Poker How To Win
Table Of Contents
You win if your opponent folds, but you also win if your hand improves. The classic example is when you’re heads up with someone and you have four cards to a flush on the flop. You have a roughly 1 in 3 chance of making your flush. If you bet aggressively, though, your opponent might fold. You have two ways to win. Poker Strategy Tips for.
To review how to win at poker, play fewer poker hands pre-flop, bluff correctly, bet out more often with monsters, fold if you’re not sure, and attack whenever you sense weakness. For the last one, I’m going to change it to: Attack whenever you smell blood. That comes across much better because it’s more shark-like. The best poker players in the world tread a calculated path to success, and work constantly to improve their game. Today we’ll discuss four steps you must take to follow their lead—steps toward becoming a winning player. Doug Polk contributed to this article. How to Win at Poker Step 1: Pick a game type and stick to it.
Looking for a poker strategy to improve your chances of winning and begin to play like a professional poker player? You are not alone.
This article doesn't list all the poker tips and tricks under the sun. Instead, it focuses on specific Texas hold'em strategy elements that are proven to help you identify the best hands to play and improve your chances of winning at poker.
Continue reading to learn:
We have also put together a collection of online poker bonuses up for grabs at the best online poker sites. This way you can try all these poker strategy tips in this article when you play with other players.
In other words, if you are looking for a poker strategy guide with clear and easy-to-understand poker tips for beginners, you'll love this one.
Poker is one of the greatest games on earth. The combination of skill and luck, the psychological element, and the fact you can make money from it all help with its popularity.
Whether you play on the world's most prestigious poker tours or you just love to play poker with friends, in order for you to increase your poker winnings, you need to learn how to win at poker. To do this, you need to learn the basics, become familiar with concepts like poker odds and outs, and a few other strategy tips that will help you with every single poker hand you play.
AN INTRODUCTION TO 'POKER MATH': How to Calculate Pot Odds in Poker. is a simple guide to understand how to calculate pot odds in poker.
The process of learning how to win at Texas hold'em can be broken down into several categories. The main ones are:
- Basic Poker Tips: These include elements like the hands ranking, poker glossary, basic strategy articles, and other poker tips for beginners that can help you improve your hand.
- Advanced Poker Tips: These can include the correct use of poker tools like an odds calculator and more sophisticated strategies that will help you win at Texas hold'em poker with a variety of players.
- Long-Term Poker Training: The key to learning how to win at poker is to continue to develop different ways to approach the game and never sit on what you already know. The most effective way to succeed in this mission is to practice as much as you can and rely on resources like good poker books and poker training sites.
Basic Winning Poker Tips
If you want to discover how to win in poker, you need to learn the Texas hold'em rules.
When I first started playing poker, I didn't know anything about the game. That includes what starting hands I should play or what beats what in poker.
You'd be surprised at how many people sit in a real money poker game and expect to win at Texas Hold'em poker without even a clear understanding of the poker rules and other basics.
Those basics not only include knowing the poker hand rankings so you know what beats what, but also the various positions at the poker table and how they affect your strategy.
NEED HELP WITH THE BASICS? Poker Positions Explained: The Importance of Position in Poker is the most comprehensive guide to positions in poker. Read it to know how to adjust your play according to your position in the hand.
Basic tips help you learn key poker concepts like pot odds and implied pot odds, as well as the importance of following solid bankroll management rules.
Once armed with this information, you're ready to add a few more strings to your bow and move one step closer to discovering how to be a winning poker player.
Advanced Winning Poker Tips
The next stage in your quest to win at poker every time is to learn some of the more advanced concepts.
Fill your mind by studying such aspects of the game as:
You should also learn how to play against the various different poker player types — e.g., tight-aggressive, loose-aggressive, and loose-passive — because each opponent type needs to be approached with a different strategy.
Some of these advanced concepts became public knowledge in the mid-1990s when David Sklansky penned The Theory of Poker.
It is in this book that you will find Sklansky's thoughts on what he calls 'The Fundamental Theorem of Poker,' which reads:
'Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose.
Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.'
This text may seem long-winded, but the idea being expressed is quite simple.
The correct decision (i.e. the one that will bring you poker winnings) to make in any given poker situation is one that has the largest expected value, or 'EV' as it is commonly abbreviated.
If you were able to see your opponents' cards, you would be able to calculate the mathematically correct decision and would win at poker every time!
Obviously, it is not possible to calculate the correct decision to mathematical certainty as poker is a game played with incomplete information.
But you can use all of the available information presented to you to make a decision that would yield long-term positive results — decisions that are +EV.
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Apply Your Skills
While it is practically impossible to learn how to win at poker every time in a monetary sense, due to the luck factor, by making decisions that are +EV you actually are winning every time you play poker, at least in the long term.
- As a simplified example, imagine you are heads-up with an opponent in a hand where the board reads .
- You hold and your opponent has accidentally revealed , so you know that you need to complete your flush to win the hand.
- There is $100 in the pot and for some reason, your opponent decides to only bet $20.
