Basic Poker
Strategy
Written by Kathy Watterson and Lou Krieger
Provided by Royal
Vegas Poker
Kathy
Watterson, who is my coauthor “Internet Poker: How
to Play and Beat Online Poker Games,” coauthored
this article with me.
Some of this material appears in that book,
though in a somewhat different form.
This piece is aimed at beginning players,
particularly newcomers to “brick and mortar” and
online
casino poker, or those who might
have been playing for a while, but never stopped to
about what it takes to become a winning player.
Poker is a game of money played with
cards; it’s not a game of pots played with money.
It’s also a game of skill, not of chance, and
players who go at it solely by the seat of their
pants stand no more chance of winning at poker than
they do at roulette. Without a solid basis for
making decisions about whether to check, bet, call,
fold, raise, or re-raise, you might just as well
play the lottery.
Winning poker players understand strategic
concepts, and they apply them with precision and
discipline. Let’s look at some:
Win
money, not pots:
Anyone can win pots, but winning money is
the aim of the game. Pots are only incidental. If
your goal is to win the most pots, that’s easy.
Just play every hand and call every bet until the
bitter end, and you’ll win every pot you possibly
can. But you’ll lose a ton of money in the
process. The very best players engage in few hands,
but when they get involved they’re usually
aggressive — they maximize the amount they win
when the odds favor them.
If your goal is winning money, don’t look for
reasons to play hands or you’ll talk yourself into
playing too many. Money saved is just as valuable as
money won, so knowing when to release a hand that
appears to be beaten is just as important as knowing
when to bet. Remind yourself of this every time you
sit down to play
poker!
Remember:
When it comes to poker, only losing players
hang in there hoping. Hope springs eternal, and
the hope of poor players is the meat and potatoes
of every poker pro's livelihood. While it's
wonderful for many of life's endeavors, hope is
the kiss of death in poker. Play a solid game and
hope for hopeful opponents.
Read
more about how to raise your poker game by clicking here.
Lou Krieger is the co-author of 'Poker for Dummies'
and the host of Royal
Vegas Poker.
Be
selective and aggressive:
Selective and aggressive play separates
winning poker players from consistent losers.
There’s not a single consistent winner who fails
to practice this principle. Odds shift as cards are
dealt across the table or across the Internet.
Winning players recognize when they have the
best of it, and they’re determined to get more
money in the pot when conditions are favorable.
By the same token, they’re extremely
reluctant to commit chips to a hand when the odds
don’t favor them.
Aggression and selectivity generally don’t walk
hand in hand, so you’ll need to learn when to come
in with guns blazing and when to hunker down. If
you’re too aggressive, particularly when your
cards don’t warrant it, your opponents will
eventually recognize your tendencies.
They’ll then wait until they have better
hands than yours, allow you to do their betting for
them, and raise on late betting rounds to collect
double bets when they have the best of it. On the
other hand, if you’re too passive, you won’t win
enough money with your good hands to overcome the
hands you lose, the blinds, and the rake.
Remember this: Aggressive players have two ways to
win a hand. The first is to wrest control of the pot
by forcing opponents out. Your bet or raise might
cause someone to release the hand that would have
beat yours, had the hand been played to conclusion
by all. Passive players — those who check and call
most of the time — have only one way to win:
presenting the best hand at showdown.
Play
Only The Best Starting hands:
If
you’re playing correctly, you’ll release all
of your weak starting hands unless you’re bluffing
in a short-handed game. Poker is all about
minimizing losses with weak hands, and maximizing
wins with good ones. Since the cards figure to break
about even in the long run, if you’re not
selective as well as aggressive, the best you can
hope for is a lifetime of breaking even ¾
which really translates into a lifelong loss since
you have to overcome the cost of the rake.
Poker is like any other for-profit venture in
that you have to overcome your cost of doing
business in order to turn a profit. The way to do
this in poker is through selectivity and aggression.
When
Playing Online, Use The Internet’s Cloak Of
Anonymity To Study Your Opponents:
Winning poker players scout playing styles of
opponents as diligently as football coaches study
film of upcoming opponents. On the Internet, take
full advantage of anonymity by playing spy. Observe
any game before taking a virtual seat. The players
won’t even know you’re there, and you can take
lots of notes while you’re watching the game.
Some players even sit there for extended
periods of time, not playing, but checking out the
opposition and gathering information.
When hands are turned over at showdown, notice
who’s holding what, and try to recall betting
patterns earlier in the hand. With a little practice
¾
OK, OK, with a lot of it ¾
you’ll be able to characterize opponents after a
round or two. Got
‘em nailed? Got plenty of notes in your hard
drive? Great! Now jump into the game and put that
knowledge to work!
