| a Beginner's Survival Guide
by: Lou Krieger ©
Some of my best ideas come from readers like you. Recently a reader’s
email suggested a column offering a survival guide to ease the transition
for beginners who are about to take the plunge and play casino poker
for the first time. This is an idea whose time has come, and it
probably ought to come around about once a year, since there is
a continuing influx of new players - and new readers - who may never
have given a moment’s thought to the differences between playing
poker in a casino or cardroom, and playing in a home game or across
the kitchen table with family and friends.
Start Small:
Playing in a casino is not like playing in a home game or with family
and friends. The game is faster, for one thing, and that takes some
getting used to. And regardless of how many truly awful hands you’re
apt to find played in low-limit, “no fold’em”
hold’em games, those games are usually a lot tighter than
they are around the kitchen table when your opponents are Uncle
Billy, your parents, and three or four of your cousins. Even if
you are an experienced home game player, you will find the pace
of
casino poker substantially swifter than the home game variety. You probably should
figure on losing money the first few times you play in a casino,
if for no other reason than your own unfamiliarity with the pace
of the game and a few formalized procedures, rules, and points of
etiquette that are new to you. Since you will, in essence, be paying
for lessons the first few times you play poker in a casino, there’s
no reason to make them any more costly than necessary. My advice
is simple: Play small at first. And stay small until you feel comfortable
with the environment, are sure that you can outplay your opponents,
and can afford a bigger game. Then move up.
Join the ‘Good Hands’ People:
Playing marginal hands can be your undoing. Play few hands, but
play aggressively when you are dealt a good hand. Actually, if you’re
going about it the right way, you’ll gain as much or more
by watching your opponents when you are not involved in a hand than
you’ll learn by vying for pots with them. Make sure you have
some idea about the hands you will play from various starting positions
before looking at your cards. If you’re playing hold’em,
my books contain suggested starting hands that can be played from
early, middle, and late position. Other authors have also promulgated
starting standards for hold’em players, and most agree about
the vast majority of starting hands. What matters most is that you
need a basis for deciding which hands are playable and which ought
to be folded. When you’re really new to casino poker, playing
fewer hands will probably mitigate your losses while affording you
an opportunity to watch your opponents, observe and mentally catalogue
the kinds of hands each of them plays from early, mid, and late
position, and eventually use that knowledge to outplay them.
Don’t Bluff
Low limit games are no place for bluffers. In these games, where
you typically have a relatively large number of opponents seeing
the flop and even continuing beyond it with all sorts of hands I
can’t imagine ever playing, a bluff is unlikely to work for
two reasons. As a general rule, the more opponents you are confronting,
the greater the chance that at least one of them has a hand. And
he or she will call when you come out betting. In addition, low
limit games are populated with players who sleep very well, thank
you, knowing that no one, but no one, is stealing from them. Since
bluffing is unlikely to work, don’t try it ¾ unless
you’ve identified some opponents who are actually willing
to throw hands away when someone bets into them with what appears
to be a big hand.
Don’t be disappointed if you can’t bluff. It’s
an overrated tactic anyway. What you have going for you instead
is the certainty that you can expect to be called whenever you bet,
and may of those callers really should have thrown their hands away
a lot earlier. Moreover, whenever you make a big hand, like a full
house, the nut flush, or nut straight, you can raise with the certainty
that you will be called ¾ thereby winning additional bets
that you could never count on winning in games where players will
lay down marginal hands to a bluff. In the low limit games you’ll
be starting out in, you’ll probably have to showdown the winning
hand to capture the pot. That makes for a somewhat mechanical, occasionally
boring, but undeniably profitable strategy: If you got the goods,
bet. If you don’t, check. And if someone is betting into your
hand and you know yours is better, go ahead and raise.
Keep Learning
You’ll never know it all. There is always something more to
learn about poker, and even when you think you know all there is
to know, you won’t. Moreover, much of what’s learned
about poker has to be relearned from time to time. Read books. All
of them. Even if you get just one or two good ideas from a book,
it’s an investment that will pay for itself in a relatively
short period of time. I have a large library of poker books, and
I don’t consider any of them to have cost me money. They are
investments that have repaid the money spent to acquire them many
times over. Books aren’t all there is, either. Watch videos,
get yourself some software, like Wilson’s Turbo Texas Hold’em,
or Turbo 7-Card Stud (which not only lets you play against computerized
opponents, it is a terrific tool for running simulations and conducting
your own research about various hands and scenarios), discuss poker
with knowledgeable players, and avail yourself of the advice proffered
on the Internet newsgroup, Rec.Gambling.Poker.
This seems like a pathetically small measure of advice, particularly
when there is so much to know before one morphs from newbie to skilled
poker player. But there’s a finite limit to the number of
angels I can get on the head of this particular pin. If you take
my advice, you’ll get your feet wet gradually ¾ there’s
no real need to dive into the deep water head first ¾ and
reinforce your experiences by thinking about what’s transpired
in your game and assessing it against the theories you’ve
learned from books and software. Don’t expect too much at
first. Setting the world on fire isn’t important. Learning
and improving is. Keep moving forward. Baby steps will do. As long
as you’re making progress, you’ll reach that point when
you realize you’re a poker player ¾ a real one too,
not a pretender. Even then, you’ll have to keep learning.
But it’s much more enjoyable when your winnings are underwriting
your hobby and maybe even your lifestyle.
*****
Lou Krieger
Read more about how to raise your poker game by clicking
here . Lou Krieger is the co-author of 'Poker for Dummies' and the host
of
Royal Vegas Poker . To learn about the promotions offered at the site visit our Royal
Vegas Poker Bonus Page
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