Advanced Poker Strategies

The average poker player gets together with his poker buddies once or twice a month and maybe plays a bit online.  They treat poker like a game of pool or darts, and they think they’re good players, but they never take any steps to improve.  Anyone can bet top pair and suffer beats, but if you want to be able to dominate your home game or become a winning player online or at the casino, you have to educate yourself and learn the advanced strategies of the game.  There is plenty to learn about poker, and it takes years of play and reading before a person has an understanding of how to best play in most poker settings.  Here are the most important advanced strategies to learn.

The first thing to do is to start to document your play.  You can’t clean up your game without knowing exactly where your play is.  You have to find out how much you’re losing and where and why you’re losing it.  Documented poker histories show you where the leaks in your game are, allowing you to correct faults in your play over time until you’re playing the optimum way possible in every table situation.  You can get stats of all your hand histories from online poker rooms, and you should track all your buy-ins and cash outs.  Weak player lists can also come in handy.

You should also be learning about pot odds and practicing the hand percentages as you play.  You should be trying to learn how to limit your gambling situations to where you have a favorable percentage of winning.  And you should be learning about getting percentages on your stack size versus another in a tournament game.  The mathematics of poker is something that every player can learn and implement.  This adds consistency to your game and will improve your long-term results.

Recognizing better patters is another advanced poker strategy.  This is how good players learn to put opponents on hands.  Understanding how typical hands are played, especially from opponents who repeat their habits often, is the method that good players use to figure out what opponents are holding.  It’s about taking the time to run through the entire hand so you can dissect what each action was on each street, in order to put them on a type of hand that would make the most sense.  It’s also the best method for sniffing out a bluff that an opponent might be attempting.

The next level of poker playing also requires an understanding of bankroll management.  If you’re serious about playing poker, you should be playing at the proper limits for the money you have.  you should be playing in games where you have at least two hundred times the big blind, and tournament buy-ins shouldn’t exceed 15% of your total playing roll.  Otherwise you put yourself into a situation where you can easily go broke from a bad run of cards.  And being out of the game is not the way to get better.

There is plenty of literature available on how to get better at poker.  Buy some books and learn the next levels of play.  Study pot charts and practice putting other players on hands by the way they bet on each street.  Learn to manage your money so you can stay in the game and keep records of all this so you can see where you make your mistakes as you play.  If you can put all that together, success at poker will be part of your reality.