Tips Texas Holdem Poker

Welcome to our fully dedicated Texas Hold’em strategy section! This expansive collection of guides was put together by several highly-successful, past and present, professional poker players. Not only have these players been crushing the games for years, but they have extensive experience teaching and instructing students of all levels professionally. Their wealth of knowledge coupled with their experience in teaching makes for a real treat for you.

• Tips On Winning Texas Holdem Poker
• Tips On Texas Holdem Poker

Know each and every one of the Texas Hold 'Em card combinations and their hierarchy. Hand ranks low to high - High Card (no pair), One Pair, Two Pair, Three of a Kind, Straight, Flush, Full House, Four of a Kind, Straight Flush. There are websites which allow you to play for free, without any risk (but without any winnings too). Texas Holdem is one of the most popular gambling games worldwide. Mastering this poker game is not out of your reach with our best Texas Hold’em poker tips. With millions of players worldwide, Texas hold’em, or Hold’em, is undoubtedly one of the most popular poker games. The rules are pretty simple to master. Best Ultimate Texas Hold’em Strategy You should quickly get the hang of the rules of Ultimate Texas Hold’em by reading the rules above and potentially watching a few hands being played. The better Texas Holdem players will lose less, but no one can win. If everyone at the Texas Holdem poker table plays the same, no one can win. Learning Texas Holdem by playing Texas Holdem is a foolish idea. If you learn to play Texas Holdem poker like everyone else plays, you cannot have a winning edge.

Normally, you’d have to pay for this kind of specific and valuable information. We’re offering it to you completely free of charge. The information is broken up into different sections based on skill level and specifically what you might be looking for. If you’re completely brand new to the game and don’t even know how to play, that’s ok! Take a minute and check out our complete Texas Hold’em guide. You can always come back and join us here when you’re ready to rock and roll.

For those of you that are ready, let’s dive into the strategy. If you are a newer player or not sure where the leaks in your game are, we recommend starting at the top of the guide and working your way through the entire thing. Just because something is labeled beginner or fundamental does not mean that it does not have some advanced strategy content sprinkled in. Texas Hold’em is a game that requires strong fundamentals if you have any dreams of ever being the best.

If you’re looking for specific information, we’ve added some convenient links here to the specific sections below. Click on the section you are looking for, and you will be taken to the information dedicated to that topic.

Let’s get the cards in the air and start learning how to crush Texas Hold’em.

Things You Must Know First

Regardless of your skill level, there are a few things that you must know before you get started building or retooling your Texas Hold’em poker game. In fact, the more skilled you are, the more important some of these tips are going to be to get the most out of your experience learning with us. Remember, we are not here to make you feel silly or look down on you. We are here to help you improve your game as much as possible.

Check Your Ego, Cash Your Checks

If you think you are the best and refuse to acknowledge that you can learn more and improve, you are doomed never to become a better player. Even the best players in the world admit that they need to be learning and growing their game constantly. They won’t refuse to listen to advice or suggestions because they think someone is a worse player than them. They will use their judgment on whether or not advice is important, but they are always open to improving.

You need to be the same way. Put your ego down at the door and open yourself up to changing your game. There is nothing wrong with admitting that you were doing something wrong or that there is a better way to do it. It does not make you any less of a poker player. What will make you seem like less of a poker player is if you start to struggle to beat the game because of your stubbornness.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel Overnight

This is the most important tip from this entire strategy guide. Whenever you go to change your game, you don’t want to try and do it all overnight. If you start adjusting a million things at once, your game is going to fall apart completely. Take one area of your game and work on improving it first. Once it gets better, move on to another area.

Imagine if you were working on a car and you adjusted every single part of the engine all at once. The chances that everything would work correctly would be so minimal. In fact, you’d probably break parts that were working just fine because you were trying to change too much. This is the same with your poker game. Start small and slowly rework everything. You’ll see better results, and you’ll know what is working and what is not. If you change everything and start losing, you’ll never know which things worked and which did not.

Take your time. Poker is not going anywhere. It’s as simple as that.

Fundamental Strategy

We’re about to put the “fun” in fundamentals. Sorry for the cheesy intro. In all seriousness, we are about to have some fun building or solidifying the foundation of your Texas Hold’em game. If you’ve been playing for a while and are ready to skip this section, please wait. From our extensive experience instructing, we’ve found that almost every player except for the elite has some sort of leak in their fundamentals.

This is by no means an insult to your game, but is just us being realistic. We highly recommend that everyone at least read through this section once. If you are brand new and know that you have some fundamental leaks, then we recommend spending some time in this section before you look to move on to the more advanced stuff. The information will always be here, and the games aren’t going anywhere anytime soon so take your time and do this right! It will pay off in the long run.

