Online Poker Smart

Posts Tagged ‘basic’

Even if you are a beginner, you need to have some basic strategy by which you make your decisions around the Poker table. Your basic strategy is a set of rules to get you off to a good start. As time goes by, you will change and refine your basic strategy, and that is perfectly allright. As you also play and experiment, you will find yourself irresistibly drawn into breaking these rules, and that is also fine. As you gain experience and start to develop your own poker-playing personality you can decide how aggressive/loose or passive/tight you want your style to be. It is probably best to start off on a conservative, sensible strategy so that you can lay a proper foundation from which you can build.  In a tournament you should also be prepared to call more small bets in order to see the flop, since there is a real hurry to make a decent hand quickly in order to get you off to a good start.
Remember this about Poker: poker can be hours of boredom and moments of pure terror. There are certainly some moments with heart stopping, adrenalin-pumping moments in poker, but most often quite rare.  Poker is not really all about action all the time.  Possibly the single most important word you can always remember when it comes to playing poker is PATIENCE. Be patient…. poker is an art of patience. If you are not patient, know that you are going to help many other players make a lot of your money through playing poker with you….   Most of the time you are folding your cards either before the flop or just after you’ve seen the flop.  It really can happen that you catch a bad streak where you just seem to have run out of luck with your hole cards being unplayable or where you experience several bad beats.  This is where patience becomes such an important aspect.  When you cannot cope with these times and you start playing your bad hands, you will most certainly lose your money.  Whatever you do, don’t go on TILT!  When you find yourself in a situation where you are playing hole cards that you would not normally play and you seem to be on a losing streak, get up, take a deep breath and exercise patience.  Rather go for a walk!

A very simple and basic poker strategy is this:  Raise when you have the best hand.  This is important.  When you are very experienced, you may sometimes decide to do otherwise, depending on various factors that you take into consideration at that point.  But especially for Beginners, rather raise when you have the best hand.  The reason for this being that you need to build your confidence.  And when you are slow-playing a hand, just to find yourself in a situation where your great hand is overtaken at the turn or river, can be extremely demotivating.  Furthermore, this leads you to feel that somehow, you need to get even.  You then start playing substandard hands or you stay in the hand for much longer than you should, chasing the turn or the river for draws that are way against the odds.  Rather follow this basic rule until you are more experienced at playing poker.