Any advice you hear which doesn't prompt you to think about the villain and to make an educated guess at his ranges before and after he responds to your play is bad advice.

Any advice you hear which tells you how to play based solely on your own position, your own cards and the board is bad advice.

Your goal is not to beat the deck, it's to beat the other players at the table.

OK, well... "You should never fold the nuts." is good advice. However, it doesn't tell you whether to bet, x/c or x/r the hand. You must consider how these different lines effect Villain's ranges to evaluate these 3 choices. You should consider how his responses effect your EV and choose your play to maximize EV.

There are many times in poker when you go all-in expecting to lose the hand 66% of the time or more, but you would still go all-in every time you had the chance because the times you win, though infrequent, are worth so much $$ that they makes up for the frequent losses.

As an extreme example, let's say there is a pot of $95 OTT and somehow, Villain is left with an all in bet of $5. Your call of $5 to win $100 means that you only need to win 5% of the time to break even. So if you have at least 3 outs (6.5% chance to hit your draw), you should call. You know you're going to lose $5 93.5% of the time, but that 6.5% that you win is worth $100 and you still make money in the long run. Whereas if you fold to his $5 bet, you make exactly $0 in the long run.


Your goal is not to win hands, it's to make every decision in every hand a +EV decision. Furthermore, your goal is to always be trying to find a more +EV way to play every hand. Just because something is +EV doesn't mean that it is the most +EV thing you could have done.