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Poker Tips, Strategy, and Theory

Saturday, February 19th, 2011 by Phil

Seven Poker Strategy Tips to Win at Poker: For Beginners

If you’re a poker beginner, then this post about poker strategy and poker theory will be good to read. It might even be a good refresher for experienced poker players too. These are some poker tips that I’ve learned since starting to play poker almost ten years ago.

Poker Tip #1 – Learn the Poker Math

Poker math isn’t that hard. But the essence of winning poker is putting a lot of money into the pot when the odds are in your favor, and not wasting a lot of money betting into pots where the odds don’t favor you. If you don’t understand the math to begin with, then you won’t be a winning player.

This isn’t trigonometry or calculus either. Keep in mind too that poker math is only the beginning of poker wisdom. But it’s the foundation, and without a foundation, your house is going to fall down.

What do you need to know about poker math? You need to know how to calculate outs. And you need to know how to calculate your odds of winning a given hand. You also need to know how to compute pot odds.

Poker Tip #2 – Understand that Luck is Just Another Word for Standard Deviation

People who believe in luck make bad poker decisions. Don’t fall into that trap. Winning poker is  along run game, played over thousands of hands. ANYTHING can happen in the short run, and it will. You might have your pocket aces busted five times in a row by someone with a smaller pair. That doesn’t mean that the math doesn’t work, and it doesn’t mean your unlucky. In the long run, everyone will experience a run just that bad.

The problem with taking luck too seriously is that you’ll get steamed or go on tilt. Then you’ll start trying to force luck to run your way. But making lots of bad decisions in succession is mathematically the wrong way to win at poker, and it doesn’t work.

Be patient. Focus on the long run.

Poker Tip #3 – Learn to Read Tells

Tells can give you a lot of information. The best way to learn about tells is to read Mike Caro’s book on the subject. But here’s the biggest secret to poker tells, online or not:

Most of the time, players are acting the opposite of the way they feel.

People who act like they have a strong hand usually have a weak hand.

People who act like they have a weak hand usually have a strong hand.

Once you know that, you can start looking for the exceptions to these rules of thumb. You can also manipulate your opponents by faking your own tells at will, depending on how you think they’re reading you.

Poker Tip #4 – Have a Big Enough Bankroll

Want to play winning poker? Make sure you have enough of a bankroll to avoid going broke.

For Texas hold’em, a good size bankroll is one hundred big bets. So you if you want to play $3/$6, then you should have a bankroll of $600 or more.

For sit and go tournaments, a good size bankroll is fifty buy-ins. So if you want to play $10+$1 buy-in sitngo’s, you should have a bankroll of $550 or more.

But keep in mind one important thing. If you’re a losing player, you need an infinite bankroll. The bankroll figures I quoted above are for winning players.

The idea behind having a large enough bankroll is to make sure that you have enough money to avoid getting broke by standard deviation. (Remember Poker Tip #2?)

Poker Tip #5 – Bluff Sometimes, but Not All the Time

Beginning poker players usually bluff too often. That’s a good way to lose money. You want to bluff occasionally, but not often enough to lose money. And you should make sure that the situation is correct before you bluff.

Don’t bluff into a pot with five or six players. The odds of them all folding are too small for this to be a profitable move.

Don’t bluff into a pot with a calling station. He’ll call you all the way down to the river no matter what he has. (Value bet against him instead.)

Do bluff into a pot with only one or two weak players. If you’re playing against a single player who folds 90% of the time, the money you can make bluffing into him will make up for the money you sometimes lose when he actually has great cards.

Be willing to bluff on the flop too. A weak player with a great starting hand can get run out of a pot if the flop is scary, no matter what cards you’re holding. If he’s got AA, and the flop comes JT9 suited, then he’s going to put you on a pair of jacks, a straight, or a flush, and he’ll give you the chips in the pot. You just have to reach out there and bet into him.

Poker Tip #6 – Read David Sklansky’s Book, The Theory of Poker

You’ll learn more about how to think about poker strategy from Sklansky’s book The Theory of Poker than from any other ten books about poker combined. It doesn’t matter which poker game you prefer, The Theory of Poker is must-reading for serious poker players.

Poker Tip #7 – Don’t Cheat

This one’s a no-brainer.

If you want to be a loser, cheat at poker.

If you want to get your ass kicked, cheat at poker.

If you want to be unable to look at yourself in the mirror, cheat at poker.

If you want to risk arrest, cheat at poker.

If you want to risk being murdered, cheat at poker.

Winners never cheat, and cheaters never win. Some things are more important than money. Your integrity is one of them. Your self-respect is another one.