General Poker Advice
Poker has taken the world by storm in the last few years. Now you see it on TV, you see people playing online, you see people having house tournaments. What everyone needs now that they are hooked is some general poker advice for when you are playing. Nobody is perfect and so learning as much as you can about the game is the best way to increase your chances of winning.
The first advice I want to give you involves playing with friends around a kitchen table or card table, for a friendly in home tournament. More and more people are finding this to be a fun way to pass a night by and maybe win some money. Now chances are you’re going to be playing with friends and as much fun as it is to hang out and joke around, you are going to have to take the game seriously if you want to win. Usually these tournaments have around 8-12 players or one or two tables. The first piece of advice I can give is to not be too aggressive early on. Sure you’d love to go all in and try to take some people out to pave your way to victory lane, but it is better to let other people take each other out unless you are very confident that what you have is going to win.
The reason that it is good to be a little more passive early on is because often amateurs who come to these tournaments excited to play will be very anxious and so they will play too aggressively which, if you get a few of those people at one table you can see them disappear very quickly. It’s better to wait and see who is going to be playing kamikaze style and who is going to lie back and wait for their chance to strike. The last reason for doing this is that with more people being dealt cards, the worse your chances are of having the best hand. The only thing to be careful of is that if you sit back too much, you may get into trouble as the blinds increase. If your blinds are increasing fast, you have to act a little faster, and if they are increasing slowly, you have a little more time to wait on a hand.
Once you get done to the final four or five players you can start playing more hands, calling more blinds in the hopes of catching something on the flop. By now hopefully you know what kind of players your friends are and can read them a little better. Now it is up to being dealt a good hand and getting as much as you can for it.
Next I want to talk about online poker and the different strategies you can undertake depending on the situation. If you are playing in a large tournament with hundreds or thousands of players then my advice is to call a lot of blinds (not raises) during the first set of blinds to try and get a chip lead early. You do this because in online tournaments blinds are raised very quickly and you need to be able to keep up. When you are playing in these tourneys you have to be careful because players can play very aggressive and you don’t want to get caught in their wake. They will get lucky now and then and beat out a smarter player who has a better hand pre-flop.
If you are playing online poker for real money at a regular table then I would recommend not being too aggressive, but instead really wait on a good hand before raising or calling the big blind pre-flop. The blinds are never raised so you don’t have to be aggressive. Take some time to learn what type of players you are playing with at your table so you know who you might be able to catch in a trap and who you have to bet against to take the pot.
Poker is a tricky game and the best way to improve is to read about it and watch it on TV, or play online. Experience is huge in poker and if you want a little boost you can always read one of the many poker books published by the pros as they will help you get some insight into the better players’ strategy.
[tags]poker, poker article, poker advice[/tags]
Related Items
Tags: advice for playing poker, general poker advice, poker, poker advice, poker tactics, Poker Videos
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 19th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
i was beginning to consider i may well be the sole woman / man that thought about this, at least now i learn i’m not odd
i am going to be sure to go and visit a few other threads soon after i get a bit of caffeine in me, it’s not easy to read without having my coffee, I was until the wee hours of the morning last evening enjoying myspace poker and after downing a few ales i ended up burning off all my zynga poker chips cheers 
May 10th, 2010 at 5:31 am
You should definitely take advantage of the free $50 bonus being offered at our new Bet Phoenix Casino. Limited time offer at: Bet Phoenix. Good luck!
August 18th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
I am as obscessed with poker as any one person can be. I have got a fan page over on Facebook. If you wanted to see: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Poker-Players-Only/136818223026737