While I was on the Internet today, I came across an article by one of my favorite poker players – Daniel Negreanu.  In the article Negreanu talks about how there are far too many poker players out there today obsessing about the little things when it comes to poker strategy.  He said they spend too much time trying to figure out stuff like if they’re a 56.2% or 51.8% favorite going into a poker hand. 

To sum things up he says, “the minor details of many poker hands are often unimportant and simply not worthy of in-depth analysis. Worrying about these insignificant details won’t have much effect on your bankroll at the end of the year.”  I definitely agree with these thoughts and I really liked his explanations for what players should be focusing on instead of minute statistics. 

Negreanu instead advises people to look at the bigger picture by spending more time reading opponents at the table and studying psychological aspects of poker.  Getting more in-depth, he also advises people to do a number of other things such as:

– Not calling frequent all-in bets just because you think one is bluffing.
– Avoiding bluffing away large amounts of chips.
– Making big bets in order to protect your great hands so you don’t become the victim of bad beats.
– Automatically calling hands that will only take 5% of your chip stack when you think it’s the correct play (it’s only a small error if you were just a little off in your calculations).

I definitely like this advice from Negreanu and I think that it puts a lot of things in a much bigger perspective.  I think that too many people are worried about shaving every single poker statistic down to the smallest detail when they’re probably getting away from the more important stuff by doing this.  Plus doing too much hardcore number crunching just makes the game less fun.