Today I will make a short post on poker and gambling tips for the novice.

First

Ask yourself what you want to accomplish. What are your goals? Do you just want to learn the rules? Or are you after something more?

Second

Once you’ve decided what your reason is for poker or gambling, you can start reading some poker and gambling tips. I would recommend you start by reading some good no-limit holdem books.

Third

When you’ve read one good book and splashed in play money or micro-stakes real money games it is time to head to some good forums.

Finally

As I said, I decided to keep this post short and concise for the novice. Poker and gambling tips can be found all over the internet. Most of it is really bad though!

I want to keep you focused on simple steps that will keep you on the right track.

1. Identify Goals
2. Learn Rules
3. Read Book
4. Participate in Forums
5. Play Poker!

Sounds good, right?

The biggest winrate-killer in poker is simple - TILT.

However, it is within each player’s power to control tilt. It takes discipline, and self-awareness, but to be successful one must master tilt.

It is very do-able with a couple strategies:

Prepare before Playing.

This is simple - make sure you are well-rested and well-fed before playing. There’s nothing that tilts me faster than being tired or hungry.

Don’t Play When Emotionally Agitated.

Did you just have a fight with your girlfriend?

Did your cat run away?

Are you sobbing because your favorite person got voted off the island?

Don’t sit down and play when upset, poker requires calm concentration.

Know Thyself

It is critical to know your own symptoms of tilt. They differ from person to person - some examples are:

• Whining about bad beats, either in chat or on IM or to a friend
• Feelings of frustration or despair about lost money
• Feelings of anger or thoughts of revenge towards a specific player
• Impatience, the desire to win money back right now
• Making decisions based on emotional wants rather than logical reasons

Which leads us to….

Take Breaks

If any of these tilt symptoms show up, it is time for a break to cool off.
Take a walk, get some water, grab a sandwich, check your email, whatever. Give yourself a chance to calm down so you can return to the game clear-headed.

Also, marathon sessions can be dangerous, as one’s ability to focus dwindles as sessions get longer. Taking a break every hour or two helps tremendously.

Last but not least…

Stay Hydrated

The brain needs water to function properly, and many people drink caffeinated beverages like soda or coffee which actually dehydrate the body further.
Grab a glass of water, stay hydrated, and stay focused.

With a little practice and effort, these tips will help any player cut down on their tilting.

Less tilting = less losing, and more winning!

Johnny Cash is singing in the background. My session is going great, just came home from the gym and so far I’ve played godlike poker.

I get dealt KK and raise it to a standard 3.5BB in the CO. My opponent who is too loose and too passive calls in the small blind. He plays around 50% of his hands and only raises 10% of them. He is also one of the reasons I am at this table

The flop comes Q32

Looks good I thought, he is very unlikely to have hit that flop hard. My friend checks and calls my 3/4ths pot bet.

Turn is 3

Now he pots it. The things going through my head at this point were:

• Does he have a hand that beats me?
• What is he want me to think?
• What does he want to accomplish?

The first thing I do is start with hands that beat me. Does it make sense for him to have QQ, 33, 22, 3x? First of all, I think he re-raises pre-flop with QQ so I can pretty much rule it out. Also on the flop he would bet out or check-raise with his sets or twopairs to protect from draws. So I was not particularly worried about sets.

He could have slowplayed pocket aces but that is again very unlikely. A hand that could make sense for him would be something like 43 or A3.

Let’s get to hands I beat. What kind of hand plays like this? Well every draw out there is in his range at this point, as are any queen and some weirdly played pocket pairs.

In My Mind I Went Like This…

Hands I beat: Qx, medium pocket pairs (~40% of the time), flush draws, 45, 56, A5, A4 and add 5-10% chance he can have a random hand or a hand I didn’t count in since he is a loose player.

Hands that beat me: A3, 43 are pretty much the only ones that make sense.

What Does He Want Me To Think?

What I thought at the time was that he was saying “I bet big, you should fold”. His betting made no sense for a made hand wanting to get value. It felt more as a bet to scare me out.

He wants me to believe he has a big hand when in fact he wants me to fold was my psychological analysis of the situation.

The River

Is a safe 9 and he pots it again. Hmm, all the draws missed and I still believe that the only hands he could have that beat me are A3, 43, maybe even 53 but would he bet the for the full pot? Wouldn’t he want to get value out of those and not scare away what looks like a KQish hand for me?

I have to be right about 33% of the time calling a pot bet. If I input what I believe his hand-range is into Poker Stove.

