By Kathy Watterson and Lou Krieger
Kathy Watterson, who is my co-author on a soon-to-be released book that’s all about Internet poker, co-authored this column with me. Some of this material will appear in that book, although in a somewhat different form. This column is aimed at beginning players, particularly newcomers to “brick and mortar” and online casino poker, or those who might have been playing for a while, but never stopped to think about what it takes to become a winning player.Poker is a game of money played with cards; it’s not a game of pots played with money. It’s also a game of skill, not of chance, and players who go at it solely by the seat of their pants stand no more chance of winning at poker than they do at roulette. Without a solid basis for making decisions about whether to check, bet, call, fold, raise, or reraise, you might just as well play the lottery. Winning poker players understand strategic concepts, and they apply them with precision and discipline. Let’s look at some.

Win money, not pots: Anyone can win pots, but winning money is the object of the game. Pots are only incidental. If your goal is to win the most pots, that’s easy. Just play every hand and call every bet until the bitter end, and you’ll win every pot you possibly can. But you’ll lose a ton of money in the process. The very best players….  read rest of article at Card Player Magazine