these days it seems like everybody wants to know how do I improve my red line my non-showdown winnings it's probably the number one question I get from prospective students is can you help me with my red line my red line is going straight down and I don't know what's wrong with it and I think it's very common to have that problem where you've got a really losing red line and you know there's probably something wrong with the way you're playing but you don't know exactly how to fix it that's what this video is going to
be about today I'm going to give you three unorthodox ways to improve your Redline this is not just going to be about bluffing more and folding Less on the river even those those things are very important I'm going to go deeper than that there's a lot more that goes into the red line and there's a lot that the poker Community doesn't really understand very well about the red line and I'm going to go into that today so on the screen right now I have an example of a student that I coached who before he came
to me had a very losing red line and then after taking some of my advice his Red Line actually went in the total opposite direction and he had a very winning red after doing the coaching with me if you're unfamiliar with how these graphs work when you play online poker and you have a poker tracking software the software keeps track of your winnings that's what this graph is and the green line is your total winnings but it also splits that green line into two additional lines the blue line is your Showdown winnings and the red
line is your non-showdown winnings so the blue line is the amount you won when you had to show down your hand at the end of the hand and the red line is the amount that you won when you didn't show down your hand and you can also see there's actually a fourth line here on this graph the orange or yellow line that's just the all in adjusted winnings and you can also see on the x-axis that this is a graph of over 1 million hands so this is not some sort of fluke the student actually
did really dramatically transform his game and he also added several big blinds per hundred to his win rate in the second half of the sample and before I jump into how exactly this student did this I first just want to preface this video by saying the green line is what matters your win rate your bottom line is truly what matters so we don't want to just increase our red line just for the sake of increasing our red line and having like a cool graph okay that's not the goal here the goal is to win money
period additionally if you were a solver playing against other solvers in six pack tax your red line would be negative it would be probably very negative so if you're playing balanced poker against a bunch of other players who are playing balance poker you can expect a positive blue line and a negative red line but here's the thing you're not playing against solvers you're playing against humans and humans play poker in general too passively they fold too much they don't raise Enough by and large the mistakes that human players make are mistakes of passivity not mistakes
of over aggression so if you're playing in real games and you have a very negative red line that probably means you are leaving money on the table alright so I won't leave you in suspense any longer here it is here's how you fix your red line you have to stop being a nit that's it that's the whole video I'm kidding but actually though you do need to play more aggressively in all of the tips that I'm about to give you the real tips are going to be pointing you in a direction of playing more aggressively
and less passively so if you have a really bad Red Line you might not be a nit but you probably have some tendencies that are too tight and too passive and you're gonna have to fix those okay the first real tip I'll call it tip number zero is you need to Bluff more on the river and you need to fold glass on the river if you do that your red line is going to leak less when you're in Bluff catching situations and it's going to win more when you're bluffing but I don't want to focus
too much on these two tips because everybody kind of knows at this point that playing more aggressively on the river is going to improve your red line that's not that interesting and I don't want to make videos about just really basic stuff so here's three more tips for how to improve tip number one and this is probably the most common one is you need to play more aggressively pre-flop now this is just a problem that most professional poker players have they just assume that they play pre-flop correctly but they never actually check and they haven't
studied pre-flop in a really long time but because pre-flop is basic they assume that they have it down and that they're too good to study pre-flop don't be that person you really need to at least do some sort of basic database review on your pre-flop play if you've never done that before because you're probably playing too passively pre-flopping you don't realize it the most common leaks are overfolding your big blind to Steels and not three betting enough and also not forbidding enough especially if you're not three betting enough that is going to really tank your
red line if you just turn up the aggression pre-flop that will probably change a lot about the shape of your graph and it'll also likely help you to stop leaking money pre-flop and improve your win rate as well tip number two you're over folding the Flop and not raising enough so this is sort of the same idea as tip number one we're just moving on from pre-flop now to the Flop if you're playing too passively if you're giving up too many pots on the Flop or if you're just not raising enough that's going to tank
your red line and this is especially common for small C bet sizes although there are a lot of situations where people overfold to larger C bet sizes too particularly when you look at the raising frequencies as you probably know the larger the bed size is the less you have to raise in theory and the smaller your opponent's bet size is the more you have to raise in theory and when players face a small seabed or a small flop stab or a small donk bed they often fail to raise as much as they're supposed to and
then they just don't take enough pots down on the Flop and then that tanks their red line so the moral of the story of these first two tips is don't underestimate taking down pots early on in the hand pre-flop and on the flop because those pots are smaller but they're also a lot more common than Big River spots so they have a really big impact on things when all is said and done third and final tip if your red line is tanking you're probably missing value on the river both when you're betting and when you're
raising for value so missing value what does this have to do with a red line well if you think about it imagine your opponent checks to you on the river and you're in position and you've got a hand which is sort of a thin value bed but it is a hand that at least in theory is mandatory to Value bad and imagine that you check that hand instead of value betting as you should well if you check it down you're almost always going to win the only time you're not going to win is when your
opponent is slow playing a really strong hand so most of the time you're going to win and then all of those winnings are going to go to your blue line your Showdown winnings because you showed the hand down but if you bet the hand let's say you bet three quarters pot on the river your opponent is going to fold like half the time and when your opponent folds those winnings go to your red line your non-showdown winnings the same can be said for when you have a hand facing a bat that really could raise for
thin value but you just call instead and I think this is a huge leak and it's in my opinion not raising enough for thin value on the river is probably going to be a leak that sticks around for many years because it's just not really on people's radar right now like how much you're supposed to raise for value on the river solver raises extremely aggressively for value and you just don't really see it happening in real games that much A good rule of thumb for Value betting the river that I often give my students is
if you check back the river in position you should be winning the hand between 45 and 50 of the time if you're checking back the river and you're winning the hand a lot more than 50 percent of the time that means that you're probably missing value because you're checking back the river way too strong and as a result you're taking too many pots down with hands that you should have really value bet but instead you check them down to Showdown alright guys that does it for this video I hope you enjoyed that and I hope
you learned something if you did like the video please remember to like the video I would appreciate it and consider subscribing to my channel if you want to get more free poker strategy content from me also I'd love to hear what you think in the comments if I left anything out feel free to add additional ways that you think you can improve your red line in the comments and with that I will catch you guys in the next video good luck at the table
