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“They” (whoever they are) say that poker is 70% luck and only 30% skill. Having said that, describing Texas Holdem Strategy can come across as dictating rules to winning the game. However, nothing can be farther from the truth. Strategies are guidelines to what works best in most typcial situations. A poker game, of course, with multiple individuals, each with their own personalities, and all with the same singular desire to win, is many things – but rarely a typical situation. Therefore, take these guidelines not as hard and fast rules, but as insider information as to what is most commonly considered wise gameplay.

At best, these strategies will make you a contender in any game, regardless of your experience level and that of your competitors and can hopefully get you started learning how to develop your own less rigid and structured style of play. At worst, you’ll be able to identify the tricks and techniques that your (allegedly) poker-savvy opponents are attempting to use on you. Either way, learning basic Texas Holdem strategy is a win-win situation.

Starting Hands

In Texas Holdem, your two hole cards are the only ones that make your hand distinct from your opponents’ which makes them one of the (though not the sole) most important factor in determining how (and whether) you should play the hand. There are precisely 169 starting hands possible. At least half of these are considered totally unplayable (unless, of course, you go into the hand planning to bluff, in which case, any hand is playable).

Widely considered the best starting hand is A-K suited, though some will argue that a Pair of Pocket Aces is even better. The arguments for each are strong, making it worth considering both of these starting hands as “the best”. That said, many playes, professional and otherwise, proclaim other hands than these two as their favorites to start with.

Extrapolating from there, a player serious about winning might seriously consider folding out of a hand should their hole cards feel to be a Pair or a Suited Connecter (two numerically consecutive cards – or pictorially, ie. J, Q, K – of the same suit).

If you start with a Pair (of anything) and don’t pull “Trips” (or 3-of-a-Kind) on the Flop, then at that point you might want to consider folding. If you start with a suited connector and don’t pull 2 more cards towards a straight or a flush after the flop,, your fantastic starting hand is suddenly not so fantastic.

Another worthwhile starting hand is Royalty (J,Q, or K) with a Suited Kicker. The kicker is the card in your hand that does not help make your actual hand. A novice may consider this a throwaway card, but it’s much more valuable than that. In the case of a tie, it is this card that determines the winner. Therefore, the higher your kicker, the better your hand (which is also why many players prefer high suited connectors as a starting hand rather than a pocket pair – as with a pair you have no kicker other than the highest shared card on the table, but if you have a high suited connector, you could still conceivable pull a high pair and have the remaining card as a killer kicker). That said, being dealt a J,Q, or K and an unsuited kicker is also a decent (though not great) starting hand.

After the Flop

As suggested above, if you start with a pair and don’t pull a 3rd of that kind on the flop, you’re treading in dangerous waters. 3-of-a-Kind is not that hard to come by, and at a poker table of 6-10 people, if you don’t have one by the time the flop comes, there’s a good chance someone else does.

Speaking of 3’s, many people chase flushes and straights with only three cards towards them (ie. three hearts or 9-10-J of any suit) after the flop – called Three-to-a-Straight or Three-to-a-Flush, depending. This is more often a losing battle than not and therefore generally considered unplayable. The odds of the next (and only) two remaining cards – the Turn and the River – both filling out your potential straight or flush are so slim that you’re better off bluffing (if feasible, based on the cards on the table) or cutting your losses and folding out of the hand.

The exception to this is if you have Three to a Straight Flush. This may be worth investigating a little further. The odds are still slim, but depending on how much it costs to stay in, it may be worth it to see if you can nail this rare and killer hand.

If you have four to a straight, you’d be best served distinguishing whether it’s an Inside Straight Draw (ie. 4-5-7-8) or an Outside Straight Draw (ie. 4-5-6-7). As should be obvious, the odds of pulling that straight are significantly better for an outside straight draw than an inside one, to the point where the former is often worth playing and the latter usually not.The exception to this is an outside straight draw with an Ace (either A-2-3-4 or J-Q-K-A) as in each instance there is still only one card that can help you, not two, making an outside straight draw with an Ace as hard to make as any inside straight draw.

Now you know the basics – the hands typcially worth staying in and those that aren’t. This, of course, is with Bluffing notwithstanding, but we’ll save the intricate topic of bluffing for another article altogether. In the meantime, you can now at least feel confident sitting in at a Texas Holdem table knowing in the most basic sense what hands to hold and what hands to fold.

