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To keep winning in Poker, it’s not enough to just learn all the rules of the game and then to be prepared to risk your funds. You actually need quite the opposite: reckless risk-taking in Poker was never viewed as an effective strategy. Three main pillars of a classic Poker strategy have always been the analysis of your starting hand, analysis of other player’s hands and bluffing, which allows forcing opponents to leave the table during the early stages of betting.
Pillar one: analysising your initial hand
In any type of Poker, the winnings go to the player with either the highest-ranking hand or the best bluffing tactics, so you will need either good cards or skilful bluffing to get rid of your opponents. When you are selecting a strategy for playing, it’s essential to select an approach based only on the starting hands, i.e. the ones that you have after first dealing.
Professional players use mathematical calculations when deciding whether to risk money with the starting hand or simply drop it: the probability of getting a necessary card in the next draws are quire well-known. For starting players, the optimal approach would be not to think about mathematics, but to follow some rules instead:
Rule No one: in all types of Poker, play only a proportion of all hands, say, 20%. In all cases when you are aiming to win, instead of just draining your bank, always drop the bad hands. It’s no use playing marginally good hands trying to get rid of people via bluffing and raising.
Rule No two: your starting position is one at the basis of your strategies together with your hand. The position is your place on the table relative to the dealer. It’s necessary to take all this into account: the player in the last position that makes his bets last, has the most information available about all hands and reactions of other players. So the player in the last position always has more chances to win, even if he’s starting out with weak hands. If you are in the early position though, leave the hope of playing a marginal hand altogether, because your opponents will not allow you to play a weak hand cheaply and you will probably lose during any round.
Rule No three: don’t risk with a drawing hand. Drawing hand is an unfinished combination, potentially strong, but it needs one or two cards to be completed. In some types of Poker, it’s advisable to play a drawing hand, in others – not at all. For example, it’s quite profitable to play a drawing hand in Omaha Poker, where a player has a lot of cards to start with, and a lot of time to make decisions. At the same time, it’s not profitable to play a drawing hand in Texas Hold’em as there are fewer rounds and the player is less likely to assemble the full combination by the final round of betting.
Pillar two: analysing other players' hands
Another important part of any strategy in classic Poker is the analysis of the opponents’ hands. Some types of Poker are quite difficult in this aspect, while others give better options to do so, like, for example, Omaha Poker, where two cards out of four are open during the first dealing, which makes it a lot easier to estimate what everyone has. In Texas Hold’em, on the other hand, everyone has two closed cards during pre-flop, and hence analysis starts during the betting. In any case, it is easy to analyse other player’s hands if you have experience, you should keep an eye on how other players behave around the table.
It's possible to separate all hands that your opponents could have into three main categories:
- Hands guaranteed to win: these are the hands that your opponent hopes to win large bank with. In case of such hand, the player won’t necessarily be raising or re-raising during every round, but it’s important to remember that such hand instils maximum confidence into players. And so it would show: for example, sensibly call when someone is raising, and the probability of a raise from such player would increase closer to the final round. In other words, the player would try to increase the bank close to the final round (so he can win more for himself). Such hands are easy to pick from a player’s behaviour.
- Hands under bank: combinations that are strong enough to win the bank, but not that strong, so the player is risking to raise the bank. The players with such positions are checking whenether possible, and calling when they have to do it. No large bets or re-raises from someone with this hand.
- Drawing hands / marginal hands with bluffing: players with these bring most excitement to the game. Drawing hands are combinations requiring completion, and to play such hand, players either try to play slowly and accurately by calling / checking at the first opportunity, or playing aggressively and actively bluffing. Bluffing is easy to pick, when someone is behaving strangely or illogically, for example, a player’s constant raise of bets during following rounds after flop, re-raise in reply to someone’s raise and so on.
