Sacramento, California Justin Kuraitis there are 10 tactics and strategies that will make you a more confident and profitable poker player. Now, this list won’t teach you how to win every time – not even the greatest poker players do that – but it will help you improve, whether you play cash games, tournaments, in live poker rooms, or online.
10 Quick Poker Strategy Tips
You can click any of these poker tips to jump straight to a detailed explanation that will help your game.
1. Play Fewer Hands And Play Them Aggressively
There is a limit on how many starting hands you can play before the flop in No Limit Texas Hold’em, even for the world’s best players. If you try to play too many hands, you’ll bleed away your chip stack (unless lady luck is on your side). The best approach is to play a tight range of strong and/or playable hands, and you need to play those hands aggressively. Playing all of your hands aggressively, including the more speculative ones like 7♠ 6♠ or 5♥ 5♣, allows you to disguise the strength of your actual hand.
When you raise, your opponents won’t know whether you have A-A, A-K, or 7-6, which makes you super tough to play against. Tight and aggressive wins the game!
2. Don’t Be The First Player To Limp
Limping (just calling the big blind preflop) is an absolute no-no as the first player to enter a pot. There are two main reasons why this play should be avoided:
l You can’t win the pot before the flop like you could if you raised.
l You give the players behind very enticing pot odds, making it more likely you face multiple players and thus less likely you win the pot.
l The only acceptable situation in which to limp is when at least one other player has already limped. This is called over-limping, and it can be a good play because you are getting great pot odds to join the action so you can hit something good on the flop, hopefully.
3. “Semi-Bluff” Aggressively with Your Draws
The most effective way to bluff is to let the cards you have dictate if you are going to bluff or not. This means bluffing with hands that have outs to improve to the best hand on a later street, such as straight draws, flush draws, or even just an overcard or two to the board. Think of these draws as your backup plan in case your bluff gets called.
4. Fast-Play Your Strong Hands to Build the Pot and Make More Money
A player checks their flopped nut flush three times, and then has to awkwardly table their monster of a poker hand when their opponent checks back the river. Slow-playing too often is a mistake common among players who are afraid of chasing their opponents out of the pot when they have strong poker hands. It’s best to bet your strong hands to build the pot and protect your equity. That’s not to say you should always bet/raise your strong hands post-flop. You can check your strong hands if:
l It’s unlikely that you will be outdrawn. There aren’t many scare cards to prevent you from getting paid on later streets.
l Your opponent’s range is heavily weighted toward hands with no showdown value.
5. Defend Your Big Blind (with the Right Hands)
Because of your discount and the fact that you are the last person to act preflop, you can profitably call with many more hands than if you were sitting in another position. That’s not to say you should call raises with trash hands like 9♠ 5♦, but the more borderline hands like K♣ 9♦ and Q♥ 6♥ become playable in most situations.
6. Fold When You’re Unsure
The biggest difference between a bad player and a professional player? It’s the good player’s ability to lay down a good hand like top pair when they think they are beaten. This sounds very simple, but it is very hard to do in practice partly because of the way our brains are built. We are naturally curious and we naturally want to win. When we fold, we surrender our chance to win the pot and we don’t get to satisfy our curiosity by finding out what our opponent has.
7. Attack When Your Opponent Shows Weakness
Players don’t check with hands that can call multiple bets as often as they should. This means that, when they do check, they usually have a relatively weak hand that will often fold if faced with multiple bets. This is the “bluffing with nothing” situation I alluded to earlier. When your opponent shows a lot of weakness in a heads-up pot (like if they check on the flop and the turn), you can take advantage of them with an aggressive bluffing strategy.
8. Play Solid Poker Early in Tournaments (Don’t Worry About Survival)
9. Only Play If You Feel Like It
Poker should be a fun experience, regardless if you are playing as a hobby or if you are a professional player. You’re going to perform best when you are happy, so it makes sense that you should only play this mentally intensive game when you feel that way.
10. Only Play In Good Games
Bottom line is that you generally need to be better than half the players at the table if you want to have a positive win-rate. You want to make a sick-good profit, you want to play against the worst players you can find. Here is a checklist for a good poker game:
1. At least one player is limping regularly.
2. There are many multiway pots.
3. Re-raises are either very rare or very frequent.
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