His range: 22,33,53,43, AX spades (except AQ, A9 and A2), JTss-87s

Now notice that I gave him a few more hands than I thought he had. I gave him two sets and 53. Also I was very generous with the draws that I beat, I didn’t even put in the straight draws!

And do you know the equity I have vs. this range? My equity is 43.59% and I need 32-33%!

I didn’t know these numbers at the table but I had a feeling I had to call. So I did and he flipped up 45 for the missed open ender.

So what does Britney Spears and my opponent have in common? They are both unstable

I had my first encounter with internet poker while recovering from a broken nose in Australia.

Start Small – Real Small

I deposited $50 onto pokerroom, and started playing $0.25/$0.50 limit full-ring. Online games were predominantly LHE, so that was the game I learned.

One strength I have is the ability to make a poker decision based on the value of the decision, not the value of the money wagered. No matter how small or big the stakes are I focus on making the best decision, not the sums of money wagered.

Introduction to 2+2

My friend Stan heard I was learning limit, and recommended I check out the forums at www.twoplustwo.com, and suggested I read some of David Sklansky’s books – “Theory of Poker” and “Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players.”

Both books were excellent reads, and began to transform the way I looked at poker decisions.

When I was self-taught I always wanted to play perfectly each hand, and the idea of thinking about ranges and situations rather than the specific cards my opponent had was a powerful technique.

As with many others, I learned quickly, reading every thread I could find and discussing hands endlessly. Every time someone proved my ideas wrong I had a chance to learn!

Rising in Stakes

$0.25/$0.50 was slow going, but I aggressively moved up in limits, taking shots at the next limit when I had 200bb for the new limit.

$0.50/1.00 was a pretty easy jump after a feew weeks, and $1/$2 went smoothly as well shortly after that. I ran into some trouble at $2/$4 though, my first real downswings, one as big as 150BBs (big bets), which at the time was unfathomable!

By the end of the second month of semi-regular play I had grown the $50 into $500. Once I had $500 I started bonus-whoring, a process where I would move my entire bankroll to a new site every week to take advantage of deposit bonuses, typically $100 on $500.

This was a common bankroll-building method at the time. I was able to grow my $500 into $2000 by the third month, chugging along at $2/$4.

Summertime…and the Living is Easy

I had a great summer, lots of surfing and hanging out with friends.

I was finally content with myself and my life, and was finally “okay” with not having a girfriend, I was single but happy.

Of course, that was when I met this awesome hot chick who would eventually become my girlfriend. Once you give up looking, what you were after shows up in front of you!

If at First You Don’t Succeed

I took a shot at 5/10 6max in the fall. I lost $500 and felt uncomfortable in the 6max games, so I moved back down to 2/4. At the time the only 6max games on party were 1/2, 5/10, and 10/20.

I got on 2p2 and went to the Heads-Up and Shorthanded (HUSH) forum for strategy, and moved down to 1/2 to learn 6max.

I was determined to “make it” at 5/10 – it would take me a few months before I finally moved up completely, the hard work eventually paid off.

Senior Year Rocks!

I was stoked to go back to school – I had an apartment with my 3 best friends, and I was looking forward to making the most of my final year of college. I took some really cool classes like “Artificial Intelligence,” and had my best professors in my required classes.

I scored awesome waves too, every other weekend a hurricane would plow up the Atlantic Ocean throwing epic waves to the east coast. I would cruise up to New York to surf and hang out with my girl.

Totaled

On one trip there I got into a car accident, I was stopped at a stop sign on a rainy evening and a car coming in the opposite direction lost control and t-boned my beloved Firebird.

I was unhurt, but bummed to lose my car.

Despite this, I was deliriously happy through the holiday season – I had a beautiful girlfriend, was having the time of my life at school, and my parents and brother came up to New York for a few weeks.

Let’s Get Serious

Back at school after the holidays, Stan and I resolved to get serious about online poker – and put in at a minimum 30k hands a month.

It was great having a roommate who was into poker – we would review each other’s sessions, study hands, and share the ups and downs of variance.

We both did well, and camped at $5/$10 limit for the semester – we were leery of taking shots at $10/$20 – that was a high-stakes game (the highest on party was $15/$30 at the time!) where the aggressive “pros” could see into your soul.

The rest of the semester was a blur of interesting classes, parties and fun with my friends, visits with my girlfriend, and lots of online and some live poker.

We still ran the live NL game, but at this point I was a complete limidonk, having put a couple hundred thousands hands of limit in.

