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Schooling is a belittling term used to describe what weak-loose poker players do as a defense mechanism. (Sheep flock; fish school.) If a pot is fairly small on the turn in Holdem, and the player with the best hand bets, any single player with only a gutshot draw will be making a significant mistake by calling. But now suppose several other people call too, with different gutshot draws. Because these other players are playing bad also, now the pot has grown to the point where the gutshot draws are getting better pot odds on their calls. These bad calls “school” together and miraculously become not-so-bad calls!

Schooling is part of the reason many reasonable players complain that they are unable to beat loose games. Everybody going to the river, sucking out every possible draw, how can a sensible player make a hand “hold up” and beat such a game? Well, it’s not hard really. A winning player merely wins money differently (and with higher variance) in these games. Schooling is actually profitable to good, winning players, but it does take a little analysis to see why. One column can’t do justice to this topic, but maybe an example will help some people start having the right idea on how to view schooling.

Suppose you are playing $10/20 Holdem. In the big blind you have A9 (suits don’t matter here). Six people limp in, you check. The flop is AT5. Not so great, but you bet to see what happens. All six of your opponents call. Uh-oh, you start thinking about checking and mucking on the turn. But the turn card miraculously comes another Ace! You bet $20 into the $140 pot.

Via the magic of being able to make this stuff up, it turns out our six opponents have KQ, KJ, QJ, 43, 42, and 32. Of the 34 possible remaining cards in the deck, only 2 make a winner for each individual opponent. That’s 16-1 against them. When it comes to the first player, let’s say the KQ, he has to put in $20 at $160. He’s only getting 8-to-1 on a 16-to-1 draw. Bad call. But now as each subsequent player also calls, when it gets around to the 32, he has to put in $20 at a $260 pot. He’s getting 13-to-1 on his 16-to-1 draw. His call is not nearly so bad as the KQ’s call! That’s schooling, but the schooling of the other players has now also turned the KQ’s call into not nearly so bad a call — likewise for all the other players.

But we don’t care about them, we care about our A9. If everybody had folded when we bet the turn, we get the $140. After 100 times, we’d be $14,000 ahead. But now what about when they all call? It turns out that A9 will end up winning about 65% of the time. So, after a hundred times, 65 times we get another $120 (six turn calls of $20 each), assuming nobody ever tries to bluff or calls a bet by us on the river. The 35% of the time we lose, we lose our $20 turn bet, plus any action on the river. Just to pick some numbers, I suggest we lose one bet on the river 50% of the time (when the river card is a king, queen or jack) and two bets the other 50% of the time (when the river card comes a four, three or deuce). So we lose an average of $30 on the river — $50 total that 35% of the time the school draws out on us. What this works out to be is a decent extra profit per hand for the A9. The schooling helped our opponents, but it is still more profitable for us for them all to call — to the tune of about $11.50 a hand. (65 wins of $260 = $16,900. 35 losses of $50 = $1750. Total profit = $15,150, or $1150 more than the $14,000. Also note that the 35 times we lose, we lose the $20 we invested in the pot to that point, or $700. However, that is not what we are analyzing here. We are looking at our situation on the turn. That $20 is already in the pot. It isn’t ours anymore. The before the flop action and flop calls by the other players have their own schooling ramifications.)

Now some people might prefer getting the $14,000 profit after 100 incidents of hands like this with everybody folding when our A9 bets the turn — zero variance, win 100% of the time. It is about $1150 more profitable though for the A9 to live with the variance of having everybody calling. Most important, the fact that all these folks are calling/schooling is not a dramatically bad thing. A good player playing properly will do just fine against schooling opponents.

But it’s not that simple. If we change the 43 and 42 to 77 and 66, now we are going to win only 59% of the time, with that other 6% (the difference between our 65% and 59%) of the wins going to the 32. The 32 now snares a bunch of the profit in the hand, to the point that we would prefer that everybody would fold, and we just take the $140 each time. However, the A9 is still making money from people playing poorly by calling the turn bet, it just so happens that sometimes the main beneficiary of schooling is the best draw out there (the 32), not the best hand. Sometimes the second best hand benefits the most (in this case the 32 goes from a losing hand to a profitable one when everybody else calls), it all depends on the actual hands and how good their draws are, and how strong the best/most-likely-to-win hand is.

Schooling games give good players two main ways to win — by either playing the best made hand or the best draw. There is more money to be made overall, but you have to make sure your game adapts to get the profit from both these ways.

You beat a schooling game the same way you beat any other game — play smart, appropriate poker.