Beginner’s Tips

This is the number one starting point where anyone on their poker journey should begin. We’ve collected a massive number of tips to help new (and rusty) poker players get into the action. Have a tournament or a game coming up soon and need to get up to speed quickly? Not sure where else to start? You’re in the right place.

The best part of these beginner tips is that they aren’t as obnoxiously generalized as some beginner’s tips lists are. While we do talk some general theory and strategy, we also give you some actionable steps that you can take immediately to improve your game.

Factors Affecting Starting Hand Requirements

Texas Hold’em hands start with pre-flop action. This is your first and arguably biggest decision that you’ll make in the hand. If you have a firm grasp on which hands you should play from what positions, you’re going to set yourself up for success. If you don’t, though, you may be starting yourself down a dark road where you’re destined to lose a lot of chips or money.

Have a chart that you follow? If you follow the same starting hand requirements for every position every time, then you definitely want to read this guide. There are A LOT of different factors that go into what hands you should and should not be playing. We cover all of this and more in the guide below.

Trouble Hands Strategy

Trouble hands are probably the number one profit killer for poker players. These are hands that look great, they feel great, and they make you think they’re great. However, they’re hands that are easily dominated and can get you in a lot of trouble. They have a fantastic knack for giving you the second-best hand which is about the worst position you can be in with poker. We break these hands down and how to protect yourself from falling victim to their beautiful trap.

Bluffing Strategy

Bluffing…everyone’s favorite thing to do that they typically do the worst. Bluffing is an important part of no-limit Texas Hold’em and is integral to your success as a player. Does this mean you should be bluffing a ton? It does not. The biggest problems that people have with bluffing are that they do it too often and they do it at times that don’t make sense. Bluffing is all about telling a story that makes sense in a situation where it is profitable. We’ll walk you through every aspect of bluffing and turn you into a “professional bluffer” if there even is such a thing.

Pre-Flop Raise Sizing

One of the quickest ways to identify a bad player is by looking at their pre-flop raising sizes. Believe it or not, mistakes here can give away an enormous amount of information about your hand. As we already mentioned, mistakes pre-flop can set you up for failure on the rest of the hand no matter how well you play. This does not exclude pre-flop raise sizing. Learn the dos and the don’ts to help set yourself up for success.

Tournament Specific Strategy

If you’re playing Texas Hold’em tournaments the same way that you’re playing cash games, you’re going to have a bad time. While the game that you’re playing is exactly the same, the nuances in the formatting and the end goal of each make the strategic implications lightyears different. In the guides below, we walk you through the important strategies needed to crush tournaments and the specific strategies needed for each tournament type.

Differences from Cash Games

As we mentioned briefly above, tournaments are WAY different than cash games. Your goal is to outlast the rest of the field, not just win some chips. The blinds don’t stay the same, and the conditions of the game are always changing. Because of this, you have to be prepared to adapt appropriately or else you will get swallowed up by your opponents.

Understanding Blind Structures

A lot of players don’t realize that the structure of the blinds and antes plays a huge role in how you approach a tournament. As all structures aren’t created equally, all tournament strategy plans should not be created equally. We will walk you through how to interpret a blind structure, how to understand it properly, and most importantly how to alter your strategy accordingly. You’d be amazed at how many players struggle with this.

Deep Stack/ Early Stages Tournament Play

The early stages of a Texas Hold’em tournament play way different than any other part of the tournament. You have more chips, lower blinds, and a lot more reckless players and fish still left in the field. The value of certain cards and hands increase while the value of others decreases during this stage. It’s important to understand what you need to change to succeed through the early stages. If you never make it out of the early stages of a tournament, you’re never going to make any money.

Medium Stack/Middle Stages Tournament Play

As you now know how to work through the deeper stack stages of a tournament, you need to shift your focus to eh medium stack/middle stages of the tournament. As stack sizes shrink, your strategy is going to need to change. Things that you could do during the deep stack phases are no longer viable. Hands that were more valuable during the deep stack stage start to become less valuable. Hands that were less valuable start to grow in value.

While each stage of the tournament is important, this could arguably be one of the most important to get good at. Mistakes in this stage can be costlier and ruin your chances of making the money. Never fear, though, we will teach you everything that you need to know.

Short Stack Tournament Play

Being on the short stack is not somewhere we ever want to find ourselves in a Texas Hold’em poker tournament, but it inevitably will happen more often than you’d like. While you don’t have a lot of wiggle room to make moves, there are a lot of strategies that you can employ to steal chips, get that double up, and get yourself back into contention for the win. Playing the short stack is much more complicated than most players are aware of.