I did all the classic “Bad” plays I never would have done before learning limit – playing TPTK for my stack, aggressively raising offsuit broadways or folding suited connectors to a raise pre-flop in a game where limping and calling was hugely +EV, you had implied odds on flopping big so there was no need to bloat the pot pre-flop with speculative hands.

Despite donating a bit in the live games, I had build my bankroll online to about $12,000 by the time graduation came around. I was starting to realize I might be able to make decent money at online poker!

Do you go to the store without a shopping list? Some do and I’m one of those that don’t. I guess that wasn’t a good example, was it?

What about if you go on a long trip, do you take a map or anything similar? The point I am trying to make here is that if you plan ahead it will make your life easier.

And I don’t care about being super effective in real life but in poker I care a lot!

Dan touched on this point in his post about Thinking Ahead. I am going to build on that post by providing a few more concepts and examples that will help you understand the concept of planning ahead.

Anticipating The Action

For you to be able to plan ahead you have to anticipate the action to some degree. For example, if you know that an opponent will check-raise you a lot on the flop. And you also know that you can’t really call a check-raise.

What happens if you check the flop? Does your opponent become more controllable? Most opponents have a plan like “I am going to check-raise this guy on the flop because he doesn’t have anything”.

When you just check it back to him he doesn’t really know what to do and becomes confused. He lacks another plan obviously!

He might just bet the turn and you can easily call a turn bet with your middle pair. Or he might check and let you value bet.

Example #1

You raise AJ on the button and an aggressive player in the big blind calls.

The flop comes KJ8

The big blind checks and you decide to check.

The reason for the check is that you know that the big blind will check-raise a lot of hands but not so many that you want to put all your money in with middle pair here. So checking here enables you to control the pot and avoid folding the best hand if he check-raises.

There are of course exceptions to this “rule”. If you know he check-raises and instantly gives up on the turn with worse than a King then you can easily bet and call a check-raise.

Turn comes a harmless 2

The big blind bets pot and you call.

No reason to raise here against a player like this. Although if your opponent was a more loose bad fishy player you could raise his bet 2-2.5 times to get a call from a worse jack or a draw like QT, AQ, AT, T9, Q9. It all depends on how you think your opponent will react to you (anticipating his actions).

River comes 4

That puts the back-door flush out there but it doesn’t scare us since it is so unlikely that he has it. Now the big blind bets 1/2 pot and we call. He flips up QT which was planning on check-raising the flop.

If your opponent were to show you a big hand here you would adjust your reads.

Although I would not stop calling someone down in this spot with a hand like this just because they show me two pair or something like that a few times, his hand-range is so wide for me to be folding AJ when the action goes check, pot, 1/2 pot. If he does it a few times with the same betting pattern I would note it.

Example #2:

You raise AQ UTG+1 and get a call from the button who you don’t know that well but he seems loose and doesn’t like to give up pots.

Only the two of you see the flop which is 67T

Many players would just tell you to bet your Ace high here but I disagree. How do you think your opponent will react?

A board like this hits your opponents hand-range hard, even if he is loose and you are out of position. Which means that you will have a hard time contesting the pot.

If your opponent is someone who calls you all the time then you shouldn’t focus on betting him off a hand. You should focus on value-betting your made hands MORE.

If you had a hand like A7 or 99 you could value-bet him relentlessly. We are of course assuming he will not be raising you off that hand if you do, that is for another post though.

Position plays a huge part in a game like No-Limit Hold’em. In this spot I would simply check-fold my Ace high.

How can you adjust to a player like this?

1. Play tighter when he has position on you
2. Value bet more
3. Learn his patterns
4. Continuation bet/bluff less

Those are a few things you can do. You can always leave the table if he is making your life difficult. I am pretty sure there are a lot of better tables out there.

Summary

In summary, what I do is simplify my decisions. Below are a few examples…

Tendency: Opponent calls too much in position with weak hands

Adjustment: Value bet, Tighter when he as position, Bluff less

Tendency: Opponent check-raises flops

Oops, you forgot to mention with what? Never base your decisions on reads that do not exist.

Tendency: Opponent check-raises flops with any pair, any draw and big hands.

Adjustment: Check behind on the flop and learn how he plays after that.

I know it is easy to get caught up in a personal vendetta against someone. I have done it and still do.

Someone who constantly floats (calls) you in position and you have to check-fold time and time again.

You want to start firing those 2nd and 3rd barrels, because he is owning you.

What you have to consider is that he will be very likely to call you down no matter how much you bet.

That is why you have to adjust your strategy wisely and not just throw more money at him and hope he folds!