As in life, though, nothing in poker is that simple, which is why we’ve given this article a companion piece on Texas Holdem psychology or Playing the Player. This will give you a deeper insight into what’s really going on behind those hole cards and poker faces. So read on, if you dare…!

To learn how to play video poker, check out these great video poker sites to perfect your game. Video poker is one of the top ways to build your online poker bankroll in order to put this great holdem strategy to work.

In the first part of our series on bluffing we covered what bluffing is and how to use it to your advantage when playing online.

The Limit to Bluffing: Bluffing works best in No Limit scenarios, because you can go all the way with it – go All-In- bet the farm and (hopefully) scare the bejeezus out of your opponents. In Limit games, however, the highest you can bet or raise is the limit. When the ceiling is a finite number, your fellow players are a lot more likely to call it just to see how the hand plays out. Therefore, bluffing is not as powerful a tool in limit games.

Get Caught: A particularly stellar bluffing strategy is to let yourself get caught doing it, even at the expense of losing a pot to do so. The reason? Because once you’ve established yourself in your opponents’ eyes as someone who bluffs, people will call your outrageous bets more often, giving you a greater chance of pulling down enormous pots when you do get dealt the Nuts.

Representing the Flop: This is a particular type of bluff, distinct from the “Stone Cold Bluff” occupying the bulk of this article. “Representing the Flop” is pretending that whatever cards you needed to have the Nuts just came up on the flop. Many players are keen to this trick, though, so watch out when you use it. You might find someone else trying the same racket at the same time as you, in which case you may want to back off. In some instances, that other player may actually have gotten the Nuts on the flop, and here you’re just faking it. It’s a trcik to be aware of, but not to abuse. Get a read on the other players at the table and note your position in order to decide if now is the right time to represent the flop, because sometimes it’s the perfect time.

Beating a Bluff: Lastly in this intro to bluffing is one final word of advice on how to act when you believe your opponent is trying to bluff you. Look at your cards. Can you win the hand? If so, play on. If not, let him have it. Don’t call someone just because you think they’re bluffing. Only stay in a hand you think you can win.

One way to learn more about how and when players bluff is to watch them very closely when you are not playing. In fact, some of the best jobs to do this is to work as a Vegas Poker Dealer’s Salary. When you become a poker table hire, you get to watch all the action without having to take any of the risk.

To bluff is to try to convince your fellow players that you have the Nuts (or at least a fantastic and probably unbeatable hand) when really the cards you’re holding are garbage. The objective of bluffing is almost always the same – to get the other player to fold. (There is an exception, elucidated further below).

Bluffing successfully requires a great deal of calm, poise, cunning, and acting ability. It is an inextricable part of the game of poker, a necessary skill without which you’ll never earn or amount to much in the game. Without bluffing, poker really would be solely about the cards and you could
therefore play every hand open (with your hole cards showing).

Bluffing Online requires a craftier use of a much smaller set of tools than poker players in live, land-based settings have at their disposal for bluffing. For example, online your opponent cannot see you Carey Grant-esque poker face. Online your bluffs will come mostly in the form of your bets. Therefore, an online bluff cannot be a half-hearted bluff. An online bluff has to be large enough to look like it would hurt badly to lose. In fact, the gutsiest online bluff is going All-In. Just be sure you use it wisely – because (rebuy tourneys notwithstanding) you only get one chance to be wrong about that.

The Exception:
To Slow-Play is to try and trick your opponent into thinking you have a weak hand and are playing it poorly, making you ripe for the taking. Essentially you’re playing weak in order to get your opponent to throw more chips into the pot in the hopes of wrangling more of yours away from you before they supposedly move in for the kill. Little do they know, however, that you’re holding the Nuts – the prime time to Slow Play – and will be the one dining on a pound of their flesh this time around.

A form of slow playing is the Check Raise, when you Check the right to bet first in a round to entice your opponents to detect weakness in you and therefore bet just enough, they expect, to get you to fold out the pot. Often this is done in the first round of betting as a method to “steal the blinds”. However, when the bet comes back around to you, you don’t fold – as they had hoped for – and you don’t merely call their bet – but you raise it. Now your opponent is on to you. They know what you’re up to, and all they have to decide is if you’re Check-Raising them because you truly have a killer hand or if your Check-Raise is itself an elaborate bluff.