Bubble Play

The bubble of a Texas Hold’em poker tournament is either an exciting time or a terrifying time depending on what kind of player you are. For some, it’s a time that they can beat up on scared players who are trying their hardest to squeak into the money. Those players that are terrified of not making the cash despise the bubble time. We’re going to teach you which of these players you need to be, how to prepare yourself mentally to do that, and then how to strategically pick up a lot of chips to win the tournament. A lot of professional poker players would argue that a tournament is often won on the bubble and not so much at the final table.

The Art of the Deal

Sometimes in tournaments, you are presented with the opportunity to make a deal to end the tournament early. Players will negotiate how much each player will earn and if they want to continue playing for any portion of the prize pool. This happens when a tournament is top heavy or there is a steep increase in prize money.

For example, if first place is $1,000,000 and 2^nd place is $500,000, the final two players might not want to play heads-up for half a million bucks. Instead, they might agree to each take $700,000 and play for the last $100,000 and the trophy. This is called making a deal. Making a deal requires some skills and finesse to make sure you get the best deal and don’t screw yourself out of some serious cash.

Selling Action

What you may or may not know is that a large percentage of the time poker players do not have 100% of their action during a tournament. What does that mean? It means that a lot of times they have not paid their full buy-in themselves. Someone else or several other people have invested money into that player with hopes of a return.

Selling action is a great way to get into bigger tournaments that you might not otherwise have been able to. It’s also a great way to cut down on risk. It does have its drawbacks as well that you need to be aware of.

Types of Tournaments

As there is a multitude of different types of no-limit Texas Hold’em tournaments, there is also a multitude of different ways that you will want to approach these events. You aren’t going to want to play a freezeout the same way that you are playing a satellite tournament. While some of the strategies will bleed over for each format, there are things that will be independent for each style.

In the guides below, we walk you through what each type of tournament is as well as what specific strategies you need to use to dominate that format.

Cash Game Specific Strategy

At this point, it should be very clear to you that cash games and tournaments are lightyears different in a lot of ways. Not only are they formatted differently, but the strategies used to beat each are different. In the guides below, we’ll walk you through the specific things you need to know to beat no limit Texas Hold’em cash games.

Game Selection

One of the most overlooked strategies for Texas Hold’em cash games comes before you even sit down at a table. Game selection is the process of choosing which game you’re going to play. While this has some to do with which stakes you’ll play, it has more to do with picking a table within those stakes. Finding games that are easier to beat can be the make or break to your poker session. We will walk you through all the nuts and bolts of selecting the most profitable game to play.

Tracking and Analyzing Sessions/Software

Cash games are all about finding small edges and hammering them home. As the conditions you play in stay relatively the same (blinds/table size/etc.), a small leak can turn into a big one when it happens over thousands and thousands of hands. If you’re playing multiple tables at once, these leaks will compound and could have an even bigger effect on your end of the session bottom line.

This makes it that much more important to track your sessions, track your play, and use the tools available to analyze this information to make improvements to your game. We’re going to show you the right (and wrong) ways to track your data, the best ways to analyze it, and the tools and software available to help you do all of this more efficiently.

Advanced Strategy Concepts

If you’ve jumped straight to this section, we highly recommend that you go back and at least read through the earlier sections once. Properly understanding these sections depends on you having a firm grasp of the concepts we have already gone over. The worst that happens is you solidify your fundamentals and are that much more technically sound. Don’t worry, we will wait for you.

Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s jump into our more advanced concepts. The titles of some of these sections may seem less advanced to you, but that’s ok. Part of taking your game to the next level is knowing the advanced sides of the easy concepts. We hope you enjoy what we have put together for you here. This is the gold pot of this guide, and our Texas Hold’em guides.

Establishing Ranges

If you’ve never heard the term range before, we have a lot to go over which should be exciting to you. Poker is not ever about putting your opponent on an exact hand. If you have the ability to do this successfully, you’re probably already the best in the world. We can tell you, though, that’s probably not the case. Texas Hold’em poker is about putting your opponents on potential ranges of hands that they might have based on information you’ve taken from the hand and from history.

We’ll talk about how to build these ranges, how to apply those built ranges to your strategy and talk about how those ranges fit with your own ranges. It may seem confusing at first, but it will take your Texas Hold’em poker game to the next level. You want to know what the elite players are thinking about? This is what you’ve been looking for.

Continuation Betting

In the early days of poker, the continuation bet was the secret sauce. All you had to do was raise pre-flop and then blindly bet 100% of flops, and you would win in the long run. Unfortunately, those days are behind us. We will talk about why that used to work, why it doesn’t, work anymore, and what you should change about your game to effectively use continuation bets to turn a profit. This is one of those sections that surprises people that it’s more in-depth than they thought it could be.

