If you think that it is wild and free-spirited to be a poker player, think again, this is one game where decision making is pivotal to winning, and boy do you have to make a lot of decisions. Poker games can be tight and passive, loose and aggressive feature solid opponent or fruit cakes. They all have different circumstances which call for the need to make different decisions. Rarely will any poker player find the circumstances of a game to be completely by-the-book.

This is all part of the many integral processes of playing poker – judgment calls have to be made and this calls for strong decision making skills. Every single poker game provides the player with an opportunity for exercising thought and taking decisions which are called upon to influence the outcome of the game to be on his or her side.

Every iota of knowledge and ability must be drawn from the ability to make decisions and the poker player also has to create opportunities for decision making. It is impossible to play perfect poker, and no player should wait for opportunities to fall into their lap, they have to make them and take them. If a player is good at seizing opportunities and making decisions they will have an edge over players who don’t have these skills.

In playing poker, the “what” is what you see happening, the “how” and “why” remain secret to some degree. A poker player who focuses on the “what” in other words, what they can see and forgets about the “how” and “why” because they are partly hidden, will never make a good player. Delving deep into decision making sees great poker players doing just this. They study, they analyze and they draw conclusions and make decisions; in particular if a game is a mass of contradictions; which poker most often is.

A poker player who makes the correct decisions because they are correct is going to win time and again in comparison to players who do something right by accident. Knowing why and how a decision is made is a very important skill. Yes, some players do stumble upon doing something right every now and then, but if they only see what they did and not how and why, it is highly unlikely they will learn a lesson.

It is for this reason that you see some poker players trying to get close to pros they have played and lost against to ask them questions about the game. They want to know the how and the why the pro did what they did to win. Not only the what, which is the action itself and they could see – what decisions did the pro make to get to the “what”?

This is not an easy matter – learning how and why a specific decision was made and how and why it worked. Chances are the next time they play the circumstances will differ greatly, but the more of these decision making skills the poker player has, for as many different circumstances as possible, the sooner that bottomless pit of decision making possibilities begins to fill up. This is what makes poker playing a lifetime learning process!