Understand This Poker Concept And Your Win Rate Will Explode

07 Apr 2025

Beginner

This material is for beginner players

Poker will never feel the same again once you grasp this fundamental concept. This is not an exploit and it’s not about strategy. This goes much deeper and answers the question how you actually make money in poker. And I can confidently say that it is not what you expect. This works both for live poker and online poker and is such a fundamental part of poker strategy that every player needs to understand it. My name is Andreas Wagner. I'm a live low stakes professional poker player based in London and I can tell you that this concept was so eye-opening when I first studied it that poker never felt the same again afterwards. So let's jump right into it!

The way you've been thinking about poker all these years has been wrong. Yes, you heard right. I can almost guarantee that you think about poker like everyone else and therefore you are not maximizing your winnings. But if you understand this one concept that I'm going to teach you in this article, then you can get ahead of 99% of poker players and increase your win rate. And you'll be surprised to see how easy this one is. I'm not talking about an exploit or a physical tell this time, but about something much more fundamental at the core of poker. 

Here is how you probably think poker works:

• You have a good hand. 
• You extract value. 
• You know that you're beat, so you fold. 

Long term, these wins and losses will add up to your win rate. If you're a good player, you will win money. If you're a bad player, you will lose money. And on the surface, this is not wrong. However, where people do get it wrong is here. Let's say you're playing a really tough game and your head's up against a strong opponent. I think he qualifies as a strong opponent. You arrive at the river with a weak pair. So you know that most likely you won't win at showdown. So what do you do? 

Here you only have one option: you go all in as a bluff. Your opponent folds his second pair after much deliberation. You scoop a big pot and you feel proud and happy. You think that you made a lot of money by having had the guts to bluff in this spot. And I don't want to spoil it for you, but the fact that you bluffed there and won the pot does not mean that you added any money to your win rate. 

To make it more obvious, imagine you have  . Villain has  . You both go all in preflop and your Aces hold. Again, you win a massive pot, but you don't add anything to your win rate. How come? Well, it's about something that is called reciprocity. 

If you inverse everything in this hand, so if you are in his position with his cards and he's in your position with your cards, would there be any other outcome to the hand? The answer is no. You would still have got it all in with Kings versus Aces and then you would have lost that big pot. And the same would be true in the previous hand where you bluffed. If villain is really that good, he would have found the same bluff, you would have folded in his shoes and you would be back to square one. 

If we were talking about football or some of you might call it soccer, then this thinking process would be right. If you score three goals and the opponent scores zero goals, then you win. And this is the case for basketball, baseball, cricket, rugby and even tennis, athletics and so on. But poker is a very frustrating game. It's more like the opposite of that. It's not about scoring goals, but making sure not to concede an own goal. Look at this diagram:

If you play well and everybody else also plays well, then you won't win any money. It's like a nil-nil draw in football. If you play absolutely perfectly, you will be at zero. If you make small mistakes, you'll be just under zero. If you make bigger mistakes, you'll be further down. Let's assume that you play perfectly. That's a game theory optimal strategy or GTO. So if everybody else plays perfectly, you would not win anything. 

In fact, you would lose some money because you have to pay a rate. But if your opponent's graph is down here, then the difference between these two lines would be your win rate. The further apart the graphs are, the higher your win rate is, as long as your graph is the one at the top and not the one at the bottom, of course. 

You might now say: «But Andreas, it's all well and good, but how does that actually help me win more money at the poker table?». Okay, so there is one further step that you have to understand. Let's illustrate it with two short example hands. In hand one, you shove the river with the nuts and a good villain calls you with a second nuts. You scoop the pot of $800:

In hand two, you're playing a very soft live one-two game. One player raises the hijack calls, the cutoff calls, the button calls. You are sitting in the small blind and you're looking down at   offsuit:

What do you do in this spot? Hopefully you'll say fold because that's the right answer. You lose your one dollar that you paid for your small blind and the hand is over. Now the big question for you: «In which of these two hands did you increase your win rate?». You might have guessed it! It is the counterintuitive hand two. Because in hand one, you had the nuts, villain had the second nuts. It was a cooler. Had the positions and the cards been reversed, it would have been exactly the same outcome. Just the other way around. 

But in hand two, because it is such a soft game, many of your opponents are so bad that they would have called with  , and that is a big blunder. So while they would have made a mistake, you played it perfectly. And it sounds silly, yes, to say that you played it perfectly when all you did was to fold a hand that you were supposed to fold. But that is exactly the point. 

It's not about fancy bluffs or huge hero calls. It's all about playing fundamentally strong poker where you make fewer mistakes than your opponents. So next time you get annoyed that your card is dead for hours, just remember that you're winning money every single time you fold a hand like   to a race and you don't open   suited in early position because you got bored:

As long as your opponents make these kind of mistakes. When you exploit someone, then all you're doing is playing better than your opponent who made a mistake in that spot. And if you want to learn how to actually find these exploits, then we suggest you read more poker articles on our site. Hope you’ll enjoy it!