Floating

If you think this has something to do with laying on top of the water, you’ve got a lot to learn. Even if you do know what floating is in regard to Texas Hold’em, you probably still do have a lot to learn. Floating is an advanced concept that was developed to combat the continuation bet. We’ll break it down for you and let you know the best ways and places to employ it for maximum efficiency.

Pre-flop Raising vs. Limping

This is one of those topics that might seem pretty self-explanatory, but we see players screwing this one up all the time. While there are no hard and fast rules on the topic, there are some things that you need to be aware of. How you choose to implement them into your strategy will be up to you. Whether you use a strategy or not, it is important that you know them in case it is something that your opponent is choosing to do.

3 & 4-Betting

3-betting is a concept that most players know they should be utilizing, but few do enough. Out of the ones that are utilizing it, a large number of them are using it incorrectly. On top of all of that, we see a lot of players reacting incorrectly to other player’s 3-bets. If there’s a top list of sections that we highly recommend you read in this strategy guide, this section would be on that list. Do yourself a solid and take a few minutes to go through the information we have put together for you.

While 4-betting is slightly less important depending on the stakes you are playing at, we still wanted to cover it. 4-bets can be important to protect your opening ranges and also as a nice combat to a player who is 3-betting incorrectly. If you’re confused, that’s ok. We will take you through every aspect of 4-bets and how to use them properly. We’ll also touch on how to react to 4-bets.

As a bonus, we will also touch very briefly on 5-bets for those of you that are clinically insane and like to light money on fire. There’s nothing like a cold 5-bet to get the juices running in the morning.

Live Poker Specific Strategy

Live Texas Hold’em and online Texas Hold’em are essentially the same game, yet there are some strategic differences that you need to be aware of. In the guides below, we’ll walk you through a few of the things you need to be aware of to crush live poker in a brick and mortar setting. This includes home games as well as playing in any casino poker room in the world.

Reads and Tells

One of the big advantages for most players playing live is that they can see their opponent’s faces. This allows a trained eye to catch tells and reads about what a person might be holding. We did say that this was an advantage for most players, but we specifically did not say all. One of the more important aspects of reads and tells is making sure that you are not giving off your own. Your opponents may not be great players, but you don’t want to give them a leg up on you by wearing your cards across your forehead.

Online Poker Specific Strategy

Just as there are strategies specific to playing live, there are strategies specific to online Texas Hold’em. A lot of people think that online poker is just clicking buttons. While they are somewhat correct, there is a lot of strategy that is different than playing in a brick and mortar setting. We will break everything down for you to help you be the best internet poker wizard there ever was.

Reads and Tells

There are reads and tells on the internet? Believe it or not, there actually are. While these sometimes can’t be trusted with as high of reliability as the live poker ones, they’re still valuable to know. Let us show you the parts of online poker that only the most brilliant and OCD of minds can see.

Putting It All Together

If you’ve made it this far and have not gone crazy from information overload, congrats! We’ve just unloaded years and years of knowledge on you in a very short time. Hopefully, you’ve learned a lot and have already started implementing these changes into your game. If there are sections you are unclear on, take some more time and go through them again. We don’t expect you to have picked up everything the first time through.

Remember, Texas Hold’em poker is a game that is learned quickly but takes a lifetime to master. There’s no reason to rush things and get ahead of yourself. Take your time and make small changes, so you don’t throw your whole game out of whack. The sky is the limit for you, and with hard work implementing what we taught you here today, you’re going to be crushing the world soon.

Most Texas holdem books and strategy web sites are filled
with general advice aimed at beginning and intermediate players.
If you think about this it makes sense, because over 90% of the
population of poker players fit into one of these categories.

It’s also much easier to offer advice to the larger group
because most of the players are so far from playing correctly
that you can help them get huge increases in their results if
you can get them to adjust their game in a few simple ways.

When you start looking for advanced Texas holdem strategy
advice you can’t find much, and what you do find rarely goes
beyond the things being taught to low limit players.

The bottom line is that advanced Texas holdem strategy is
hard to teach and it’s hard to learn. Most players can’t handle
the concepts needed to excel at the top levels of play and will
never dedicate enough time and work to getting to a place where
they can.

The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky is one of the most
important poker books that have ever been written. But if you
read it before you’re ready it may hurt you as much as help you.
I know this because I read it early in my poker career and it
didn’t help me at all. I went back a year later and read it
again and it was like a light bulb suddenly came on. I wasn’t
ready for the lessons the first time.

What you need to understand about the advice on this page is
that you may not be ready to fully utilize it in your play right
now. If you’re not, don’t feel bad or be ashamed. Simply come
back and read it again in a couple months and a couple months
after that until it starts sinking in.