In this situation you should snap-call, because even if the river is not a spade you actually gain in the long run.
Why is this the case?
Because the pot odds you're receiving are 5-to-1 (calling $20 to win $100) yet your chance of hitting your flush with one card to come is about 4.1-to-1.
As the pot odds are greater than the odds of hitting the hand, you actually make money in the long run even if your flush misses!
That is to say, if you faced the same choice many, many times and always chose correctly, you do stand to come out ahead thanks to your consistently '+EV' decisions. And that folks, is how to win at poker every time!
Of course, the game is more complex than that overly simple example suggests. But in essence, the idea still holds.
The key to how to win at poker is to make more +EV decisions that –EV ones, and then play enough for the math to make the results run true.
FREE Poker: the Ultimate List!Check out the list of the best free poker games and use all these strategy tips to win more!
Use a Poker Odds Calculator
One way to improve your own game vastly and increase your chances of learning to win at Texas Hold'em is to play around with different scenarios to see what the mathematically correct decision would be.
Since we know that the relationship between mathematics and poker isn't one that everyone loves, we developed a free poker tool that helps you with all your poker calculations.
The next time you play Texas hold em poker and you want to know whether you hold a strong hand or not, load up the PokerNews Odds Calculator and look at how much equity your hand has on different boards and against different possible hands for your opponents.
There are other tools and poker cheat sheets out there that allow you to see how your exact hand fares against a possible range of hands, too.
Knowing this information and being able to draw upon it while in the heat of a hand could be the difference between winning at poker or losing.
Always look to extract as much value as mathematically possible, if you want always to win at poker.
Continue the Learning Process
It may seem to an outsider that the best poker players have discovered the secret of how to win at poker every time, yet this simply isn't true.
What is true is those at the top of the pile are extremely skilled poker players, but they are also some of the hardest working people in the industry, constantly working on their game and trying to improve.
The true secret to winning at poker is to be like them and continue to work on your game.
Poker Books
Whether you like to keep your collection on an e-reader like the Kindle or you prefer the old ink-and-paper combo, poker books are an essential element of any winning poker strategy.
The right poker books give you the unique opportunity to learn how to win at poker using the experience of the best players in the history of the game.
If you don't know where to start with your collection, have a look at Nolan Dalla's list of the best poker books ever written.
The ten poker guides in the list will help you win at poker more than any poker cheat sheets or quick tips ever will.
The best part? These poker books won't help you only with Texas hold'em but will give you the opportunity to improve your play also if you prefer other games like Omaha poker, five-card draw, stud poker, and many other card games.
Poker Videos
Youtube is another great resource to find good strategy guides to improve your poker games.
While some of the best videos are kept behind a paywall by a number of advanced poker training sites (more on that later), videos are another great resource to get better results when you play cash games and poker tournaments.
A great starting point with a lot of useful poker tips for beginners is the official PokerNews YouTube Channel.
Over the past 15 years, the PokerNews team traveled the world and all the major poker tours to interview professional poker players and have them share the strategy secrets that made them as successful as they are.
The Poker News strategy videos are your best option to learn poker winning strategies if you are on a budget.
Click here to access the channel and browse through hundreds of free poker videos.
Poker Training Sites
If you really want to learn poker and you don't want to be stuck playing low stakes games forever, you need to consider joining one of the best poker training sites.
While the best ones are not for free, the level of coaching and help you get from them is essential to progress in real money poker and compete with other players at the highest levels.
If you are new to the world of online poker training and you don't know the difference between resources like Upswing Poker, Run it Once, and Daniel Negreanu's Masterclass, here's an overview of the best poker training sites.
What's Next?
Learning how to win at poker requires a lot of work - and a lot of reading. Now that you know what to expect and what tools can help you reach your goals, it's time to move onto other in-depth poker guides like:
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cash game strategytournament strategyTexas hold’emno-limit hold’embeginner strategy
There are a handful of critical aspects when it comes to learning how to play poker. There’s learning the different poker hands and their ranks as well as learning to call, raise, and fold. But there’s also more to it than just that.
This post tries to capture some of the other aspects of how to play poker, including a few hints about general strategy that might keep you from losing too much money early in your career.
How to Find a Good Poker Game
It’s easy enough to find real money online poker, although if you live in the United States, only a limited number of websites will actually allow US players to compete for real money.
If you’re brand new to poker, though, I suggest getting started with the free, play money games on the internet. You’ll learn a lot about how the game goes.
The most important things to pay attention to begin with is what order everything happens in. It’s important to understand this, especially when you switch to live poker.
And I recommend switching to live poker as soon as possible. I got my start playing on the internet, but live poker has charms all its own.
Another option, which is a better option financially, too, is to find a home poker game. Why’s that a better option? Well, you can avoid paying the rake that way.
When you play poker in a casino, the casino has a dealer run the action. The casino also takes 5% of every pot as their “rake.” This is one of the ways they stay in business.
