Back when I was learning poker, the path that I took was probably similar to the path that many other players take. That was to learn poker in such a way as to play the game in a style that was extremely tight and defensive.

You tend to play this way when you acquire a bit of knowledge by reading a few books. It is only when your knowledge reaches a certain level that you begin to understand that this tight safety first style is really holding you back. Do not get me wrong, there is nothing too bad about playing poker in this way. In fact in many games, you can actually grind out a living by playing tightly throughout.

I quickly found out that this style of playing poker was not for me personally, I found it to be too boring. I call it the Lion and the Spider principle. Both of them are predators in their own world. But they catch their prey in totally different ways. The spider will spin its web and wait for hour after hour and day after day if necessary in order to catch its prey.

The Lion on the other hand takes a far more pro-active route and goes out and actively catches its prey. The Spider is successful in its own right but it cannot catch big pieces of prey because it is limited in size. It will never catch a 500lb Zebra because it is not equipped to kill something of that size.

This applies to how people play poker, they either be the Spider or the Lion. I started out like many others being the Spider but the problem is that there are many others like you all doing the same thing. The Spider population far outweighs the Lion population. The Lion takes great risks to its own personal safety whenever it goes hunting but the reward is big. Also the activity of the Lion is a lot more interesting to watch than that of the Spider.

Whenever you are playing poker like the Spider, other players notice that you are playing tightly…..even on the internet they do. When you see a sign up board with a game that has an average pot size of 15BB. Do you seriously think that this will be YOUR average pot size when you sit down to play in it…..of course it won’t for one simple reason. Tight playing rocks get spotted the easiest of all. You don’t need to be Einstein to spot them, they are obvious because they do a lot of folding.

They are what has become known as “book players”. As a Spider, you will be successful if you wait there long enough just like the tightest player on the table will get paid off by some fool who wasn’t paying attention to how tight they were. But you are never going to earn serious money playing poker this way. I don’t teach players the philosophy of how to grind out minimum wage in online poker.

The vast majority of people would not want to work for that kind of money anyway and the way that you have to play to get that money is literally like watching the proverbial paint dry. If I play a six handed game, I am constantly in action and I am constantly trying to outwit my opponents. It is a game and a very interesting game at that.

Hunting like a Lion is not only a far more interesting way to hunt, it is also a far more effective way in terms of the size of the prey that you could catch. I guess what I am trying to say here is that to be successful in poker and especially NL hold’em, you really cannot do it playing a safe, take no risks at all style of game.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson