Texas Holdem Poker Strategy

Basic Texas Holdem Poker strategy is critical for any poker player. If you have no basis for making decisions about whether to call, fold, raise, or reraise, then you might just as well play the lottery. Sure, you’ll win occasionally because everyone gets lucky now and then.

Without strategy and knowledge, you’ll exercise no control over your destiny as a card player. If you picked 100 poker players at random and asked them about the objective of poker, most would say something about winning the pot, but they couldn’t be further from the truth.

The goal of poker, in addition to the enjoyment of playing the game, is winning money, not pots. If your goal was to win the most pots, that would be easy to do. Just play every hand and call every bet and raise until the bitter end. You’d win a lot of pots. In fact, you’d win every pot you possibly could. But you’d lose money. Plenty of it, and rapidly. So the objective of poker is to win money. And that means tempering enthusiasm with realism by being selective about the hands you play.

There’s no need to play every hand. The very best players play relatively few hands, but when they do enter a pot they are usually aggressive and out to maximize the amount they win when the odds favor them. This is the essence of poker: Anyone can win in the short run, but in the long haul -when the cards even out – the better players win more money with their good hands, and lose less with weak hands, than their adversaries.

Because of the short-term luck involved, poker is a game where even atrociously poor players can – and do -have winning nights. This is not true in most other competitive endeavors. Most of us would not have a prayer going one-on-one with an NBA basketball player, or attempting to hit a 95 mph bigleague fastball. What’s more, we realize it. Yet most of us think we are good poker players.

If you took a poll at any poker table, the majority of players would rate themselves significantly above average. But that’s not the case. It can’t be. ln the long run, good players beat bad players -though the bad players will win just often enough to keep them coming back for more. It’s this subtle blend of skill and luck that balances the game. That balance also rewards good players who are realistic about how they assess their ability and that of their opponents. This chapter can help you develop those skills.

Prepare to Win

When learning how to play Holdem, Success demands preparation. Knowledge, plus preparation and experience (and whatever innate talent one may have), equals know-how. That’s what it takes to be a winning poker player. If you have that knowledge and you’re losing, or you’re just not winning as much and as often as you should.

The primary step in making behavioral changes and eliminating bad habits is to be responsible for you. Adopt the irrevocable assumption that you are personally responsible for what happens to you at the poker table. If you put the blame on forces outside of yourself, you have not committed yourself to making changes; you’re denying the problem.

A Little Probability

Consider a simple coin toss. With a very large number of tosses, do you believe that the number of heads and tails would be exactly the same? If you do, then you would also believe that these simulated players, each programmed to play identically from a strategic perspective, should have identical results after 3 million hands.

Understanding poker’s fluctuations can provide some perspective when considering your short-term results. Not only can fluctuations persist for a long time before results can be attributed solely to skill, but there is no guarantee you will balance your books after the last hand is dealt. The probability theory offers is the likelihood that your results will parallel your ability.