How to Be Contrarian and Right in Poker
“It’s actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.”
In early 2019, at a time when the outlook on online poker was somewhat bleak, I started playing 200nl full-time on Bovada with a combined bankroll and life roll that was, in retrospect, hair-raisingly small. I had, at best, six months of runway to make poker work out for me, and that was assuming I didn’t go on a massive downswing.
Fortunately, I not only became profitable at 200nl, but I rose up in stakes quickly and found myself playing 1knl and 2knl within six months. In my first year playing full-time, I made $150k USD, and I even took three months off at the end of the year to create the Mobius Poker Journal.
If you’re interested, you can read my Run It Once poker journal from that period here. A number of online trolls have claimed that I never post graphs, but when I was playing full time, I actually posted graphs encompassing my entire database in that blog.
In 2020, after completing the Mobius Poker Journal, I licensed this course to Poker Detox Coaching For Profits, and essentially took over all technical aspects of the coaching and strategy development there. Over the next two years, I coached the stable to over $5M in profits, and we accomplished this with a group of players that were breakeven or slightly profitable at low stakes before joining the program.
In 2022, I set out on a different challenge. I had already proven that I could coach players from low stakes to high stakes, but now I wanted to switch my focus to coaching exclusively at high stakes and nosebleeds. I started my high stakes stable, Mobius Cash, and now coach some of the top players in the world in both cash games and MTTs including crushers like Yuri Martins Dzivielevski, Matthew Marinelli, and others.
All of this is to say that I have had a lot of success in the relatively brief six years I have been active in poker. I could attribute that success to a number of different things, but the main reason I feel I have been successful as both a coach and a player is my contrarian approach to the game.
For whatever reason, I have always felt I had a strong internal compass when it came to poker. This is peculiar, as I have generally had a hard time believing in myself in other walks of life. But in poker, I have always done things my own way, and with confidence. I have had no problem tuning others out when my compass steers me in a different direction from the consensus.
The first time I really noticed that I was built differently from the average player was when I started to hire research assistants in 2021, which became necessary once our stable at Poker Detox grew to 50-100 players. I found that my research assistants usually became paralyzed under the pressure of developing strategies for such a large group of players. It was a lot of responsibility, and the thought of making a mistake terrified them. It was scary for me too, but more than that, it was exhilarating. I actually liked being in the position of developing strategies at scale, and I felt like I was the best person to do it.
The strategies I developed were often bizarre. The way I told my students to play went so far against the consensus that many of them didn’t want to listen to me. Over and over, I would have to explain my reasoning, and tell my students that this was what we were going to do, whether or not it looks like a stupid idea. Eventually, they would get on board, and then we would print money at the tables.
As an aside, the film Moneyball gives the best portrayal I’ve seen of the crushing pressure that comes with getting large organizations on board with data-driven strategies. I highly recommend it:
It’s one thing to trust yourself even when your beliefs go against the consensus, but it’s not enough to be contrarian—you have to be contrarian and right. And that’s the hard part.
In poker, playing a consistent and fundamentally sound strategy is usually enough to be profitable. But if you want to have outsized returns, some part of your approach needs to be fundamentally different from the average player. Here are three contrarian ideas that have made me successful in my poker career.
Note: Some of these points may no longer be considered contrarian, but five years ago when I started out, it was much less common to hear players and coaches talk about them.
Idea #1: Focus on maximizing your edge against fish, not regs
When you play poker professionally, there is an illusion that you are competing against the other professionals. They are your most common opponent, and the hardest to play against, and therefore most regs spend pretty much all of their time studying how to play against other regs. Try to find some decent poker content about how to play against recreationals, and you will probably come up empty handed.
But in reality, this is not at all how poker works. The way poker works is the money flows from the recreational players to the professional players. In most cases, 80-100% of your profits come from recreational players. If you’re a bad reg, you may even make more than 100% of your profits from fish (and then lose some back to the better regs). If this is the case, then why do you spend most of your time studying how to play against regs?
For example, take a look at a preflop open raise chart from the button. It will probably tell you to open raise a little over 40% of the time, depending on your rake structure. But remember that this chart was based on a simulation that assumed the big blind and small blind were theoretically optimal players, both preflop and postflop. So what happens if you have a fish in the big blind who defends about 20% more than GTO, while 3betting 5% less than GTO? The correct open raise range will be completely different.
