Hints and advice to improve your poker.

Improve Your Poker

As it is often the case in many activities, the “progression curve” at poker is not a rising straight line, but comprises several peaks and plateaus:

• Peaks generally correspond to the learning of new skills or approaching things from a different perspective;
• Plateaus are, conversely, periods when your poker remains at a steady level, either because you could not go any deeper with what you’ve learnt so far, or you wrung the topics out, but you cannot find where to go from there.

If you feel you have not made progress lately, or if you believe you could move ahead faster, here are some tips for you.

Brush Up On The Basics

Before jumping to new topics, it is profitable to make sure you got the basics right. We are prone to forgetting things, and sometimes we learn inaccurate or incorrect facts, and they tend to stick.

Odds are well worth committing to memory. Beginners sometimes mix up odds with one card and two cards to come; they believe “flush draws are 2:1”, and they call every pot-sized bets (which is often wrong, since they are going to face another big bet on the next betting round most of the time, and they won’t have the odds to call).

Evaluating some situations in a given variant with tools such as Twodimes can also be very productive.

Feel free to browse the basics section of this website, it won’t take much time anyway if you already know what it contains, but you may stumble across a point or two you may want to review.

Books

There are some great books available, and some of them should be read several times before they reveal all their secrets. Sometimes we simply read too fast, in our thirst for knowledge, and sometimes we are not ready to follow the author and really comprehend what he meant.

Reading again material like the NLHE part of Super System can give you a real shot in the arm, if your game have become a bit too passive with time. Ciaffone’s books are also worth reading and re-reading every now and then.

Forums

There are many poker forums on the Internet, some are quite busy, and if you have the time to browse them frequently and participate, there often is a lot to be learnt. You can find some avanced discussions and threads on technical topics that can precisely answer some of your questions or give you these new ideas you are looking for.

You can find other forums in the link section.

Articles

To some extent, articles are the next step of forum discussions. The article will generally be much less volatile than forum posts, so it should be much better written and organized, and more efforts are generally devoted to develop a thesis and an antithesis.

The best articles are consequently an excellent reading for those looking for new ideas and new point of views. You can find some humble ones here at CheckFive, and famous authors write in Internet magazines, available in the link section.

Practice

Of course, you are going nowhere if you spend all your time preparing yourself and you never practice, so this is clear that you should play on a regular basis if you mean to make good progress.

We advise you to play special sessions for training and experimenting with ideas, so as not to be afraid to push the enveloppe to see what happens, but only during your training sessions. Keep playing your usual game the rest of the time, provided it gives you satisfaction (in terms of affordable fun or cash).

You can find recommended places to play online in the Play section.

A Game

Remember that poker is just a game for the vast majority of us. Even though you perhaps devote an inordinate amount of time to it, always keep in mind what your real goals are, and be sure they are worth it.

Check this article out for more on motivations.