Beginner Poker Tips: Improving Your Game

Beginner Strategies, Betting Strategy
December 6 2008

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been playing poker for five days or five decades. There are always ways to improve your game and become a better player. This holds especially true for beginners who likely have more holes in their game than they either know about or like to actually admit. There are three things you should always be working on to improve your game. They are:

1. Filling in holes that are causing you to lose hands and money.
2. Analyzing different situations to figure out the best play.
3. Figuring out how to better pick up patterns and ways to read people.

These are three of the most basic things you can do to improve your game. Now here’s how to actually work on them. The one thing all poker players should do is take notes on their play, or at least have a computer program do it for you. You can’t look at your game and find the holes and mistakes you’re making without information to look at. Certain things to focus on should include starting hand selection, percentage of flops seen and what cards you lose with most often. This may seem pretty basic, but it will actually help you find underlying holes in your game as well.

Next, get all the outside information you can. Not only has the poker boom dramatically increased the number of poker players, but it has also increased the amount of information available about the game. There are hundreds of books, web pages, guides, videos, TV shows and more which can show you things about poker you’ve never even thought of before. Start from the ground up and gradually move on to more intermediate and expert tips and tactics as you improve.

One last thing to do to improve your game is to go over your mistakes. The next time you suffer what you believe to be a bad beat, make sure it really was a bad beat and not a poorly played hand. Maybe the cards really were against you, or maybe you shouldn’t have given your opponent a free card on the turn. If you don’t locate mistakes like this you’ll keep making them . . . and losing money.

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