Sooner or later you are going to be in a SNG tournament or a MTT and you are going to be sitting somewhere from the button to the BB and you are going to have multiple players that are pushed all in ahead of you. If you are looking at a stack where you are covered by most or all of the players that have already pushed, you are going to have to let this hand go. The time to do this of course is when you are on the bubble. It may be difficult to do, but if you want to make the money, this is a golden opportunity to slide right in there with absolutely no risk.

Let’s say that there are 6 people left in the tourney (of a SNG) or there are only 2 positions left to go for the money in a MTT and you are on the button. Everyone has started the tournament with $2,000 in chips and you are sitting at $1,200 and you are in the BB. Under the gun pushes with a short stack of $1,000 and next position immediately pushes all in with $4,000 in chips. The next player also pushes in and has $2,100 and the button also pushes and has $2,400 in chips. If you double up, you would be looking at $5,800 in chips, but you have to get through 4 hands to survive.

Before you rush and just throw those chips in there, start to break down the hand and really figure out where you stand. In most cases, the short stack is going to be sitting on some type of pair. The big stack will more than likely be looking for isolation and would have two high cards or a pocket pair. The third and fourth players in almost certainly have a pocket pair. Best case scenario, you are looking at three pocket pairs and AK or AQs.

While you are still the favorite on the poker table, your percentages go dramatically down every time someone else puts in their chips. You are not going up against only one hand here, you have to beat all of them in order to be alive. For arguments sake, let’s assume that they all have a pocket pair. At pre-flop, you now have 8 cards that can beat you in the deck. That means that you are actually a severe underdog to the rest of table as any one of those 8 cards can beat you and send you to the rail.

While the ‘technical odds’ have you much higher, AA will really only hold up about 70-80% of the time. In this situation, you are better off dropping the hand and letting other players get eliminated. You can actually make the money right there if the big stack wins, but either way, you are going to be a lot closer to the money and in no risk of being eliminated.

This is not an easy play to make as most people will rush to get their chips in the pot here. However, if you have the discipline, you are must better laying down the hand and letting everyone else go to war. We all know you will get sick to your stomach if the AA holds up, but you can be assured that in most scenarios, it is more likely to go down that it is to win that hand. Take solace in knowing that you made the right call.

In truth, it is not really all that difficult to achieve a certain degree of proficiency at poker. In order to be a player that wins the majority of the time however, it is important to always learn, absorb and adapt. And to do that, you need a certain measure of self-control, as well as the ability to analyze any given situation that presents itself. Learning the skills necessary to analyze the various aspects of the game can help you make better-informed decisions when faced with the pressure cooker situation of a real world game.

What almost all successful poker players have in common is the drive and the capability to absorb information on a continuous basis, as well as to analyze all the information that they receive. Watching the other players around the poker table can be a valuable source of information in this regard. If you see another player get caught bluffing for instance, you can take note of his or her actions in order to avoid getting caught doing them yourself in a future game.

As useful as the above example is, experienced poker players will know enough to look beyond such basic detection techniques and possibly even know that the bluffer was bluffing even before he was caught. Of course doing so will take some experience on your part, but it is a necessary skill to develop if you want to be able to play the game successfully for a long time. In this sense, poker is a game of anticipating what the other players around the table are going to do before they even do it…in some cases even before the opponent in question knows that they are going to do it.

Developing this skill will give you the make the right decisions and the right actions when crunch time comes. This will also allow you to set up the scenario so that you are better prepared to react to whatever move your opponent will make. Even if you have only been playing at a particular game for a short period of time, you should train yourself to spot cues that other players are giving out almost immediately. It is a skill that will take a lot of playing experience to be sure, but developing it as early as possible will have many beneficial effects on your game in the long run.

It is unfortunate that most players don’t see it that way and indeed, almost entirely neglect the aspects of poker that don’t have anything to do with winning. The overwhelming focus is on winning the big prize to the neglect of the factors that come into play that prevent that very goal from happening. And more often than not, most players think that the way to achieve this goal is by winning the money from the other players around the table, when the fact of the matter is that virtually all of the money that can potentially be won in a game of is a result of the various actions that go on during the course of an entire game. Placing money into the pot, one player winning some and another losing some more…all of this contribute in some small way to the big prize. In a sense, the money that you can potentially win in poker is the cumulative result of all of these various and sometimes seemingly trivial occurrences.

One thing that would be valuable for any poker player to realize is that to a certain extent, you have to be able to lose in order for you to win. There is virtually no way to ensure that any one player–you included–will win 100% of the time. In fact, you will probably end up losing more of the hands that you are dealt than winning them. Of course this realization isn’t always receive so warmly by the majority of poker players who on the whole absolutely hate to lose. What may make this realization a bit easier to swallow however is the fact that losing with grace actually plays an important role in winning.

How is this so? An obvious example is when you are faced with a particularly brutal run of bad luck, you may find it more beneficial to simply cut your losses and walk away. Far too many times, a poker player who attempts to reverse this run of bad luck by going on playing will end up sinking deeper into a financial hole. Obviously self-control comes into play here, which is one of the most important qualities for any poker player to develop.

The fact of the matter is that you simply have to accept that even big winners have lost more pots than they have won. Keeping things in perspective and knowing when to quit when you are ahead will better prepare you for the future and hopefully an eventual win.