Poker was always meant to be a game of chance. Kind of like how you play the game of Blackjack, Craps, or How to Steal Blinds in Holdem. It is a game where you are taking calculated risks, analyzing your opponent, and calculating the best opportunities to win money or take your opponents chips. However, over the last 5 years Texas Holdem Poker has developed and changed drastically. Strategies used before to get by were simply not taking full advantage of all the information available to the player. This is where a great many intelligent gamblers have found success.
When you first start out playing Texas Holdem Poker you might find it difficult to understand certain concepts such as pot odds, or an example lay out of how to play a hand. In a previous article, I talk about pre-flop play and what you should and shouldn’t do pre-flop in cash games. In this article however, I want to focus more on why these strategies are so good for those that play Texas Holdem Poker.
By far the best strategies for Texas Holdem Poker that ever were developed were not strategies at all
By far the best strategies for Texas Holdem Poker that ever were developed were not strategies at all. They were simply, hard work. They had no set cheat sheets, secret tips, or magic markers. They were simply educated guesses based on game history and common sense. Most of these strategies were derived from years of game play, bad beat stories, and gut feelings.
If you think about it, given the sheer volume of information available to you and the wide variety of games being played in the world, a strategy is one of the most futile strategies in the world. You can always improve your game. If you learn to be a more consistent winner, you will be a winner in every sense of the word.
Another reason that people fail to be successful in Texas Holdem Poker is that the game and the people playing it are not well laid out for learning. It is easy to get wound up in the mind games, the need to win today, lose tomorrow, and so on. People who are making the journey from nothing to riches took a lot of pain and hard work. If you do not want to be one of them, you can learn a hard lesson at any time. You can learn Texas Holdem Poker, but you are not one of the Lakers, and you do not have to win every hand to make some serious money.
If you are not beating the other players at a particular game, you are not winning. One of the worst ways to learn is to lose. If you are out here making the right hockey picks, or your NFL picks, it is time to stop. At any game you play in, you want to be a winner. You want to improve your skill and your game, but do not beat yourself out of it. Unless you are in a tournament and can afford the buy-in, avoid tournaments. They are a poor gameplay and a costly expenditure.
In the real world, there is so much more to learn. I am certain you are aware that you will need sometime to absorb and process the vast amount of information that is available to improve your game. The cost of attending free poker school and utilizing their other services has been recently estimated to be in the range of $15,000. This does not include books, tuition, or any other additional fees that may be applicable. So in other words, if you want to improve your game and bankroll with the best of the best in sports betting, gambling, and poker, you are going to have to supplement your income primarily with research and information services.
Because of the paucity of adequate knowledgeable and skilled players in many poker rooms, you can often locate a game with a decent number of players, an acceptable pot, and a flop. With a little bit of careful research you are sure to discover a few capable players. On the other hand, be careful in making your selections, you want to find the right fit, not just the right hand. Play your cards right against decent players, you will win some money and lose some, you must accept this.
Now let’s say you earn $30/hour playing a $1/$2 game. This gives you a $10/$20 advantage over the house, the expected value, which means you expect to make $30 back IF you win, creating a $10 profit for you. You have to have a high volume in order to make this profitable. This means playing around 20 sessions of $1/$2 limit holdem to fully optimize your bankroll.
You do not want to make more than you have to as you will need a much larger bankroll to manage the high volume. You need to sit down at the table as the first thing and start playing tables. This gives your subconscious a break when you are trying to grind the games to your advantage.