One of the biggest differences between online poker players who win and those who lose is the quality of that player’s starting hand. In general, you should only play roughly one out of every 4 to 6 hands.
This can differ greatly, however, if you are playing at a loose or tight table. In most cases, playing less hands than your opponents can give you a big advantage. When you call the pot loosely, you will end up folding many times after the flop or the turn as you try to chase hands. Worse yet, if you try to call other people’s raises trying to make that straight or flush, you will usually end up losing more than you can gain by completing the hand.
What is the Strength of your Starting Hand
Everyone is dealt about the same strength of hand overall in a tournament, more or less. It’s what you decide to do with your hands that ends up making or breaking you.
Good poker players play mostly strong starting cards while the losing poker players play much more often with speculative starting cards.
Being able to play your strong hands correctly is easy. If your in the right position, you wait until others have bet and either raise big to chase others out or try to trap others with a small raise or smooth call. Either way isn’t fool proof and both could end up costing you chips if you don’t have the right timing.
Here’s an example making a bad decision either way:
I’ve seen someone who had a pair of Jacks in his hand. The board came up J, J, 6. There were three other people in the hand and he was first to act. He had four jacks and could not be beaten. Instead of pretending he had nothing and try to entice someone else to bet into the pot, he made a raise and chased everyone away.
On the other hand, a person is one of the first to act at the table. He has KQ off-suit raises 3 times the big blind. If someone else calls, the first to act is most likely behind. He may also find out that a short stack has gone all in and now is in the difficult place where he needs to commit more chips against a hand that may dominate his.
Position during the Hand
Positioning is the other most important thing that will help you decide whether or not you are going to stay in the hand. If you have an early position in a particular hand, you better have a solid hand before you commit chips to the pot.
One of the worst thing you can do is to call the pot when your first to act. It shows a serious sign of weakness in your hand or that you don’t really know how to play.
The further you go around the table, the better chance of getting a feel for what hands could be out there. If you fourth to act at a nine person table and all three before you have folded, I would say that you could try to get away with a modest raise to try to get the small and big blind specials out of the mix. Conversely, if you are fourth to act and two people have raised before you, you only have two moves: fold or all in. The hand will get much too expensive to try and pull some magic from the deck.
The best position to be at on the table is the dealer button. You get to see what everyone else does before you. It’s the easiest position to figure out whether you need to raise the pot to get the smooth callers out or whether there’s too much competition to call. A favorite move by some poker players is to raise on the dealer button if the cards have been folded around to him. People generally assume that there is at least one good hand in a nine person table.
When you are the small blind, don’t immediately call every time. This gives the person next to you the idea that you will call any hand and they will try to raise you to get you to fold or get more money out of your mediocre hand.
When you are the big blind, don’t call every time; but more importantly, don’t fold everytime that someone raises your big blind. People will recognize this and will raise on your blind often so it must be protected from time to time.
If you follow these general rules and guidelines, you will find much more success playing poker. What this should have taught you is that you need to be selective about which hands to call and see the flop on. One of the biggest mistakes that players make is making a hand with their average-at-best starting cards. Often these hands do not profit much, but will cost you dearly when someone makes a bigger hand.