Decisions, decisions, decisions. Poker is a game of decisions. But not all of them are equally important, and not all of them are critical. Things that occur all the time are important. Even when a loss attributed to a wrong decision is small, it eventually adds up.

Always defending your small blind in Hold’em, for example, illustrates the point. Suppose while playing online in $2-$4 Texas hold’em, with $1 and $2 blinds, you always defend your small blind — even with abysmally weak hands like 7h-2c. Based on the random distribution of cards, you’re typically dealt such a throwaway hand about one-third of the time.

At 60 online hands per hour — a typical pace in cyberspace cardrooms if the game is running efficiently and most players are attentive and have good Internet connections — you’re dealt the small blind six times every 60 minutes. If you always call, you wind up calling twice each hour when you really shouldn’t. That’s only $2 each hour, but if you play ten hours per week, at the end of the year you’ve given away well over a thousand dollars unnecessarily. Sobering thought, isn’t it?

Costly Decisions Matter Too
Decisions costing a significant amount of money, while not occurring often, are very important. Suppose all the cards have been dealt, and your opponent bets into a fairly large pot. If you call when you should have folded and your opponent wins the pot, that’s an error, but not a critical one. It cost only one bet. But if you fold the winning hand, that’s a grievous error, because now the cost of that mistake is the entire pot.

We’re certainly not advising you to call every time someone bets on the river. But remember: Calling doesn’t have to be correct too often to pay off handsomely over time. If the cost of a mistaken fold is ten times the price of a mistaken call, you need to be correct only slightly more than ten percent of the time to make calling worthwhile.

Early Decisions Matter Most:

Early choices usually mean more than later ones because of their impact on subsequent decisions. Whenever you make an incorrect move up front, you run the risk of rendering each subsequent decision incorrect as well. That’s why your choice of starting hands is usually much more critical than how you play on future betting rounds.