And even the few that do reach a point where they can
completely grasp the lessons needed for advanced play have a
hard time finding someone to teach them. They usually have to
learn by trial and error at the tables. This can be costly, but
it helps reinforce the lessons as you learn them.

So if it’s so hard to learn these advanced strategies and so
few players need them, why would we dedicate an entire page to
them? Because in the quest to have the best Texas holdem
resource available if we didn’t have advice for advanced players
the quest would fall short.

We also are firm believers in providing as much solid
information as possible and letting the players figure out what
they can use and what they should wait on. If you can pick up
something in these advanced strategies to improve your game by
1% it can mean thousands and thousands of extra dollars to you
over the course of your poker career.

Psychology

At the simplest level of play Texas holdem is about math. You
use a deck of 52 playing cards and a set hierarchy of hand
values so you can determine hand probabilities and odds in any
situation. You don’t have complete information because you don’t
know what cards your opponents hold, but you can even use
mathematical equations to consider what you don’t know and still
come up with the best play from a mathematical standpoint in
every situation.

You can even use math to determine the best way to play a
hand before you even get your cards.

If you’re in the small blind and haven’t seen your cards yet
and don’t know anything about any of your opponents, the
mathematically correct way to play the hand is to fold. This is
based on studies that show on average you lose money from the
small blind with an average hand. If you haven’t seen your cards
yet you have to work on the assumption that you’ll have an
average hand.

As you get more information you use the new information to
determine the new best way to play the hand.

If you get your cards and look down to see pocket aces,
instead of folding being the most profitable way to play, you
need to raise in order to make the most money.

Any player without a learning disability who’s willing to put
in the time and effort can learn how to play Texas holdem at a
respectable level. You can learn how to determine the best plays
and if you work long enough and hard enough you can start
winning more than you lose at the Texas holdem tables.

This isn’t a guess or sales pitch. Plenty of players have
proven this is possible, and you can do what it takes to be a
winning player too. But if you’re not to this point yet you need
to start on some of our other strategy pages and come back to
this one later.

So why would we start a section about psychology with a math
lesson? The last time we checked math and psychology aren’t very
closely related.

After you master the mathematical part of Texas holdem and
are ready to advance to the highest levels of play you have to
start improving your psychological game.

You have to combine superior skill with the mathematical side
of the game with an advanced ability to think about the game and
your opponents at a deeper level than you’ve ever done before.

Have you ever heard that you need to play the players instead
of the cards or in addition to the cards?

This is what we mean about Texas holdem psychology. You have
to start playing the game beyond the basic levels. To do this
you have to consider not only how you think about the game but
how your opponents think and play and how everything that
happens changes the way they play and react.

Our strategy section includes a page
that’s dedicated to the subject of psychology in Texas holdem.

Playing Texas Holdem Like a Chess Match

If you hope to be a good chess player you have to be able to
consider the current situation, how every possible move will
change the possible future outcomes, and how things can change
how your opponent will react.

New players concentrate on the current move possibilities but
rarely think about the entire game, or even their next move.

As most player’s game improves they start considering how one
move might set up the next move or two, but thinking beyond one
or two moves deep is rare.

But the most advanced Texas holdem players think about every
decision and consider how it can alter and set up future
situations.

In a pot limit game it’s important to determine if you have a
hand where you want to build a big pot or one where you want to
limit the pot size. When you want to build a big pot you need to
make at least a small bet on each round because every bet and
call makes the possible bet on the turn and river bigger.

But if you have a drawing hand or other hand that requires a
lower commitment you want to avoid putting any money in the pot
on the early rounds so you can manage the risk verses possible
reward.

This sounds simple, but unless you consider how every action
is going to set up the end of the hand you’ll frequently find
that another player was able to manipulate the hand and pot size
to fit their long term goals, not yours.

Another example is how you play certain hands against
opponents who’re good enough to track your play. If you always
check to them on the river when you miss your draw they’ll learn
this is how you play and use it against you. They’ll start
betting on the river after you check even if they don’t have a
strong hand because you check every time you’re weak.

But you can also build this belief in this opponent and then
use it against them. Once they believe they know how you play
the river you can start betting sometimes when you miss your
draw, because they’ll fold good but not great hands because they
think you won’t bet without a good hand.

Take a few minutes and think of some of the situations where
thinking and planning like this can come into play.

When you start considering all of the possible applications
at the holdem tables you can start seeing why you need to start
thinking about poker like a chess game.

If you want to advance to the top levels of Texas
holdem play you need to start playing chess like poker, and more
importantly start thinking like a chess player instead of a
gambler.

It’s Not a Single Session, But It Is

Most poker players think about each time they sit down to
play Texas holdem as a single session. If they play for three
hours and then go do something else they had a single session.
This isn’t the way advanced Texas holdem players view the game.

