How good is your poker game?

How good is your poker game? This is a question that I am constantly asking myself and challenging myself to answer. Some days I can answer quite succinctly. Other days I struggle to find the words. Unless you play against world class competition on a regular basis it can sometimes be difficult to determine just where you game stands in the large scope of things. Asking someone else does give you some level of objectivity provided that person is being honest. But it still comes down to how you feel about yourself and your poker game.

How do you determine just how good you are or aren't?

The obvious thing would be to simply look at your results. Most would agree that the numbers don't lie. There is a lot of truth to that statement. However, do the numbers over simplify the situation? What if you were playing great for ten sessions and then ran bad for the next eight? True, that is an extremely small sampling but you get the general idea. Overall, just as or success at the table fluctuates, to some degree, our skill set does too. We can all attest to the fact that we can play the most skillful hand i the world and still lose the pot on a one outer. Although unlikely it does happen to the best of them and a lot more often than any of us would like to acknowledge.

Having said that I would suggest that you are only as good as you are running at the moment. Considering that poker is a game that involves luck / variance to some degree we must take that into account. A player that is both skilled and lucky can compete at an awfully high level against some of the best compeition around. That's not to say that you are going to beat Phil Ivey or Tom Dwan heads-up but it does mean that the combination of those two variables is extremely potent.

Ultimately, it' up to you to seek out the toughest competition your bankroll can handle. It is only then that you will truly be able to determine just how good your game is.