by Steve Paul-Ambrose
One of the first things you learn playing poker is to avoid being results oriented. This is a pretty hard lesson for most; after losing a bunch of flips, shoving into aces or busting on the bubble it's hard not to second guess yourself and let the results affect you even if you know the play was right. The results of a hand are often a terrible way to decide if you made good decisions during the hand. On the other hand, your results over thousands of tournaments are generally a good indicator of how well you played during that time span, but let's stick to individual hands. Basically I want to look at when you can use the results to judge your play and when you can't.

Let's start with an obvious one: it folds to the small blind who goes all in for 10 big blinds. You are the big blind, look down at AKs and call. Unfortunately the small blind has AA and you lose. Hopefully no one looks at that hand and says: "I shouldn't have called there, next time I have AKs in that situation I'll fold!" Now a slightly more difficult one, same scenario but you have KTo. This is much more opponent specific, there are lots of people you should call against and some you should fold against. But you've only been at the table a few orbits so you don't have much of a read. Let's assume you call and take a look at three scenarios:

1. SB has AK
2. SB has QJs
3. SB has 72o

In the first scenario, these results are essentially meaningless. Yes it was a "bad" call against his specific hand, but it's quite possible that he was shoving any two cards. AK is any two cards so when he looked at that, he shoved. If you had seen this player in this spot a number of times and he folded a lot but when he shoved and got called he had a big hand, that's useful information. Him showing AK this time is not.

The second situation is similar except in this case we made a "good" call based on his hand. But his shoving QJs doesn't really indicate anything about whether our call is good or not.

The third situation is the one where the results clearly indicate that our call is good. If he's shoving 72o there we can reasonably assume he's shoving any two cards in which case we're about a 60/40 favorite against his range and calling is clearly the right play.
How can you use this to improve your play? Instead of analyzing your play based on the hand you were up against one time, try to use the results to create a range of hands for your opponent and do your analysis based on that.

Sometimes the results will not really be helpful (the AK and QJs examples), sometimes they will do the job for you (72o). In general though they will provide at least some insight and give you a better chance to make an accurate analysis and allow you to make better decisions next time a similar situation arises.

by Steve Paul-Ambrose

Often when playing poker you'll instinctively know that a given raise, call or fold is right and make it. That's an important skill, but often not knowing why can get you in trouble. A good example of this: in the ante stage of a tournament, it folds to you on the button. You look down at 72o and you make a raise. Now your reasoning for this raise is likely "the blinds are tight, I can win the blinds and antes most of the time" and you'd often be right to an extent. But it's still instructive to look at why you can raise any two cards, and particularly how that impacts your decisions when your raise doesn't win the blinds.

Generally in this spot between the antes and the blinds the pot will be 2.5x the big blind, and your raise size will be about the same. So for a raise to show an immediate profit, it has to work 50% of the time. Looking at it individually, if your opponents each play 30% of their hands, your raise will work .7*.7=49% of the time. So if you think they're looser than that, your raise is likely not best. So now your reasoning for the raise might look more like: "I think the blinds are tight and will each only play 20% of their hands. My raise will work more than 50% of the time, so I will raise." Great. The problem for most people comes when their opponents call (we'll ignore when they reraise because I think we can all agree that you should just fold your 72o when that happens).

For most people when their raise gets called and their opponent checks, they put out a continuation bet. They showed strength preflop and the only way to win is to bet right? I'd say that's wrong for two reasons. First, your opponent, not you, is the one who showed real strength preflop, by calling he's narrowed his range from a random hand to a hand in the top 20%. You on the other hand raised with 72o so raising isn't exactly showing that you have a stronger than random hand. Secondly, we've determined that the preflop raise shows a profit. It's a lot harder to demonstrate that a continuation bet will, particularly when we know that our opponent has a stronger than normal hand. So in other words, betting is the only way we can lose by turning our profitable preflop raise into a potentially unprofitable situation by continuing to try to win the pot when our opponent has shown strength.

Now that's not to say you should never continuation bet after raising 72o there. Just before you do, you should understand why, and why you raised preflop in the first place.