Bluffing is a great strategy to use at online poker rooms as the physical aspect of bluffing is eliminated. Check back in the next few days to learn more about bluffing in part 2 of our Bluffing series. Use this Pokerstars Marketing Code or our favorite Carbon Poker Coupon Code to start bluffing your way to the top of the online poker world today!

To bluff is to try to convince your fellow players that you have the Nuts (or at least a fantastic and probably unbeatable hand) when really the cards you’re holding are garbage. The objective of bluffing is almost always the same – to get the other player to fold. (There is an exception, elucidated further below).

Bluffing successfully requires a great deal of calm, poise, cunning, and acting ability. It is an inextricable part of the game of poker, a necessary skill without which you’ll never earn or amount to much in the game. Without bluffing, poker really would be solely about the cards and you could therefore play every hand open (with your hole cards showing).

Bluffing Online requires a craftier use of a much smaller set of tools than poker players in live, land-based settings have at their disposal for bluffing. For example, online your opponent cannot see you Carey Grant-esque poker face. Online your bluffs will come mostly in the form of your bets. Therefore, an online bluff cannot be a half-hearted bluff. An online bluff has to be large enough to look like it would hurt badly to lose. In fact, the gutsiest online bluff is going All-In. Just be sure you use it wisely – because (rebuy tourneys notwithstanding) you only get one chance to be wrong about that.

The Exception:

To Slow-Play is to try and trick your opponent into thinking you have a weak hand and are playing it poorly, making you ripe for the taking. Essentially you’re playing weak in order to get your opponent to throw more chips into the pot in the hopes of wrangling more of yours away from you before they supposedly move in for the kill. Little do they know, however, that you’re holding the Nuts – the prime time to Slow Play – and will be the one dining on a pound of their flesh this time around.

A form of slow playing is the Check Raise, when you Check the right to bet first in a round to entice your opponents to detect weakness in you and therefore bet just enough, they expect, to get you to fold out the pot. Often this is done in the first round of betting as a method to “steal the blinds”. However, when the bet comes back around to you, you don’t fold – as they had hoped for – and you don’t merely call their bet – but you raise it. Now your opponent is on to you. They know what you’re up to, and all they have to decide is if you’re Check-Raising them because you truly have a killer hand or if your Check-Raise is itself an elaborate bluff.

The Limit to Bluffing: Bluffing works best in No Limit scenarios, because you can go all the way with it – go All-In- bet the farm and (hopefully) scare the bejeezus out of your opponents. In Limit games, however, the highest you can bet or raise is the limit. When the ceiling is a finite number, your fellow players are a lot more likely to call it just to see how the hand plays out. Therefore, bluffing is not as powerful a tool in limit games.

Get Caught: A particularly stellar bluffing strategy is to let yourself get caught doing it, even at the expense of losing a pot to do so. The reason? Because once you’ve established yourself in your opponents’ eyes as someone who bluffs, people will call your outrageous bets more often, giving you a greater chance of pulling down enormous pots when you do get dealt the Nuts.

Representing the Flop: This is a particular type of bluff, distinct from the “Stone Cold Bluff” occupying the bulk of this article. “Representing the Flop” is pretending that whatever cards you needed to have the Nuts just came up on the flop. Many players are keen to this trick, though, so watch out when you use it. You might find someone else trying the same racket at the same time as you, in which case you may want to back off. In some instances, that other player may actually have gotten the Nuts on the flop, and here you’re just faking it. It’s a trcik to be aware of, but not to abuse. Get a read on the other players at the table and note your position in order to decide if now is the right time to represent the flop, because sometimes it’s the perfect time.

Beating a Bluff: Lastly in this intro to bluffing is one final word of advice on how to act when you believe your opponent is trying to bluff you. Look at your cards. Can you win the hand? If so, play on. If not, let him have it. Don’t call someone just because you think they’re bluffing. Only stay in a hand you think you can win.

