How to win in Poker : when to play too many hands in Poker
Poker has taken the world by storm; it’s the only game with money where the main stream has made it legitimate. We are not gambling; we are playing poker is the mindset of the poker players. Having said this majority of people today don’t really have it right and misunderstand poker. Let's be frank: poker is not played in many different forms and in many different ways, most people know poker from the low-stakes games they now play (or grew up playing) with their mates or family. In these low-stakes home games, where mindset is fun, luck often plays a much bigger role than skill.
The money to be gained or lost in a home tends to mean next to nothing, and everyone at the table plays almost every hand to the end. Yes, no one wants to sit out, wait and understand who is sitting on the table. The dealer's choice games are often nonstandard and vary from home to home, in some cases even bizarre variations (often fun) where, for example, deuces, black kings, or one-eyed jacks (or all of them) are wild. In this type of poker game, people just put their money in the pot and hope to make the best hand, sometimes bluffing hand after hand. In most cases there doesn't seem to be much strategy or thought involved. By the end of the night everyone agrees Julie sure was lucky tonight but no one seems to say, “Julie is great poker player” If she surely is a great poker player, who in their right mind is going to play her a home game?
One reason why luck has such a big role in home-style poker games is that many of the skills we use in pro-style games just don't come into play in a home game. For example, some of the more important skills in pro poker player are:
1. Biggest skill is “Patient” in determining which starting hands to play
2. Bluffing in a right way at the right time
3. Reading people, poker is a nonverbal game, no one is going to tell you if they have a good or a bad hand, you would have to play the odds based on what they are telling you with their actions
Patience, like discipline, is an asset worth having regardless of what you do in life. If you mathematically analyzed the data on good poker players and understood the numbers in their play; it would be impossible to miss professional or tough high-stakes poker players will fold lots of their hands right away. If you don’t follow this simple math and play too many hands or shall I say too many bad hands, it won’t be long before your bank starts to dry, trying to use luck instead of odds would be expensive mistake and trying to win by catching particular cards that are in short supply is no different.
Here is the Poker Fact number 1. In a pro poker, If you play too many hands in a pro-level poker game, probability of you wining in the longrun is almost nil regardless of how lucky you are.
Flip this in a home game and the story changes; it may actually be good to play lots of hands, size of the pot will wind up offering you odds sufficient to draw to an inside straight (add a ten, for example, to your 7-8-9-J hand) or another "unlikely to hit" hand. You'll usually lose, but when you do manage to hit the card you need, you're going to win a huge pot.
Further, the number of cards that can complete what you need in the late rounds of a hand in a home game is often larger than one sees in the pro game, because the dealer has designated various wild cards or rules that allow you extra draws or give you chances to buy another card or replace a card.
In the next article on How to play Poker to win I will cover the topic on Patience, “how to use Patience to win in poker”.
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