The rake is 1 reason, and the blind/ante structure is another. I've posted some of this before but not in it's entirety

THE RAKE

Contrary to popular belief, the player who wins the pot is not the only person who contributes to the rake. Let me use a very simple example to explain this a little better.

Suppose four people sit in a game that takes a $2 rake on the flop. If every player calls the initial bet when the rake is taken each person would have contributed $.50.

However, if only three of those people call the initial bet than those three people will have contributed about $.67 each to the rake, while the player who folded contributed nothing.

Think about that for a minute; if money is taken on every flop, a very normal practice both online and in cardrooms, than every flop you see you will be contributing money to the rake. This is a little known secret that is rarely talked about. You hear people talking about playing tight for a variety of strategic reasons, but never discussing how every time you call you lose money to the rake.

Lets go back to our hypothetical game, only this time there are ten players. If an average of four people are seeing the flop and you are playing every hand, you would be contributing $.50 a hand to the rake.

If you played only 20% of your hands this number would decrease to $.10 a hand. As you can see a tight player has more advantages than just better starting hands. It may cost 1 player $12 an hour to play $2/$4 Hold Em while another only pays $6, the tighter you play the cheaper it is to play.

It should be clear to you now that playing marginal hands, even for single bets from late position, is a losing proposition. Every time you enter a pot you are losing money, make sure you are entering pots with quality hands where the small amounts lost to the rake will not hurt the expected return of the hand. Let the bad players pay the rake every single hand while you only get involved with your quality hands.

THE BLIND/ANTE STRUCTURE

Depending on the blind or ante structure you will also have to tweak how tightly you play. The blinds and antes are the cost of playing poker, without blinds or antes everyone would simply wait for the very best hand before playing. The blinds and antes give you something to contest for from the outset.

Lets suppose you play $5/$10 Seven Card Stud with a $.50 ante. Therefore, every eight hands you will ante $4. Let’s also assume that you will be the $2 bring in once every eight hands as well. This gives us a total loss of $6 for every eight hands you play, or $.75 a hand.

The proper strategy for this game would be to play extremely tight. If you were to play and win 1 hand out of 20 you would only need to win a pot in the $25 range to show a profit, pretty easily accomplished in a $5/$10 game.

If our $5/$10 Stud game had a $1 ante it would be correct to loosen up, since every pot will start with $10 instead of $6 and the cost to play would be $1.25 a hand. If you played one hand out of 20 in this scenario you would need to win around $35-$40 to show a profit. As the blinds and antes increase you will need to loosen up.

If we look at two $5/$10 Hold Em games, one with a $5 big blind and a $2 small blind, the other has blinds of $5 and $3. In these scenarios it would be correct to play tighter in the cardroom that has a $2 small blind since it is cheaper to play this game.

In the $2 small blind game you are paying $.70 a hand, in the $3 blind game $.80. You might say well it’s only a dime how much of a difference can it make? Quite a bit when you stop and think about it.

Imagine, you play 25 hours of poker a week at a pace of about 50 hands an hour. Over the course of a year that ten cents a hand would add up to $6,500! Not quite chump change for a $5/$10 player.

Another example of using the blind structure to determine how tight or loose you will play is if there is a kill. At Foxwoods all of their $5/$10 limit games have a full kill at $100, what this means is that any time a pot is won by a single individual where the total pot is over $100 the next hand will be played at the $10/$20 limit with the winner posting a $10 blind in addition to the normal $5 and $2 blinds.

Now a savvy player will understand the potential in this type game, you can basically play hands of $10/$20 poker for $5/$10 blinds! What does this do for our starting hand requirements? Very simply it tells us TIGHTEN UP! Unfortunately, most players see the extra blind as more money to fight over and decide to loosen up. The error here is that you do not have to post the $10 blind (unless you won the previous pot), unlike the $5 and $2 blinds which are automatic every round.

Playing $10/$20 Texas Hold Em will cost you $15 every ten hands in blinds, or $1.50 a hand. On the other hand, if you play in a $5/$10 kill game it will cost you only $.70 a hand. You can clearly see that you are getting a huge bargain when you play kill pots, and it is not unusual for a game like this to have 50% or more of the pots killed.

Most of your opponents in this game will incorrectly loosen up on kill pots because they want to win a big one, or feel their pot odds have increased tremendously with the additional $10 blind, when the correct strategy is to play even tighter, since the individual cost of playing has decreased.

Generally you either have patience or you don't, it's not really an aquired skill. You need to really be cognizant of it either way. Admitting you have a problem is the first step though. I have some really cool stuff on patience that I'll post in the coming days. But for now;

Think of it this way: Everytime you play a hand that has a negative expectation you have just eliminated one of the few hands that has a positive expectation for you. That winning hand now goes straight to paying for your bad habit.

If you play perfectly you don't have much of an edge to begin with, don't give away any more than you have to. For every hand you know you shouldn't be playing there's probably 5 others that you are unaware of.

You need to be patient, and more importantly stay patient. You're turn will come, don't force it, just let it happen.

Thanks steve, that was very interesting.

Great post Steve.

Rockamama, there are definitely times when you can justify playing a marginal holding when on a dry run of cards. You don't want your opponents to think of you as super-tight, you need to keep that aggressive image, so throwing in the odd garbage raise (best to do it in position mind) is needed to protect you for the monsters that will eventually come.

In saying that, patience is a huge aspect of the game. Multi-tabling helps as you see more hands, but maybe try and concentrate on the action when you have folded and guess peoples hands/figure out betting patterns/write notes etc. That's something I find useful.

Originally Posted by davidab157

Multi-tabling helps as you see more hands, but maybe try and concentrate on the action when you have folded and guess peoples hands/figure out betting patterns/write notes etc. That's something I find useful.

I was going to suggest multi-tabling, but the other is useful as well.

I used to be insanely impatient, and then (I kid you not) I started taking the bus. That upped my patience to near-saint like levels. Then I started camping Gornit for a Drogmar (I know you have no idea what I said there). Let's just say that I was sitting for about 6 hours a day, staring at a computer screen, doing nothing, for about a month.

Yeah.