Basic Poker Strategy

Playing Your Position

As any experienced poker player will tell you, poker is not just a game of cards. Poker is a game of psychological warfare, with a felt battlefield and mental ammunition. It’s not always the player with the best cards who wins – it’s the player who can make everyone else at the table believe he has the best cards who takes the pot. Read the full poker article: Playing Your Position.

How to Avoid Bad Beats

Have you been cursing at your computer because you’ve been really bad lucky? Does it seem like your bad luck just doesn’t go away? Well, let me ask you an important question: Have you ever wondered if you were responsible for those losses? Because guess what, you probably have a hand to play in it. No pun intended! Read the full poker article: How to Avoid Bad Beats.

A Poker Exercise

You’ll often read about how making the right bet is your most powerful poker tool. To illustrate this, I want to propose a little exercise that you can try out. It will really give you a better understanding of when to bet, how much to bet, and why. Read the full poker article: A Poker Exercise.

When to Go “All in”

Going “all in” means betting all of your chips. It’s a way to increase your chip count significantly when you get called and win. It’s also a quick ticket home when you get called and loose. A common mistake amateur players make is that they go all to often, at the wrong times, and when it’s not even necessary. When is the all in strategy best used? Let’s explore that question. Read the full poker article: When to Go “All in”.

How to Read Your Poker Opponents

If you want to be sure that your poker knowledge is growing, and you want to become a real poker master, it is not always that important to play hundreds of hands, or to calculate the Holdem Odds. Learning to read your opponents’ tells is critical. Read the full poker article: How to Read Your Poker Opponents.

Winning by Folding

While the title of this article may sound illogical, I assure you it isn’t. Folding means giving up the hand so how can you win by doing so? To put it simply, it is a fact that you cannot win every single hand at poker and you will therefore loose some hands, and some chips. The question is how many chips will you loose when that happens? That’s where folding your hand comes into play. Folding is a way to get you out of a sticky situation. Sure, you may loose some chips, sometimes a lot of chips perhaps, but don’t loose your shirt over a single bad hand. This is Texas Hold’em, not strip poker! Read the full poker article: Winning by Folding.

Online Poker Tells

One of the secrets at winning online poker games is to pick the right targets to go up against. The first thing you want to do when you sit at a table is figure out who’s a fish and who’s a shark. This is an important component of your gambling strategy. A poker fish is a bad player, who often loses a lot of money due to poor plays. Generally, an experienced player will have more chances of beating inexperienced players. The secret to online poker success is therefore largely related to going against the right person at the right time. So how do you spot a fish? Well, grab your fishing pole because I’m about to teach you about simple signs of fish activity. Read the full poker article: Online Poker Tells.

Question from a Reader

It seems that no matter where I play lately, I tend to get walked over all the time. I’m looking to earn respect at the table. When I raise, I want opponents to fear me! But it doesn’t seem to be working because although I work on establishing a tight table image by being conservative, by folding a lot of hands, by calling when it’s not to expensive to do so, the moment I raise it seems like people don’t believe me. They either call or reraise and that’s very frustrating for someone who’s trying to bluff on rare occasions. Am I doing something wrong here? Read the full poker article: Question from a Reader.

The G-Spot: Game Selection

Suppose you’re the best shorthanded no-limit hold’em player in the world for online poker. You sit at a $500-$1,000 blind shorthanded no-limit hold’em game with five other world-class shorthanded no-limit hold’em players. Meanwhile, at the same time, there’s a $100-$200 blind shorthanded no-limit hold’em game featuring three world-class players and two relatively weak players. If your goal is to make the most money per hour, which table would you prefer to site at? Read the full poker article: The G-Spot: Game Selection.

When Poker Strategy Becomes Useless

Consider how we all learn about poker strategy. Some of us read books, some learn from experience, some read websites like this one, others watch interviews of their favorite poker stars, etc. The problem that most people have is not in understanding the logic behind a particular poker move, but rather the difficulty seems to be around “when” to apply that particular strategy. Read the full poker article: When Poker Strategy Becomes Useless.