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Along with the dramatic increase in popularity of poker in general, and Texas Holdem in particular, comes a tidal wave of new players who may not be newbies to poker itself, but definitely are beginners in comparison to experienced players. These beginning players have been influenced significantly by what they have seen on television. While this is cool and all, from a practical standpoint it has some disastrous implications for the beginners wanting to learn how to play Texas Hold’em. (Total novices can start with Texas Holdem Rules.)

To be blunt, if you watch Tiger Woods hook a three iron around a dogleg, over a sand trap, and then stop it on a dime on the green, don’t try this at home, kids. That’s not to say that all poker shown on television is Tiger Woods-like. Far from it. Some of the TV play is hopelessly bad — if only because even the best players sometimes make terrible plays.

The thing newbies need to remember is that the poker hands we see on TV do not well represent what makes a great poker player. First and foremost, the truly great players in all game disciplines master the fundamentals. Ted Williams, Earl Anthony, Magic Johnson, Cheryl Miller, Joe Montana, Martina Navratilova… all these folks spent hours and hours on fundamentals even AFTER they were superstars. In fact, great players devote much of their time to improving at those fundamentals they aren’t particularly good at.

Like any other game, Texas Hold’em has fundamental/basics that aren’t very flashy or readily apparent, but must be mastered (and continually mastered) before excellence can be achieved.

Discipline. No skills matter if you don’t have the wherewithal to follow through. If you know you shouldn’t tilt, but tilt anyway, you suck at discipline. And, you suck as a poker player compared to the poker player you could be. You may still be better than average, but you are a shadow of what you should be. It is almost impossible to work too hard on your discipline.

Bets. The bet is the atom of poker. Chips are electrons and protons, but the bet is the building block of everything good and bad that takes place in poker — if you play for money, that is. If you play to satisfy ego urges, rather than to win money, then you have different priorities, and you’ve blundered onto the wrong website. All ring game poker concepts revolve around the bet. (Tournaments are different. Surviving and being the lone winner are tournament concepts that don’t transfer to ring games.) You are not trying to win pots. You are trying to get the best of it on bets. You are trying to wager money, make bets, with a mathematically favorable expectation. This involves having as a coincidental goal the winning of pots, but that is not the main goal, and certainly not the focus of our efforts. We simply want to get our money in with the best of it. Win or lose, good luck or bad luck, that really is not the point. Let the bad players fixate on the results. You should fixate on doing the right thing.

Having the discipline to do the right thing all the time (more or less) is the basic of the basics.

The blinds. Poker is a thinking person’s game. When bets are made without thinking, either by bad players or when “forced” via the game rules (as blinds or antes are), this is the fundamental money at stake in the contest. Thoughtful play must significantly focus on the bets that are made thoughtlessly! Attack the bad players, and attack the blinds. Thoughtful players have an edge over semi-thoughtful players, but thoughtful players have enormous edges over bets made without thought (again, either by thoughtless/bad players or by any player because they are forced by the rules to make the bet).

Limit versus No Limit. Most of the Holdem on television is No Limit Texas Hold’em tournament poker. This is about as different from Limit Texas Holdem ring game poker as two things of the same species can get. Many of the winning tactics used in No Limit tournaments are either useless or counterproductive in Limit Texas Hold’em ring games. Chainsaws may cut most things better, but butter knifes are more appropriate for some tasks. Just because you saw a skilled lumberjack cut down an oak tree with one doesn’t mean you should use a chainsaw to cut butter.

Starting hands. One of the most poorly considered basics of Texas Hold’em is the fixation novices have on starting hands, with a corresponding focus on starting hand charts and groups. Texas Hold’em is much more of a post-flop game than a pre-flop one, but novices and mediocre players fixate on following guidelines on starting hands. Without learning to understand why you are playing a certain hand, and how you intend to play it after a variety of different types of flops, you are fully missing the point of the game. Learn why and how to play hands, not the simplistic what to play. Learning how to play Texas Hold’em means learning to understand the reasons you are doing the “what” you are doing.

Fundamentals win ball games and poker games and games of every sort. Let the suckers try to buy lunch with their egos. You should focus on the basics of making thoughtful bets when you have the best of it, and then you can focus on buying lunch with your profits — profits courtesy of the bad players, the ego players, and the players who simply don’t work on the fundamentals enough.

There is no reason answer, or chart, or diagram you can refer that teaches you how to play Texas Holdem, if you want to win that is. But following the various links here will lead you through the web of related concepts you need to master.

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