Advanced players understand that you’re in the middle of one
lifelong Texas holdem game that doesn’t end until you die. It
doesn’t matter if you play six hours a day for eighteen straight
days, or sixteen hours a day for three days in a row, it’s all
just a small part of your single long session.

If you want to play at an advanced level you need to
constantly be concentrating on making the best possible plays
and putting yourself in the best possible situations to win the
most money. Of course this involves doing everything you can to
win during the current playing time, but your short term results
don’t mean anything as long as you’re making the best plays.

If you get all in with ace king against ace queen and your
opponent hits a queen and you lose a big pot it can make your
balance for the day negative, but it has nothing to do with your
long term profitability. You know that if you can get in that
situation often it leads directly to profit.

Your expected value in any situation is the average amount
you win or lose if you can play the exact same situation
hundreds of times. At the most basic level, being a long term
winner at the Texas holdem tables is simply about putting
yourself in more positive expected value situations than
negative ones.

Everything else takes care of itself if you do this. Nothing
else really matters because it’s a simple mathematical law that
shows if you do this you’ll win in the long run.

What most players call luck is just short term variance and
if you’re in a situation where your expected value is $10 every
time you play the situation, if you do it 100 times you’ll win
$1,000. Sometimes you’ll lose and sometimes you’ll win more or
less than $10, but in the long run the expected value always end
up where it’s supposed to.

So remember that being an advanced Texas holdem winner isn’t
about the short session, but about the life long session. Then
concentrate on setting up and exploiting positive expectation
situations as often as possible.

Big Hand Poker

Tips On Winning Texas Holdem Poker

Some players seem to win a lot of pots and others can sit
back and only win a few pots per day, but still show a long term
profit. How can they still turn a profit when they only win a
few hands in comparison to other players?

In a no limit Texas holdem game the blinds are $10 / $20 and
the average stack size is over $2,000. On average, you have to
post $100 per hour in blinds. The table is aggressive and has a
couple loose players. You play a six hour stint and play
extremely tight, looking for opportunities to win big pots while
letting the other players fight over smaller pots.

This is a perfect situation to illustrate the big pot way to
long term profit. Even if you folded every blind for the entire
six hour stint and were able to break even on the few smaller
pots you play, you still have the chance to win big. Folding all
of your blinds costs $600, so you have to win enough to overcome
this. Let’s look at three big hand possibilities.

You see a flop with two other players, you have the ace and
queen of clubs and the flop is king of clubs, jack of clubs, and
10 of hearts. You bet, one opponent folds and the other moves
all in. You call and your opponent turns over an ace queen as
well. Most of the time you’re going to split this spot, but when
you hit your flush you scoop the entire pot.

The next hand is when an early position player raises and you
raise with pocket aces from late position. One of the blinds
calls, the early position player moves all in, you call, and the
blind folds. The early position player has a pair of kings and
you win a huge pot.

On the third hand six players see the flop in an un-raised
pot, including you from the big blind. You flop a straight, five
through nine, so it’s not easy to determine you have such a
strong hand. You’re able to build and win a nice pot, but aren’t
able to get anyone all in.

Even if you only split the first pot, stacked a short stack
of $800 on the second hand won $400 on the third hand your
profit for the day is $600. That’s $100 an hour and all you had
to do was break even on small hands and win a couple big hands.

And the up side is huge. What if you won the freeroll for
$2,000 and won $2,000 on the second hand and won $1,000 on the
third hand? All of these are possible with average stack sizes
of $2,000. Now you won $4,400 for the day, or over $700 per
hour.

What about if you had terrible luck on the smaller pots and
only was able to win one big pot? Let’s say you lost your $600
in blinds and another $1,000 on small pots. But you still were
able to double up, winning $2,000 on a single big pot. You still
make $400 for the six hours.

Of course it sounds simple enough for anyone to do it when
it’s spelled out like this, but don’t you think it’s realistic
that you can find a single big hand to win in a six hour playing
stint?

You just saw how you can still make good money playing Texas
holdem by only winning one or two big pots a day, so why aren’t
you playing in a manner that gives you the best chance to win?
Why are you playing so many marginal hands?

If you can play a smart patient game you can
greatly increase your long term profits. Now that you see how
profitable this type of game can be, hopefully you can use this
information to play fewer hands and take advantage of the
players who play too many hands.

Win the War, Forget the Battles

This goes hand in hand with the last section, but it’s so
important if you truly want to learn advanced strategies that it
needs to be covered in more depth or at least in a different
way.

It doesn’t matter how many hands you win. The only thing that
matters is how much money you win.

This doesn’t change anything that we discussed in the single
session section. You still have to consistently put yourself in
positive expectation situations but too many players focus on
winning hands instead of money.

