Not everyone can become Daniel Negreanu or Phil Ivey and win millions of dollars from poker. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t make a nice side income from Texas Hold’em. In this blog entry, we’re going to share 4 tips that any player can use to help their chances of winning at online poker.
1) Cheat Sheat
If you’re new to poker and need help with hand rankings, rules, odds and choosing what hands to play, use a poker cheat sheet. You can usually download them for free from the best poker sites online. They’re a great way to familiarise yourself with the basics of Texas Hold’em. If you read them regularly and have them near you when you play, you should have a better shot at winning at low stakes. Caution though, don’t use them in higher stakes games. Most help cheats will be fairly basic and you need to understand far more complex poker strategy to beat higher stakes.
2) Play on the weekends
If you want to win at poker, you need to play with newbies and bad players. You don’t want to sit at a table of regulars or professionals. They are not fun to play against and will try to grind you down over hours. The best way to avoid them is by playing weekends. This is when recreational players like you will be taking to the felt. Many weekend players are just playing for fun or taking a gamble on something new. You can take advantage by playing the low stakes cash games and tournaments.
3) Ace Rag
Recreational players have a hard time folding any hand containing an ace. Any ace with the second card under 9 is considered “ace rag”. These are problem hands as you will often find your opponent has a bigger kicker. The kicker is the second card that can be important when making the best 5 card hand. To avoid this mistake, stick to playing only the best aces (ace ten and up). The lower aces are not worth playing unless it’s cheap to enter the pot or you are in the blinds. You definitely don’t want to be calling raises with low aces. This is a recipe for disaster as you will lose a lot of chips if you hit your ace.
4) Miss the flop, get out
Low stakes games have players with the same pitfalls, they don’t want to fold. Poker is not a game you should chase to the river relentlessly. You’ll burn money quickly doing this. Ace king is a great hand but if you miss the flop, it’s pretty worthless. This doesn’t stop people holding on with this and other big cards. Don’t be like them! To win money at poker, you need to show some patience and wait for the right moments to build pots and invest money. I recommend beginners just fold if they completely miss the flop. Often you could be drawing dead even if you hit a turn or river pair. There are so many combinations of strong hands possible that it’s best to wait for better moments.