preflop therefore I think he's loose». You don't need to make up a bunch of nonsense.
Each time you want to increase the number of tables without losing quality, you can always move down to lower stakes for practice, going back after you feel comfortable with your poker skill level.
Secret #3: Exploit Everyone You Can
Use the knowledge you accumulate of other players to gain the upper hand. When you have regular opponents — use stats from your database on them to exploit their weaknesses. As Jonathan says:
If you see some player that you have a decent amount of stats on — meaning you have a decent number of hands — then you should really be adjusting to what they are doing correctly and you want to get somewhat granular with this.
In cases where you're faced with a novel opponents or you don’t have enough data about their strategy — use an accumulated database on the field:
Say, you're playing against someone and you have no clue what they do wrong because they are new to you. Well, you're going to want to exploit them based on how the recreational player pool plays in general.
Sometimes it's going to bite you in the butt because some players, who you have no stats on, are going to play very differently than the player pool in general, but on average that's going to result in you making more money.
Heads-Up Display (HUD) software can help you gather information, but you still need to be careful with it. Not every poker website allows this type of program. For example, the GGNetwork strictly prohibits this software, but still provides players with their own built-in HUD. Thus, always check the FAQ section and “Terms of Service” on official websites or ask for support/client service before launching any tracker or HUD software.
If you'd like to see everything Jonathan Little had to say, check out the full video below!
