playing poker. Always focus on the positive.
Always fold when you think or know you are beaten. If you think you are beaten, then chances are, you are! It is better to fold a medium strength hand and keep your stack to come back and beat your opponents, than to lose all or a big chunk on your stack on one crappy hand.
Poker is, and will always be dominated by players who know this and act correctly on this. Even if you weren’t beaten, the odds will work in your favour if you use them correctly.
In only my 2nd live poker tournament, I was going along quite nicely. The blinds were 300/600 and my stack was about 50 times the big blind. I was dealt 9To UTG. I decided to fold even though I was thinking of a big raise bluff. The flop came rainbow6-9-T. I was a little shocked, but I know that these things do happen. A friend, who was sitting behind me and watching me play, was also shocked and he told me that I would have won the hand when the turn came out. I don’t remember anything more about that hand other than that the winning hand was A card high and the 3 players that played to the river were all in. The winner of the hand was the person who beat me – to boot me in 3rd place. Had I stayed in the hand, I would have eliminated 3 of the 6 of us that were still in the game, and would have been the chip leader by a very long way. Instead, I was one of 4 players left.
My point here is that, yes, I would have won the hand if I had stayed in, but my cards were not strong enough to beat mostplayers’ cards who may have called my bluff. There was no way for me to know that my cards would have been the best of the hand, but thats poker and you just have to forget about those hands and carry on playing.
Skill…
When you play poker, you should never worry too much about luck. Skill, knowledge and experience are far more important. In any game of poker, you may be lucky enough to get good pocket cards often. If you do, then thats great, but you need to know what to do with the pocket cards that you have been dealt. Even Pocket AA is beatable, and it is skill, knowledge and experience that will tell you to muck your rockets if the flop comes up with a possible straight or flush, and you get re-raised. It may be one of the hardest things to do, but it could mean the difference beween finishing in the money or just bombing out. If you do muck those rockets, you will be doing it, knowing that the next time you get those pocket rockets, you most likely, will be smiling all the way to the river.
My advice in this respect is to watch, read and play:
Watch:
Watch as many good poker players play as you can. Note what they do when they get particular pockets, how they check, call, bet and raise. How and when they bluff. What they do with catagory 1 pocket cards. Anything and everything you learn from the good poker players will do your poker game a lot of good. Never copy their game exactly because your circumstances will never be the same as those at the table you were watching. Pick a style that suits your game and adapt it to the playing conditions at your table. I suppose you could also watch bad poker players. Just be careful to remind yourself that what you are seeing is NOT what you should be doing.
Read:
Find as much literature as you can on how to play poker. Read books, blogs and articles. Read them and then read them again. Find your weaknesses and find out how to fix them. If you find a weakness, fix it by finding out what you do in a particular situation that you handle badly, and change it so that it isn’t a bad situation any more. Work out how you can stop yourself getting into those bad situations. The bottom line here is that if you don’t get into the situation, you won’t be forced to deal with it.
If you find that you are betting most or all of your stack on one set of what you think is a great pair of pockets, against a loose/aggressive opponent, then losing the hand because your opponent got lucky, you can either call it unlucky and carry on losing your stacks, or you can find out how to stop your losses.
You have a choice to make. Do you want to get better at playing, or do you want to stay where you are in your skill. If you are like me, you should be obsessed about improving your game all the time. Never rest until you are good enough. That will never happen. There is no such thing as good enough. I am willing to bet that even the top pros analyse their games and look for holes to plug. The best advice I ever saw was to not do anything stupid. Take that however you like.
Play:
This one is obvious. Sit in at a table whether it is in a casino, online or at home with friends. Experience will give you something
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