Free Poker Strategy

No matter who you are, or how skilled at poker you might be, bad beats are unavoidable.

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Luck spares no player the crushing feeling of having got all your chips in as a huge favourite and lost to a highly unfortunate turn or river card. When it does decide to happen though, you should not let it define how the evenings poker went for you. If you walk out thinking ‘that was an awful nights poker‘ simply because you got terribly unlucky to bust out, you are missing the bigger picture.

The fact of poker, is that luck is simply a variable we cannot control. If we sit down, make almost every decision the correct one, and do not let misfortune influence our mindset, we have won, in a sense. I say we have won in a sense, because we have done everything that it is within our control to do, in order to nurture success. I know it is never easy to concentrate on being pleased with the way you played if you just lost most or all of your stack, but you have to think of the positives firstly.

Once you feel calmer a bit later on, run back through the hands in your mind and look at what you might have done differently in key hands during the poker tournament. No matter how good you might be, there is bound to be at least one hand that might have been better played a different way. In terms of keeping your emotions in check, well some are more susceptible to tilt than others I think, and it’s always more helpful if you are a naturally relaxed and calm person I feel.

Taking a few moments away from the poker table can help with tilting I think, but only if you are thinking about something besides the bad beat you just suffered. If you do not really have a chance to take five minutes away from the table, then simply try to detach yourself from what has just happened by concentrating on where your situation is. By this I mean, relative stack sizes, impending big blinds and their potential damage, and your best course of action.

Protecting your money from tilt can be difficult at times in poker, as there is always an underlying feeling that if you keep on playing, you might be able to turn things around.

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One of the key points to remember about poker, is that it is best played when you are relaxed and in a focussed frame of mind. You will maximise your profits playing this way in my opinion, provided you can recognise when frustration creeps in.

It can often be difficult to recognise when your optimum playing ability is being affected, because although your downward moving funds would seem to be a fairly reliable indicator, it is in our nature as human beings to have self belief and optimism. The problem is that when you couple that with a desire to carry on playing a poker game you enjoy, we sometimes subconciously overlook the obvious facts.  If frustration creeps in because we are losing, we will certainly start making increasing amounts of mistakes if we keep playing.

Often I find a good way of playing, is to sit down at a cash table with a set amount, and if I lose say 20% of it, stop playing immediately. Come back an hour later and try a different table. The theory here is that once you sit down at a table and start making a profit, you will be much more positive with your play, and generally more happy and relaxed whilst you play.

If you continue playing poker for a considerable amount of time while you are winning, and stop at a set point when you are not, you should be having a positive influence on the direction of your bankroll. If you happen to be in a tournament online and you start feeling a little tilted, it is usually best to go and occupy yourself with sometihng different for a while. If you can afford to miss a big and small blind without it having a huge effect on your chipstack, then I would do so in order to preserve a calm frame of mind.

Understanding basic odds is something which will really help your poker play develop. With a deck of playing cards, there will always be odds for each occurence when turning over cards, but you do not need to know the exact odds of every single occurence to be successful.

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For poker beginners, I would say that there are a few common scenarios which will arise, and you can memorise the odds for these situations to help get you started. One of the most regularly seen circumstances in poker, is a pocket pair against two overcards. Much can be decided on such hands. (A,K) against (Q,Q) for instance, is around 48% to 52%. That is why these instances are known as coin flips. If you understand the odds of a commonly found situation such as this, it will help you make preflop decisions. You know if there is heavy preflop reraising and you are holding a hand like (10,10), you are probably around 50% at best.

Other common circumstances include flopped Flush and Straight draws. If you are holding (10,J) for instance, and the flop falls (2,8,9), you need a (7) or (Q) to complete your Straight. Four Queens plus four Sevens unaccounted for, makes eight cards to potentially make your hand.  There are 47 unexposed cards out there, and 8 goes into 47 somewhere close to 6 times. This means your chances of making the Straight on the next card are around 1 in 6, or 17%.

As I mentioned earlier, you do not have to be exact to the decimal place, just within one or two percent. With the Flush draw, you have 13 cards to a suit in the deck, so that leaves 9 cards of that suit out there somewhere. You have a 9 in 47 chance on the flop, which equates to about 19% on the next card alone. Remeber you chances of making the hand improve if you are going to the river card too, but if your poker opponent reads the situation well, they won’t let you get that far.

This is a hand which took place in yesterdays live poker tournament, and involved myself in the small blind with (4h,2h). As the action had been folded around, I decided to make a bet to try and pick up the pot. My opponent called, and the flop fell (3x,8x,Jx). At this point, I felt that making a continuation bet would not give me enough information about my opponents hand. If they flat call, the turn falls, and I am left with the same problem of whether to follow through with the bluff or not.

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I know my table image is aggressive, and so if I bet out first, I know my opponent will think it very likely I am bluffing. You would think that with my lack of position and these obvious problems with trying to steal the pot, I might be best to give up, but we are missing one crucial point. Unless my opponent has caught the Jack, it would seem unlikely they have connected with the flop.

I do feel that if I check the flop in this position, my opponent is likely to make a bet whether they have connected or not, and reraising can then turn being out of position, into an advantageous position.

I did indeed check to my opponent, and they led out with a strong bet. This bet was slightly larger then I would expect from a player who has connected well, and it only served to reinforce my feeling that my opponent was just betting to try and take advantage of my perceived weakness.

My opponent certainly didn’t expect me to make a reraise, and through doing so, I had suddenly made my hand look very strong. I also tied my preflop raise into the story of me slow playing a big hand, in the process. My opponent did indeed fold as I expected, and I added 1,000 more chips to my stack.

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