Poker Tips and Winning Strategies for Beginners

Poker is without a doubt, one of the great entertainment and cultural phenomena of the late twentieth and early twenty first century. At the present time Texas “Holdem” is by a very wide margin the most popular of all the different types of poker games, and the growth of the Internet has simply accelerated the acceptance and popularity of card games by bringing us online poker. Outside of Texas Holdem, the most popular online casino card games are (in no particular order): Omaha poker which is played as a hi/low game with rules very similar to Texas Holdem, but the player with the highest hand splits the winnings with the player with the lowest hand, 7-card stud; the game from which Texas Holdem was derived, 5-card stud, a game with the same rules as 7-card but with fewer cards, Triple Draw, and Crazy Pineapple.

Poker is a game with a very steep learning curve. If you are somebody who is determined to be a really good poker player, then you need to make a commitment to putting in the time necessary to developing your skills because time and a lot of repetition are the only things that can help make you a dominant player within the circles that you play. As a beginner your goal should be to learn the rules of the game along with the basic strategies that are used to improve your odds of earning a lot when you win, and minimizing your loses when you don’t. Beyond that your goal should be to find a way to play as many hands as you can against other people without betting real money. This is where the Internet can help you out a lot because there are a number of free online casinos where you can practice playing as much poker or other casino games as you want on a trial basis. Be advised that online poker can only take you so far because the nature of online gaming takes away the human element which is so important in all forms of poker.

It has been said that very successful poker players don’t play their cards, they play the other players, and to a certain degree that is very true. The very best poker players in the world are experts in the study of human behavior and especially in the art of recognizing “tells” which are the tiny idiosyncratic motions and gestures that some gamblers habitually make without themselves being aware of them. Before you can rise to the level of being good at noticing your opponents “tells”, you need to be able to survive with your grubstake intact, the many numerous card games you need to go through to get you there. Here are some tips and strategies to help you survive your early stage education and put you on the road to winning.

For starters, forget about bluffing and by all means restrain yourself from trying to bluff your way to a pot in the early going. There is enough to think about with respect to trying to figure out who else is bluffing when you are a poker “greenhorn”. Just stick with the basic strategies and play your cards until you are ready to start actually playing the other players. Beginning poker players should try to only play in games that enforce the smallest blinds and antes. The reason for this is that early on in your career you will want to fold early and often while you want for some really good cards. When you fold, you have the opportunity to study the behavior of other players — their body language, voice inflection, and the way they hold their chips. Folding a lot marks you as a very “tight” (conservative) player as opposed to an aggressive player which are often targeted in the early rounds by the better players. Being a tight player builds up your credibility and makes it easier for you to bluff in future rounds.

The goal of the beginning player should be to become a steady break-even player as fast as you can. The more of your money you can hold onto, the more hands you can play with real money, and that extra experience is what is going to make you a much better player.

Blackjack Strategies

Often considered one of the few winnable casino games where players actively determine their own outcome rather just wagering on a chance event, blackjack has yielded scores of theories about methods to beat the house. Most estimates place the casinos’ winning advantage between 0.5% and 1%, making blackjack the most affordable game for the losing player. Throw in systematic bet raising, a 3:2 payout for a natural blackjack, and some complimentary cocktails, and its easy to see why savvy players feel that with guided strategy they can beat the house.

Basic strategies revolve around how to play the hand based on the total of the dealer’s visible cards in relation to the players’ card total. These are affected by varying rules from casino to casino about dealer play and betting, but they theorize that a player gains advantage with a lower card total compared to the dealer’s visible card total. Knowing the dealer must stop drawing at 17, and that a hand with player and a dealer bust is still a dealer win, a player can calculate when to draw or stand based on the dealer’s visible card total and if the dealer draws or stands. Combine this strategic drawing with a controlled betting strategy and a player’s odds get better.

More complicated blackjack strategies are based on methods of counting the visible occurrence of key cards to determine if the remaining cards in the shoe create an advantage for the player. Since keeping track of all the known played cards in a six or eight deck shoe is near impossible, some system of assigning positive or negative values to cards is used to create a running total reflecting the deck’s state of relative advantage or disadvantage to the player. These strategies usually assign a negative value to the cards 10 through Ace, because a higher concentration of these cards remaining in the deck builds an advantage for the player, thus when they are visibly played they decrease the deck’s value. The player should bet more aggressively when a deck’s running total is a higher positive number, and they should bet less when the deck’s total dips below zero. Many touted variations of this exist, each with exacting rules on valuing methods and theories about when best to bet, but studies show that careful card counting methods can swing the odds in favor of player by as much as 2%.

So why do casinos play a game so easily manipulated to a player’s advantage? Simply, the loss rate for players not enlisting a strategy is so great it compensates for the players able to discretely work the game to an advantage. This gives the educated blackjack player hope.