If you ask them what they want to do they always state they
want to win money, but their actions at the table suggest
they’re more interested in winning hands than money.

Of course you have to win some hands to win money, but would
you rather win 10 hands worth $100 each or one hand worth
$1,200?

This is a mindset that you have to develop and work on if you
want to use it to your advantage. Good poker players are
competitive and want to win everything they touch. It’s easy,
even for the best players, to get too focused on winning every
hand instead of winning the most money.

The problem with focusing on winning every hand is you start
making plays that aren’t the most profitable in the long run.
When you miss your draw instead of folding and conserving your
money for a more favorable situation you fire a bluff hoping you
can force your opponent to fold because you want to win the pot.

Chips Are Limited Resources

Blind play has been mentioned a few times, and it plays such
an important role to winning poker players that an advanced
strategy page needs to at least touch on it. Even though this
section isn’t titled with anything that looks like it has to do
with blinds, they’re a perfect example of the concept that chips
are limited resources.

To play a winning game of Texas holdem you have to have an
amount of money to risk in order to win some money. If you run
out of chips you can’t win more chips.

Advanced holdem players understand that sometimes it isn’t
about winning chips in a hand or situation, it’s about learning
which situations require the conservation of chips so you can
use them to make more money later.

Building a big bankroll is important if you want to be able
to win as much money as possible, but everyone has some sort of
limitation to how much they can wager. Let’s look at a specific
example of how not conserving your bankroll costs you money.

You’re playing in a no limit Texas holdem game with $10 / $20
blinds and are in the small blind four times per hour. In the
eighth hour of the day’s session you get all in against a player
with a $5,000 stack and win. You only have a stack of $1,500 and
you’ve completed the blind bet half the times you’ve been in the
small blind and haven’t won a hand from that position all day.

Most of the hands have been poor or average at best, but you
think it’s only half a bet so why not gamble a little?

So if you’ve played 14 hands for an extra $10 each you have
$140 less than if you’d have folded all of them. So instead of
winning $1,500 on the all in you could have won $1,640.

$140 is less than 10% of $1,500, but it’s still a significant
amount of money. And if you only did this once a week you end up
costing yourself $7,280 a year. And if you do this four times a
week instead of once you cost yourself $29,120 a year.

This is enough money to turn some losing players into winning
ones. And this is how many players look at the small blind. They
think it’s only half a bet so why not?

If you play too many hands from the blinds you need
to stop immediately. You need to conserve your chips for more
favorable situations.

This concept needs to be used in every area of your Texas
holdem game, not just in the blinds. Though you need to try to
have enough money to play in any favorable situation, you may
need to pass on a small edge to have enough money to take
advantage of a larger edge later.

If you have a situation where you’re a 52 to 48 favorite and
know that later you’ll have a situation where you’re a 60 to 40
favorite you want to be able to place money on each situation.
But if you have a limited bankroll you may have to skip the
first situation.

This discussion isn’t meant for you to put too much emphasis
on your bankroll. You want to have as big of a bankroll as
possible, but it’s almost as important to understand how to use
your bankroll as a tool and how to protect it so you have the
best chance to profit in the long run and in the maximum
possible amount.

The Best Play Isn’t Always the Best Play

After reading all of the preaching about always putting
yourself in positive expectation positions you’d think finding
contrary advice on the same page would be unlikely. But the
truth is that the answer to so many Texas holdem strategy
questions starts with it depends and this is an area where the
lines are somewhat blurred.

At the lower levels and limits where the competition isn’t
very good the best play is always the best play. What this means
is that you need to always make your playing decisions based on
what the math says is the best play.

But at the top levels of play many of your opponents also
know the best play and use this information to help them figure
out what you have based on the situation and how you play. When
this starts happening you have to occasionally make plays that
aren’t the most profitable from a pure mathematics standpoint so
you can make more money in the long run.

It’s possible we lost some of you with the last paragraph,
but remember this is an advanced strategy page so a few of the
concepts are difficult. Let’s look at it another way.

While it’s the most profitable way to play to raise from
early position with pocket aces every single time you have them
at the lower and middle limits, the way to get the most long
term profit from pocket aces in early position at the top levels
is to raise with them around 95% of the time.

You have to make it as close to impossible as you
can for an opponent to put you on a hand while maintaining your
long term advantage with your best hands. If they know you raise
every time from early position with pocket aces it can cost you
money on some hands, but if they know you raise almost all of
the time, but not every time, it’s valuable to you because they
can’t rule out pocket aces if you limp from early position.

The biggest problem with this is it’s a fine line between
altering your play just enough to throw off your opponents and
doing it so much that you cost yourself more money than you make
up for with the altered play.

