By Lou Krieger
As poker’s popularity continues to grow in the United States and overseas, experienced home game players as well as those who are new to the game itself, continue to sidle up to casino poker tables asking to be dealt in. Although new and exciting, playing poker in a casino can be confusing at first, and new players are usually full of questions. This is particularly true, and quite understandable, when that newcomer is playing hold’em for the first time, since even experienced home game players may either be more familiar with stud or have played such a wide variety of home poker games that they may never have studied, or even thought about hold’em to any measurable degree.Some newcomers think they know it all. Others ask a lot of questions, particularly when they are attempting to learn hold’em the right way. Rather than simply sitting down and paying for lessons at the table, many new players - in an attempt to fast-track their own learning process - are reading books and using computer software to learn essential poker principles before attempting to put them in action in live games.

Some new players have read so extensively about poker that their questions are quite sophisticated. While these players are the exception rather than the rule, you can usually tell how schooled they are because their inquiries are aimed at sorting out information hierarchically, so they’ll know what’s important and how to apply that knowledge in the heat of battle. Players who haven’t read much about the game, or even thought about it at all, generally….  read rest of article at PokerPages

If you know something about poker, you know that you should be folding a lot of your starting hands, right? And what are the best hands, the one you should be playing with? There are a lot of lists available, and some desktop backgrounds to the online poker player.

In the book “Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players” (see below) , David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth divide the starting hands in groups, in a simple but effective way, and we will show our version below.

Before that, let’s remember some poker glossary:

So, JTs = a Jack and a 10 of the same suit. AQo means an Ace and a Queen, with different suits. Axs = an Ace and a small card, like 5 for example, both of the same suit. Pairs are always off-suit, since we only use one deck in Texas Hold’em.

Connectors = consecutive cards, like 8 and 7, which makes it easier to do a straight. Suited connectors are even better, since they also increase the chances of a flush.

Now let’s see the groups. You already know, or will learn right now, that position is tremendously important in Texas Hold’em. The key to success in this game is….  read rest of article at The Online Poker Life

Hand reading is one of the toughest skills for many aspiring poker players. It’s easy to read a book and learn about pot odds, learn about playing aggressively, and so forth. But many players, especially many new players, are lost at sea when it comes to hand reading. They don’t even know where to start.

A lot of hand reading is deductive reasoning coupled with thousands of hands worth of observation with a little psychology thrown in. In other words, it’s a fairly complex process. But some hand reading is pleasantly simple.

The most simple form is the “giveaway” where your opponent does one thing that’s just a dead giveaway about what they have. You may not be able to nail it down to two exact cards, but you can narrow their range enough that you can really take advantage.

Every player performs a “giveaway” once in a while, but the inexperienced and amateur players you’ll find in your local $1-$2 NL game or home game probably do them all the time. Obviously, every player is different, but here are four common preflop “giveaways” that I see and exploit a lot while I play….  read rest of article at Noted Poker Authority

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

By Matt Matros

Try to play correctly from the outset

As a poker coach, I’ve had a wide variety of players ask me for advice. Some are middle-limit players who are trying to take their games to the next level. Some are regulars on the tournament circuit who just want to bounce ideas around. Some are rank beginners. I’ve found, however, that whatever a player’s skill level, his strategy is largely formed by how he learned to play poker in the first place.

There are generally three methods that players use to learn poker. One method is to start by playing every hand. In all likelihood, this will initially result in a large loss of money. But then our player will begin to play fewer and fewer hands until, eventually, he hits the sweet spot, where he can actually turn a profit. A benefit of this method is that it forces the beginner to learn how to play with subpar holdings. A downside is that he may go broke before he ever learns how to play well.

A second approach is to start out playing extremely tight, probably taking a small loss or grinding out a small profit almost every session, with very few swings toward the extremes. As the new player gains experience, he gradually adds more and more hands until, eventually, he becomes…. read rest of article at Card Player Magazine