If you’re at a table with players who are equally skilled, you’ll eventually break even over time. But not if 5% of the pot disappears on every hand. To break even in that situation, you have to play better than everyone else.
How do you find a home poker game? Ask around at the office. If you hang out in a bar, ask around there. You can also find message boards on the internet where locals host poker games, but some of them charge a rake. Such games are “underground” games and are probably illegal.
How to Host a Poker Game
If you have trouble finding a poker game, you can always host. You’ll need at least five or six players to have a decent home poker game, so you’ll probably need to invite 10 people to get a decent game going.
You’ll also need the proper equipment to host a poker game. Obviously, you’ll need decks of cards. I like to have two decks going, so you can have a deck shuffled at all times. There’ll be no pauses in the game while the deck’s getting shuffled.
I also like to use plastic playing cards rather than ones made of cardstock. You’ll pay more for such a deck, but it should last you forever. Kem is a good brand for this.
You’ll also need a poker table. You can find cheap poker tabletops that you can just put on top of your dining room table online. They’re good enough to start with.
Finally, you need clay chips. These used to be expensive, but they’re not too expensive anymore. Don’t host a game with plastic chips. They’re just lame and lack gravitas. Also, don’t host a poker game with a lot of cash on the table. Have your guests buy chips.
Be sure to let everyone know what variant you’re going to play and for what stakes. It’s okay to host a poker tournament and charge an extra $5 toward the buy-in if you’re going to provide snacks and drinks.
You should, in fact, provide snacks and drinks. Just because it’s a poker game doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be a good host, and a good host offers refreshments to his guests.
Also, check out this blog I wrote on how to deal a home poker game if you need extra help on getting your game started.
How to Bluff in Poker
Since I’ve already written posts about how poker hands and hand rankings work, as well as how betting in poker works, I’m going to skip those subjects and get straight into the subject on most people’s minds—bluffing.
A bluff is when you bet with a hand hoping that everyone else will fold. In that event, you win the pot by default.
A true bluff is a bet where you’re almost certainly have a lower-ranked hand than your opponent. If you think you have a better hand, you’re value betting, not bluffing.
If you don’t play much poker, you might think that bluffing is a bigger part of the game than it actually is. But the truth is, bluffing doesn’t work often enough to be profitable, especially in lower stakes games. They call lower stakes Texas holdem games “no foldem holdem” for a reason.
You need a perfect situation to bluff successfully. Part of that situation is few competitors.
But if you bluff into a single opponent, your odds improve dramatically. Paying attention to your opponents’ tendencies also matters if you’re going to be bluff.
A better strategy is semi-bluffing. When you semi-bluff, you bet aggressively with a hand that probably won’t win, but might improve and be a winner later.
You have two ways to win in such a situation. You win if your opponent folds, but you also win if your hand improves.
The classic example is when you’re heads up with someone and you have four cards to a flush on the flop. You have a roughly 1 in 3 chance of making your flush. If you bet aggressively, though, your opponent might fold. You have two ways to win.
Poker Strategy Tips for Beginners
You can find plenty of strategy tips for poker beginners online, but the biggest and best involve your overall approach to the game.
Most people agree that, especially for a beginner, a tight aggressive approach is the best way to play. There are two concepts to understand in that sentence:
- Tight
- Aggressive
I’d like to address tightness first. Poker players can be categorized as tight or loose. This refers to how many hands they get involved in.
How To Win At Video Poker
A tight player doesn’t get involved in many hands, while a loose player gets involved in lots of hands.
This implies that a tight player has a better hand going into any situation than a loose player. The better hands don’t come along as often, so the tight player obviously only plays when he has good cards or better.
A loose player, though, plays too many hands and sticks with them too long hoping they’ll improve. Some loose players think of themselves as some kind of sheriff with a responsibility to keep the other players honest.
Being tight or loose is a separate concept from aggression, though. An aggressive player might play few hands or a lot of hands, but when he plays a hand, he’s usually betting or raising with that hand.
You’ll rarely see an aggressive player just call a bet. The opposite of an aggressive player is a passive player. And passive players call bets to stay in a hand.
You want to be the kind of player who usually bets instead of checking, who usually raises instead of calling. The goal is to only play when you have good cards. When you do play, you want to bet and raise. You want to get money into the pot when you’re likely to win. This is called being “tight aggressive.”
Tight passive players lose money because they don’t bet and raise enough, so they don’t get any value from their winning hands.
Poker How To Win
Loose aggressive players sometimes make money in games with poor players because they get a lot of their opponents to fold. Still, when they face someone with some discipline, it’s easy enough for them to win just by waiting for good cards.
Loose passive players are the best opponents. They will call your bets with lousy cards all night. Don’t be a loose passive player when you’re gambling with real money.
Conclusion
Poker How To Win At Cash Games
There are some of the basics of how to play poker, including how to find poker games and how to host poker games.
Video Poker How To Win
I also included some poker strategy tips appropriate for beginning players. You will definitely learn more as you go and put all these tips into practice. So good luck and have fun!