You might have heard about this principle in the past and it is definitely something that you should think about. Some professionals will tell you that people make the mistake of winning a little often and losing a lot rarely. This might seem weird at a first glance and most players will not understand the concept properly.
In order to understand exactly what this principle is about, let us think about pocket Aces. When you are dealt two aces pre-flop, the chances that you are going to win the hand are a little over 60%. This will factor in all possibilities and not just when you are heads up. Most players think that pocket Aces have a 9 to 1 chance of winning but this is not true. Due to this, you can easily end up going all in and losing almost your entire stack or a really large part of it simply because you think that this is what you should do. In the event that you win with pocket Aces 60% of the time but you only win small amounts as you are thinking about going all in pre-flop, in the 40% of cases you will get called and lose a really big amount. If you do the math, you might end up noticing that on the long run this is a situation in which you constantly lose money.
There are many players that will be really successful in playing small ball poker. This is a strategy that is mainly tailored on minimal raises and winning more small pots. Such an approach can be really good but you need to understand two important things. In most cases, especially when playing at lower stakes, when you keep raising you will eventually be called by bad hands played by bad players. They might land a great flop that is totally masked and you will have no idea that they are this strong. If you are not careful, all the hard work that you put into grinding small pots at the table and building a big chip stack might have been in vain as you can lose all your profit in one hand. That is always a possibility in no limit hold em. The second thing that you need to understand is that there is a time when you should leave the table. This is especially true when playing online poker as you can take your profit and move to another table.