Poker is a game of choices

Poker is a game of choices; whether you win or lose the pot you're currently in, every time you make a mistake in poker, you ultimately lose money.

If you want to make money instead, without having to rely on being lucky, you need to cut down those mistakes, plain and simple.

The most acute way to eliminate mistakes from your game is to learn from the ones you do make.

To learn from a mistake, you have to:

1. Make the mistake
2. Understand and admit it was a mistake
3. Figure out what the better move would have been
4. Figure out why that's the better move
5. Apply it to your game.

The Why

Once you figure out the optimal choice, you need to decipher exactly why it's the best choice.

It's important not to gloss over this. Knowing what the optimal choice was in one specific hand is of almost zero help to you as a player.

You need to break it down to the roots of the problem and the reasons behind the solution. Once you understand the "why," you can apply it to your skill set and use it when faced with a similar situation in the future.

Memorizing hands and plays can only get you so far.

Application

This is the most crucial part. All of this analytical work is useless if you don't apply the final result to your game.

If you understand the mistake, figure out where the leak is, uncover how the leak got there, but then never plug it, you're just going to sink again once you touch the water.

Figure out the best play, figure out why it's the best play, figure out why you didn't make it in the first place, and then fix the problem.

The more you do this, the fewer mistakes you'll make and the less severe the ones you do make will become.

There's very little room to improve on the hands and situations you already play well, so concentrate on the parts of your game you handle poorly.

Fix the mistakes, and you'll lose far less money. In the end, that translates into winning more.