BY MICHAEL MIZRACHI / 2010 WSOP PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP WINNER

WHEN I TEACH A DEEPSTACKS LIVE class, my goal, naturally, is to make my students better poker players. With a roster of instructors that includes me, Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, Tristan Wade, and others, that goal becomes easy to achieve. These truly are the best teachers in the world. And what we do is expose the students to as many situations as we possibly can, let them ask us any questions they want, and improve their games no matter what their skill level.

If you’re a relative novice, the first lesson I teach is that the way you present yourself is very important. Any good players at your table will be able to tell how experienced you are just by your posture, the way you look at other players, the way you dress, and how nervous you seem to be. When I sit down to play, I can tell immediately whether someone has been playing a long time or not. So if you are a beginner, always do your best to act like you belong. You want to play it cool and make it seem as if you’ve been there before and know what you’re doing.

The next thing I look for is betting patterns, as novice players will often give away the strength of their hand based on how much they bet. A lot of newcomers make the mistake of overbetting their hand. If they make a big bet, usually that means they have the goods. When they don’t have a hand, they’ll bet small and try to take away a pot with minimal risk.

What you should aim to do, if you’re a relatively inexperienced player, is be very consistent with your bets. If you’re going to open raise, you should pick your number—whether it’s 2½ times the big blind or 3 times or 3½ times, whatever—and be consistent in raising that amount every time. After the flop, don’t overbet. You want to bet about half to two-thirds of a pot, because a bet of that size doesn’t give your opponent much information. Don’t make things obvious. You don’t want the pros to take advantage of you, so act cool and give off as little information as possible with your bet sizes.

Of course, to be successful, you have to be willing to make some moves. You can’t be afraid to occasionally three-bet or four-bet with air. The key is to take risks at the right time, which you determine based on your stack size and your opponent’s stack size. If your opponent is short-stacked and you have a big stack, and you put in a three-bet or four-bet and you know they’re forced to call you with any hand, you don’t want to show them a 4-5 suited. You want to make a play like that when you both have big stacks and the guy’s going to be afraid to call your four-bet and he’s not going to want to get involved, even with a hand like A-Q or A-J. You want to mix it up and have a creative imagination, but you also want to do it when the time is right to take risks.

One of the most important lessons I can pass along is knowing your stack size at all times and segmenting it in your mind. If I have a big stack, I’ll have 20 percent of it that I can use for gambling situations and 20 percent that I can use for bluffing situations, and I’ll only use the other 60 percent if I have a really big hand. And if lose some hands and get down to only that 60 percent, then I’ll make sure to play solid poker until I’ve built my stack back up to where I can take risks again.

If you watched the broadcast of this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event final table, on the very first hand they showed, I thought Matt Jarvis risked too high a percentage of his stack without a real hand. His A-J was strong before the flop but never connected with the board and he bluffed the turn and river, losing almost 60 percent of his chips right at the start of the final table. He wanted to complete his bluff, which is understandable, but I think he put too many chips in. He left himself with only seven or eight big blinds and in a predicament where he needed to gamble in order to double up and get back to where he was.

Poker is all situational, and in that situation, it looked like he was going to get called all the way down so he should have shut down on the river. I give credit to Joseph Cheong, who played it brilliantly and got Jarvis to bluff off half his stack in the hand. Still, if it was me against Cheong, I probably would have checked and given up the hand on the end, but sometimes as poker players, we get stubborn and we like to fire the last barrel and try to make the bluff. It happens to every one of us.

Whether you’re a beginner or a more advanced player, you’re going to make mistakes. The goal is to hone your game until you’re making as few mistakes as possible, and the way to get there is to absorb the lessons from the pros and practice until you’re comfortable in any poker situation.

Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi has won two WPT titles and one WSOP bracelet and has accumulated more than $11-million in career tournament earnings. He is a Full Tilt Poker pro and an instructor for DeepStacks Live.