Now factor in that the fish in the big blind is losing at a rate of -30 bb/100. The range will completely change again. If you’re following the standard instructions of most poker coaching on the internet, you’re probably not thinking enough about how to exploit the recreational players in your games.
Idea #2: Embrace radical simplicity in your strategy
Poker is an astonishingly complex game. One of the things I was honest with myself about early on was that, even though I have a great memory, there was no way I would be able to memorize game theory optimal strategies and solver outputs. A human being can not even come close to this.
From the beginning, I have been almost like a zealot about simplifying my strategies. I refused to split my range across multiple bet sizes. I simplified by c-betting my entire range or checking my entire range on the flop whenever it was not a blunder to do so. I avoided mixed-frequency plays like the plague, and when I eventually incorporated them into my game, I made sure to keep things simple and never use more than a few simple mixed frequencies.
I also focused on global frequencies rather than studying specific spots. For example, when I first started working with solvers, I spent most of my time using PioSOLVER’s multiflop aggregation report tool, which allows you to aggregate solver outputs over multiple board textures, rather than just looking at individual spots. When studying defense vs. flop c-bets, for example, I would not solve random boards and try to mimic PioSOLVER’s outputs. Instead, I would solve for PioSOLVER’s average defense frequency vs. a particular c-bet on a large subset of boards, and compare it to my own defense frequency in my database. If I found I was folding more than Pio in this spot, I would try to defend more, usually by identifying the hand category that I was overfolding with the most and making a mental note to call or raise more with it in future sessions. I would also look up my pool’s defense frequency in my database, to see if there were any population exploits I could capitalize on.
Speaking of population exploits, which were my primary focus in the beginning, I simplified my approach by only splitting the population into two simple profiles: regs and fish, based on a single statistic: the VPIP-PFR gap. I didn’t subprofile nit regs, volatile fish, etc. This certainly cost me some accuracy up front, but it saved me a lot of bandwidth and allowed me to actually execute my strategies rather than getting lost in complexity at the tables.
Idea #3: Take radical accountability over your own play
Many poker players make the mistake of learning a concept and then assuming they are done, and moving onto something else. Learning the concept is only one part of the process. After you learn something new, you need to have some method of checking that you actually incorporated what you learned into your game.
For example, many poker players will study their big blind defense just by passively looking at a chart. More savvy players will create flashcards to help them memorize specific parts of the range, or, in modern times, use a GTO trainer to drill it. This is great, but you still need to actually look at your database over a large sample to make sure you are defending correctly. It is easy to miss, for example, that you need to be defending a lot of offsuit connected hands from the big blind vs. small open raises from all positions. It’s also easy to make lazy folds if you are playing a lot of tables. You may fold combos near the bottom of your range due to tilt or decision fatigue, even if you know you should be defending them in theory.
Studying poker is an iterative process. First you learn the concept, then you practice it deliberately, then you play a large sample, and then you check stats in your database to make sure you are actually playing that spot correctly. What happens with real money on the line is usually a lot different from how you think you will play while you’re studying away from the tables.
Around 2021, I went all-in on this concept and developed the Mobius GTO Stat Checker. This tool automatically compared my students’ stats to PioSOLVER at every common node in the game tree. With this tool, my students knew exactly what leaks they had and what was essential to study.
Adopting this mindset of radical accountability over your own play also makes you better at exploiting your opponents. If you become obsessive about finding and plugging your own leaks, it is relatively easy to turn that same scrutiny against your opponents, and punish them for the leaks they are not aware of, or are too lazy to fix.
To get average results, take the average approach
It’s important to remember when you are consuming any poker training content that is produced for the masses, that the average professional poker player is on the razor’s edge of profitability.
Most pools I have analyzed show the average reg is winning at only 1-2 bb/100, and some pools with high rake like GGPoker show that the average reg is losing. You do not want to be average. If you want exceptional results, you are going to have to be contrarian and right in your approach to poker, at least some of the time.
I can’t give you my internal compass for poker, but you can adopt some of my ideas. Even better, you can learn to trust yourself to develop a novel approach to the game. As you gain a better understanding of your unique strengths, double down on them!
Don’t seek permission from others about the “right” way to study or play. Be willing to make a fool of yourself from time to time. Approach poker through the lens that only you can, because this is your best chance to achieve exceptional results.
