[BJK]

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I play a decent standard of poker, and i'm sure i am a winning player and my stats and results read good.

BUT, why do i keep making 1 or 2 mistakes in say a 2 hour session. I'm not saying i don't make other mistakes as i'm not Phil Ivey. What i'm talking about are mistakes where i know what to do but for some reason i make a different play and realise its the wrong play as soon as ive made it.

SOOO frustrating as i know its eating away slowly at my win rate.

Is this common? Is it rare to go a session without making what should be easily avoidable mistakes.

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You need a process. I play mostly live limit while using the internet to learn new games at micro-levels. When I play on the internet, I always make a lot more mistakes than when I play live. As a result, my internet winrate is about half of what my live winrate is.

However, you have to realize that not only can you never completely eliminate mistakes when you play, but you also have to be able to understand that there are different kinds of mistakes. Forgetting to count a backdoor draw as an out is a small mistake. Capping the river with two pair without realizing that there is a possible straight can be a big mistake. However, capping the flop with top two pair against a maniac who just happened to get lucky and flop a set on that hand is not a mistake.

I was going to say that I make about twenty to twenty five mistakes a session, but then I read the quote from Barry Greenstein. I'll amend that a bit for humor's sake. In the game I play, I make 20 to 25 mistakes a session. If was playing against Barry Greenstein, I'd probably make 20 to 25 mistakes a hand.

I use what I like to call "the big four" when making decisions. All of my decisions are based on these "big four" questions in this order.

What are my pot odds? If you aren't to the point where your brain automatically calculates pot odds even when partially distracted, you have work to do on your game. In LHE, my brain doesn't automatically adjust to the 3-bet like it does to a 2-bet or a 4-bet. It's something I have to work on. My reasoning is simple. I make mistakes when calculating math in my head, and miscalculating pot odds is a huge mistake. This should be automatic whether you are playing LHE or NLHE.

How many opponents are in the hand? The more opponents there are, the greater the chance is that fewer of your outs are good. If you're holding two overs with an open ender, and there are two flush cards on the table, you'll be lucky to have more than six outs against six opponents, but there is a good chance that you could have as many as 21 outs if you're heads up.

What could my opponent(s) possibly have? This goes along with level 3 and level 4 thinking. What does my opponent think I have, and what does my opponent think that I think he has? In LHE, I tend to stick with the first two questions. In NLHE, I ask the third question to myself a lot, but that doesn't mean I always get the right answer.

With everything above considered, how many outs do I have? Even if I think I'm in the lead, I'll be looking at redraw possibilities and backdoor draws.

And then I make my decision. Believe it or not, after time, you will get good enough at asking yourself these questions so that it will take mere moments to make your decisions.