Just what do you have to do to be a great poker player?
This, million dollar question (literally) is pretty much at the core of poker for any player who is not just in it for the free fun games.
So many players want to know if there is some sort of insider strategy for universal success and sets you apart from the free poker online donks and hapless grinders forever.
The answer is very simple and in this how to win poker games guide I’ll tell you right here and now.
The key to becoming a good poker player at any level, be it free or big stakes, is to make reasoned, logical decisions at every opportunity.
In other words, to “use common sense at all times” and win, sorry it’s not more profound than that.
Common sense you screech? But I have lots of common sense you say and still don’t win much! Ah, but common sense, in the context of poker is not very common at all.
Where most players go wrong in regard to common sense is their perception of poker. Too many people reply too much on luck. In reality, poker is a skill based game where making good decisions directly correlates to long term profits.
While short term results are subject to a degree of luck in the long run skill wins out and the players playing a profitable style profit! Once you adjust your poker view to accept this you see that “common sense” is the core key to winning poker.
But what about those huge crazy bluffs the TV pros make? They have solid (often complex) reasoning behind them.
The internet pros making tens to hundreds of thousands per year?
They make all that money by playing thousands of hands in a solid steady style that overwhelms the majority of their opponents’.
Even on free online poker sites better poker players profit more than the worse ones.
So how do you win at poker? Basically by structuring your game around sound fundamentals and a solid foundation of poker knowledge.
My “key”, to use “common sense”, is really just a more general way to say patience though it expands much further than just “patience”
How does common sense equate to “patience” in poker?
> In a normal Holem game you get 2 cards that only you see befie the betting (apart from blinds) starts.
> Applying simple patience reasoning, we wind up with something like we should wait for hands we can play profitably and then play those because we’ll profit.
> There are not so many such hands so basically we are playing tight preflop.
> Adding common sense into this mix we will now say that the idea of poker is to take money from the other players.
> If we invest money with stronger hands than them, we’ll profit.
> Therefore, we only play stronger hands preflop so we can profit, and as such should generally play tight.
How the Common Sense approach differs to plain patience is in the logical reasoning that you will learn to put into your decision making process.
What we are saying if playing vanilla patient is “I play this hand as it is profitable” whereas when you play with common sense you are saying “This hand is profitable because…so I will play it”, this is a step above just playing with patience, with preflop hands it is not so different as you have a known list of hands to play or not play but in more complex situations this reasoning process sets you apart.
You have to know what you’re doing at all times and WHY you are doing it beyond some set in stone rulebook.
The easiest application of this is playing tight (no trash hands!) preflop.
While the patient approach says to play certain hands only as they are profitable your logical approach goes a step further saying that when you play good hands preflop you will get more good hands postflop and make more money, therefore only play tight preflop and fold all trash.
This extends to many other basic poker concepts, such as value-betting “we should bet when we’re ahead of our opponents to make money”, bluffing “we should bluff when we can’t win the pot unless our opponent folds and our opponent is likely to fold”, and beyond.
But those are concepts which will be explored more in depth in future articles in this free poker online games training series.
I hope this free poker online games how to win poker games lesson was useful, for many more lessons and to play free poker online games against real people go see NoPayPOKER.com