Know Your Opponents

Tips On Texas Holdem Poker

On the other side of the last section is you need to be the
opponent who knows how the other players play their hands and
what their playing tendencies make them do.

If you know a player always checks on the river when they
miss their flush or always raises from early position with
pocket kings and aces you know something you can us to make
money when you play against them.

Some players never play anything worse than pocket queens
from early position, so if they enter the pot in early position
you can put them on a very narrow range of hands.

Every little thing you can learn and exploit is worth a
certain amount of profit in the long run. The more of these
small things you can exploit the more money you set yourself up
to make in the long run.

The Small Edge

This is possibly the most important advanced Texas holdem
strategy that you’ll ever learn.

The best Texas holdem players in the world understand that if
they can improve their game a fraction of a percentage it can
mean huge returns in the long run. So they constantly search for
any small edge they can possible find.

How much do you have to make a year playing Texas holdem to
make what you consider a good living from the game? Some players
would be happy making $30,000 a year playing poker, while others
think $100,000 is a good living. Others might think anything
less than a million isn’t enough.

Here’s a simple chart that shows how much a year in increased
profit a player can get for a few different increases in their
winning percentage.

As you can see if a player is making $30,000 a year playing
Texas holdem an increase of 1% is only $300, but even this small
amount is valuable. The same 1% increase for a million dollar a
year player is $10,000.

And the key is that these increases work much like compound
interest. If the million dollars a year player can improve their
game by 1% this year and another the next year and another 1%
the following year they not only increase it on the million
dollars, they also get the increase on the increase from the
previous year or years.

Even if you only find one extra edge and never improve on it
you can earn a great deal more over the course of your poker
playing career.

If you’re making $100,000 a year and increase your return by
2%, if you play another 40 years you’ve made an extra $80,000
over the course of your career.

A million dollar player earns an extra $800,000 over the
course of their career with the same one time 2% improvement.

Even the smallest edges are worth finding. If you can find
four different areas to improve your game a quarter of one
percent you’ve improved your overall returns by 1%.

Plan for Everything

The best Texas holdem players are able to visualize and plan
for almost every possible outcome of every hand they play in.
They already know how they’re going to react to a situation
before it happens.

This gives them an advantage because it gives them extra time
to determine the best play and quickly make adjustments if
something out of the ordinary happens.

When you plan everything you start working as soon as you
start looking for a table to join. You consider the current
players and what you know about them. In order to plan
everything out you need to be able to have an idea of how
certain players play in certain situations.

Of course you plan for every possible way an opponent can
play a hand, but by understanding the most likely way they react
in certain situations it helps you focus more energy on building
a profitable situation more quickly.

Before the hand starts you know you’ll be playing from the
button, which is the best starting position at the table. This
means that you can play more hands from here than at any other
position at the table. You also know that the blinds are both
weak and tend to call from the blinds with a wide range of
hands. This means that the odds of stealing the blinds are low,
but it also means you can count on them putting more money in
the pot if you need to build the pot.

The two players in early position are tight and aggressive
and the two middle position players are not very good.

You receive ace queen suited and instantly start thinking
about how you’ll play it in every conceivable situation. If it
gets around to you in an un-raised pot you’ll probably raise,
and if you have to call a small to medium raise you’ll probably
do so, unless there’s a raise and a re-raise, opening the
possibility of a push behind you. You also know that an ace
queen suited plays well in a multi way pot and can play well
heads up at times, but can also be easily dominated heads up.

As each player acts you receive additional information and
adjust the possible paths the hand can take. When you see the
flop you have additional information and new decisions to make
depending on what can happen.

• What will you do if you face a raise?
• What if it’s checked to you?
• What do you know about the remaining players?

As you work through a hand you need to be prepared for any
possibility. The more you’re able to plan for the more your long
term results will improve.

Summary

Becoming a long term winner at the advanced Texas holdem
tables is more about thinking than acting. Many self-help books
suggest that you need to stop thinking about things so much and
start acting right now. But if you want to learn the best
advanced Texas holdem strategies you need to think.
If you simply study the strategy details you just finished
reading and implement one thing you learned every month for the
next year you’ll be a much better holdem player. And even if
you’re such a good player that you just picked up an extra
percentage you just saw how many thousands of dollars this can
be worth to you over the rest of your life.

You learned two simple strategies that can make a huge
difference in your long term profitability. The second was the
small extra edge and the first was the big hand theory. If you
don’t do anything else from what you learned on this page make
it a goal to find an extra 1% edge somewhere and focus on
winning one or two big hands every day instead of battling over
a bunch of small hands. These two tactics alone will advance
your play quickly.

So what are you waiting for? Take action by getting started
thinking right now.