One of the longest running internet poker leagues is moving to PokerStars.com starting on March 11th. This is a real money league that offers bonus prizes to the winners. It is organized and managed by the team over at KickAssPoker.com and new players are always invited. It is a real money league, so you will need to get a real money account to play. The Pokerstars software download works both with PC’s and Macs and accepts people from around the world so if you want to test your skills in a competitive online poker league, saddle up and jump on board.

The “KAP online poker league” caters to the player who wants to play in a weekly online game that challenges them against other good players with modest buyins. The stakes range from $10 - $20 each week and usually there is around $500 in bonus prizes awarded at the end of each season.

The team at “KAP” said they chose Poker Stars over FullTiltPoker.com because the biggest difference was that most league members already have accounts at PokerStars so it is much easier getting funds over there and ready to play in our weekly events combined with the excellent software and sheer size of the poker room itself make moving to PokerStars a fairly easy decision.

Get signed up and good luck at the tables!

The statistics displayed in the lobby of online poker rooms helps you to determine the best table to sit down at. This may not sound like much, but it’s actual your first line of defense in your ongoing objective of making your bankroll grow. Therefore as a fundamental part of your poker strategy should be a careful and intelligent determination as to which table to join. Without a doubt, your odds of winning will improve by sitting down at the right table.

First take a look at your bankroll and comnpare it with those of the players at the table you’re considering joining. You don’t want to sit down at a table with the smallest bankroll. You’d rather have close to the largest, an amount that allows you to take the power position when you have it and attack weakness when you sense it.

Next take a look at how many players are sitting in at the table as compared with the number of seats at the table. The more Short-Handed the table (meaning the fewer players there are as compared to the total seats) the greater your overall odds are of winning any given hand. The pots may be smaller, sure, but you’ll likely win more of them.

Beyond that, there are 3 statistics most commonly posted for each table in an online poker lobby:

• Flop Percentages/Players-per-Flop: This details how often players stay in to see the flop. Experienced poker players will often fold frequently before the flop, only staying in to see it if they have a great starting hand or are planning a big bluff. Therefore, a table with high flop percentages implies loose players who are prone to place, call, and raise outrageous bets. You can take advantage of these players by playing the cards (even so far as giving greater weight to lesser hands – like 2 pair and 3 of a kinds) and not letting yourself be bluffed out of following through with a half decent hand. Low flop percentages, by contrast, imply tight players who are loathe to call any bets but those they think they can win. Take advantage of these players by stealing lots of blinds, bluffing often, and whittling down their chips stacks one fold at a time.

• Hands-per-Hour: Lots of hands per hour can be read two ways – either it implies tight players who are folding out of most hands before the showdown or it implies fast-moving, quick-acting players who play more by instinct than analysis. Observe a few rounds of the action to decide which is the case before sitting down, and you’ll know how best to play to win.

• Average Pot: Large average pots equate to heavy betting, lots of raising, lots of calling. These pots are vastly more rewarding, but also harder to win. Lots of bluffing tends to go on at tables with high average pots. In these cases, choose which hands to play very carefully. Plan to leave most hands before they get too costly and plan to earn your fortune winning fewer larger pots. To compete against tighter, more conservative players, less prone to bluff and therefore more vulnerable to it, sit down at a table with a low average pot and then just plan to win lots of pots.

All the poker strategy in the world isn’t worth a dime if it’s inadequately used. To win at poker you need to start out doing everything you can to put the odds in your favor, and that includes knowing something about the types of people you’re playing against and how best to beat them.

Discuss these poke strategies and others at this great online poker forum.

Sorry for the delay, but here is the final install of the tournament strategy posts I started a week or so ago. If you missed the first two posts you can find them here:

Beginning Tournament Strategy
Middle Tournament Strategy

Enjoy!

At the End of a tournament, when it’s down to just you and one other player, nothing helps more than having the bigger chip stack. The more you can force your opponent to put everything they have at stake in order to have a chance of winning the hand, the more reticent they will be to do it. Unless that player has the better cards – a big unless – it’s a lose-lose proposition: if they fold, their short stack is getting significantly shorter, if they stay in, it’s game over – you win!

But in heads-up poker the power dynamic can shift in a single hand, giving a player forced to go All-In just to stay in a shot at doubling their pot with every win. Therefore, the advice for the player at the end of a tournament with the short stack is to go All-In before you’re forced. Because if you don’t increase that stack shortly, you’re set to lose anyway.

