...Online Poker Reviews and Strategies...
Tips for online poker beginners
If you’re a poker beginner and you have your mind set on becoming a skilled player, you can choose to do the learning the hard way or the easy way. It is up to you really. If you begin wandering around the online poker rooms in a clueless manner, if you choose to learn via trial and error, you’re probably going to get there sometime but not too soon that’s for sure. Picking up every bit of information without the framework to place it onto is the hard way to wade through the learning process.
If you choose to do it the easy way, you pick up a poker book or you read a good poker article and you hammer down the basic concepts behind successful poker play first. If you learn what the nature of the game is, you’ll gain a direct explanation as to how it’s supposed to work. With all these concepts understood, you’ll have an easy time learning how strategic subtleties are applied, and what’s more, you will know why they are supposed to be applied that way.
Let’s start with the basic theorem of winning poker: every time you play your hand the same way you would if you could see your opponents’ hole cards, you gain value. Every time you fail to play it that way, you lose value.
Now then, since it’s not humanly possible to play as if you could see your opponents’ hole cards, you need to settle for the next best thing, and approximate that style of play as much as possible. Your closest ally in this undertaking is the expected value (also know as EV).
The expected value represents the money you’re mathematically likely to win or to lose on a bet. If you bet $1 with a friend of yours on a coin flip, your EV will be 0. If you bet $1 against his $2 on a coin flip, you’ll have positive EV as you’ll stand to win $0.5 on every single bet you play. If you both bet $1 on an event which – out of three tries – gives you two wins on the average, you have positive EV again, because you stand to win $0.33 per every bet.
The above reasoning tells us two things. Most importantly: every time you play a positive EV hand in poker you win a little, even when you suffer a bad beat and you lose, and every time you play negative EV you lose a little even if you get lucky and win.
It also tells us that the EV is influenced by two factors: the amount of money you put into the pot and the event itself on which you bet. By comparing these two factors (your pot odds and the odds you get for making your hand) you’ll be able to mathematically decide whether or not you have EV+, and therefore whether or not you should stay in the hand. Mind you however: while mathematics does give you a very useful lead as to what you should do, it’s doesn’t always represent the optimal way to act. Advanced poker players get reads on their opponents based on which the mathematically correct course of action is often abandoned for something deemed more lucrative by the player. That however concerns advanced strategy, which is something you shouldn’t get into just yet.
Once you understand the mathematical ‘engine’ behind the game of poker, you’ll see that every new concept you learn falls right within the guidelines established by these basic concepts. Starting hand selection, the exploitation if the implied odds, rakeback, sign up bonuses, you name it…
Don’t forget to sign up for a rakeback deal before you begin your real money online poker career. You’ll thank yourself later…
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