Use
Position:
In poker, position means power. Acting
after opponents is valuable because you garner clues
about their hands while giving out minimal
information regarding your own. Also, against one or
two opponents, you can often take the pot with a
mere bet if they’ve checked to you. In most things
in life, you hate being last. In poker, you’ll
learn to love it.
Take
Advantage Of The Information Explosion:
More has been written about poker
since 1990 than had previously been written in the
entire history of the game. Along with reaping a
literary harvest, you can also jumpstart your poker
learning by using Wilson Software’s sophisticated
poker programs that allow you to practice against
opponents programmed to act just like players
you’ll find in traditional casinos and on the
Internet too. You
can even tweak the programs if you’re so inclined,
changing the player profiles and other factors to
create a game tailor-made for your purposes.
You can also use the software for research purposes.
It’s easy to set up almost any sort of simulation
to test the strength of one hand versus another in a
heads-up situation or against a table full of player
profiles of your choosing.
Your authors have been using this product for
years to do just that sort of thing.
Frequent
Decisions Are Important:
Decisions, decisions, decisions.
Poker is a game of decisions.
But not all of them are equally important,
and not all of them are critical. Things that occur
all the time are
important. Even when a loss attributed to a wrong
decision is small, it eventually adds up.
Always defending your small blind in Hold’em, for
example, illustrates the point. Suppose while
playing online in $2-$4
Texas
hold’em, with $1 and $2 blinds, you always defend
your small blind — even with abysmally weak hands
like 7h-2c. Based on the random distribution of
cards, you’re typically dealt such a throwaway
hand about one-third of the time.
At 60 online hands per hour — a typical pace in
cyberspace cardrooms if the game is running
efficiently and most players are attentive and have
good Internet connections — you’re dealt the
small blind six times every 60 minutes. If you
always call, you wind up calling twice each hour
when you really shouldn’t. That’s only $2 each
hour, but if you play ten hours per week, at the end
of the year you’ve given away well over a thousand
dollars unnecessarily. Sobering thought, isn’t it?
Costly
Decisions Matter Too:
Decisions costing a significant amount of
money, while not occurring often, are very
important. Suppose all the cards have been dealt,
and your opponent bets into a fairly large pot. If
you call when you should have folded and your
opponent wins the pot, that’s an error, but not a
critical one. It cost only one bet. But if you fold
the winning hand, that’s a grievous error, because
now the cost of that mistake is the entire pot.
We’re certainly not advising you to call every
time someone bets on the river. But remember:
Calling doesn’t have to be correct too often to
pay off handsomely over time. If the cost of a
mistaken fold is ten times the price of a mistaken
call, you need to be correct only slightly more than
ten percent of the time to make calling worthwhile.
Early
Decisions Matter Most:
Early choices usually mean more than
later ones because of their impact on subsequent
decisions. Whenever you make an incorrect move up
front, you run the risk of rendering each subsequent
decision incorrect as well. That’s why your choice
of starting hands is usually much more critical than
how you play on future betting rounds.
Keeping
Your Equilibrium When Your Luck Goes South:
No magic elixir can eliminate the
troughs everyone experiences now and then at poker.
Losing streaks are no fun. Even the realization that
you’re not the only poor soul tossing about in the
same sinking boat sheds little consolation when
you’ve been buffeted by the vicissitudes of fate.
At such times, remind yourself that poker is a
lifetime endeavor, and that as long as you continue
to play your usual solid game based on good
decisions, your discipline will eventually pay off.
Gearing
down:
We recommend one course of action to any
player mired in a losing streak: Shift gears. We all
change gears during a poker game.
Sometimes we do this consciously, as a
planned strategy, while other times we just wind up
playing differently later on than we did when we
first sat down.
When you’re losing, consider gearing
down . . . way down, by playing fewer hands.
Losing means it’s time for lots of traction and
not much speed. It’s a time for playing only the
best starting hands. Not marginal hands, not good ¾
or even very good ¾
starting hands, but only the best hands. That means
you’ll throw away hand after hand. It takes
discipline to do this, particularly when some of the
hands would have won. But here’s the recipe for
gearing down:
·
Stay away from troublesome, marginal
hands. Go with the gold.
·
Make opponents pay to draw out on you.
Most of the time they won’t get lucky, and that
extra money in the pot will wind up in your stack of
chips.
·
Never play weak starting hands from
early position.
These
concepts apply to all forms of poker.
But by themselves they’re not enough.
Each form of poker is quite different, and
each demands the application of specific strategies
and tactics if you’re to win consistently.
Once you’ve learned to blend general poker
strategy with game-specific tactics, you’ll be on
your way to becoming a solid, dangerous poker
player, online or off.