Now two of my favorite poker rooms to employ this tournament strategy are Unibet and Everest Poker. Both of these rooms have great tournaments running daily as well as some good guaranteed cash tournaments where you can sometimes sneak into the tournament with a small field and big cash prizes.

Let’s Gamble!

Well, last night was a night of ups and downs, well mostly downs at FT that was topped off by a horrendous beat down at a .50/$1 no limit hold’em table. The hand went down like this:

- I start the hand with around $50 and am delt KK in the big blind. I raise to $7 and am reraised all in. I call and am happy to see I have the player dominated as they only have QQ.

The joy doesn’t last long though as the flop comes down 10 9 K. Of course the turn is a jack and I am just drawing to a King to make quads. Well we all know how common quads are and I come up short.

On another more common front I was also playing at a $2/4 table last night and started with $40. I immediately ran this up to $120, which is of course the kiss of death, and kept playing. Five times I had my stack down to under $15 and each time I came back to keep playing.

I had several suck outs on other players, but there were many hands were players sucked out on me. After all was said and done, I ended up dead even on this table.

The rest of the night had me taking 15th place in a $1 super satellite to the FTOPS main event. and getting sucked out of two $11 sit and goes that cost me a chance at the money both times. Just brutal beats as well.

Better luck next time!

Let’s Gamble.

In The Middle of a tournament is where you can start to exploit the odds. All other things being equal, the fewer the players at the table, the greater your odds of winning a hand (rhe best odds – 50/50 – are with Heads-Up or 1-on-1 play). Now that several opponents have been knocked out for you, you can sneak in and start attacking the weakest players remaining to swipe up their chips for your stack while the lucky sharks who brought them to this point are tired and overconfident.

You’ll need to accumulate a sizable chip stack in order to survive the later stages of a tournament, when the blinds are so high that folding out of almost any hand has a prohibitive price tag. Since you’ve been sitting back (more or less) in the first stage of the play, this is the time to jump in with both feet so you can stock up for the final battle ahead. Don’t worry so much about your cards as much as you should be sniffing out weakness and attacking it.

To boot, during the beginning stages of play, you should have taken those moments sitting back from the action to observe your opponents and their styles of play. By the middle of the tournament, you should have a calm and cooly assessed gauge of each of the players, their strategies, their styles, their tells, and their weaknesses. In addition to exploting weakness, then, you now have the opportunity to exploit all that as well.

Try and make all the hands you play head-up hands. If there are too many other players vying for the same pot, let them fight over it (unless you have the Nuts, of course). Save your strength, and your chips, for the battles you have the best chances of winning, and more often than not, those are one-on-one battles.

Check back for the final portion of this 3 piece article and learn how to close the deal at the end of an online poker tournament.

All Tournaments Have a Beginning, Middle, and End

Strategies suitable for doing well in the beginning of a tournament will do less good, and could even go so far as to be harmful, in the latter stages of a tournament and vice-versa.

In The Beginning of a poker tournament, you may just want to sit back and let some of the more erratic, inexperienced, and wild players duke it out a bit before you jump into the fray. Play tight, check and fold often, play only those most killer of starting hands. Take note of your position and play it to the hilt, though. Jump in occasionally, when the opportunity seems right, to take down a few large pots with a minimal investment and some crafty bluffing – mainly so you don’t tip your hand that you’re really just warming up, waiting around for the inevitable to happen – for a few hasty players to get themselves taken out of the game and for the short stacks to start showing themselves.

Warning – if you do get pegged as trying this Staying-Under-the-Radar tactic, players will react by folding anytime you bet big. Initially, this is a liability, as to discover this has happened requires you lose out on a chance to win a pot or two with some genuinely great cards. Once you’ve clued in however, you can use this turn of the tide to your advantage – knowing that your fellow players see you as always folding except when you have killer cards, you can then start bluffing them out of several large pots with lousy cards.

Don’t worry too much about their initial read on you, though. You have plenty of time to show them how much of a daring and aggressive risk-taker you are later on when the field has whittled down and the stakes are higher. For now just be sure to give yourself plenty of outs.

Tomorrow we will cover how to play through the middle portions of a tournament.