Once you find yourself automatically applying certain things you learn off the internet in your online play, and once you start making predictions and assumptions based on certain principles, you know you are starting to see parts of the big picture fall into place.
In order to take an early peak at this big picture, try to organize information somehow as soon as you can.
What’s the very first thing you need to do before actually sitting down to the table for a session of online poker?
You have to know the nature of the game you’re about to play. I’m not talking about rules here, poker rules are easy and anybody can learn them in 10 minutes most. I’m talking about the nature of the game.
While Omaha rewards good starting hand selection, Texas Holdem doesn’t place such a big stress on it. While in Omaha rookies don’t stand a chance against experienced players, in Texas Holdem this is an altogether different matter. Omaha has much less of a luck-dependant variance, while Texas Holdem has the luck-factor working overtime. Being the game of nuts that it is, Omaha is also a game of huge edges. Texas Holdem is quite the contrary. A game of minute edges applied and reapplied countless times.
Knowing the nature of your game is the single thing that will pretty much guide your every single decision.
Since it’s a game of small edges, Texas Holdem requires you to leave nothing unnoticed. Small edges are right there in your face, well before you sit down to a table. One of them would be rakeback, the others are table and game selection. Rakeback is meant to cut the effects of the rake on your play, while game selection is the process of picking a type of game most suited to your style and level of skill.
Table selection skill is the ability to locate an easy-to-beat table. It too is very important as part of your general poker strategy. It is also the best example to illustrate the inter-dependency of different aspects of successful poker play. Take a winning player, who possesses superior table and game selection skills. Put him into a game of your choice, without allowing him to choose. The same guy who can dominate at one table, will pretty much struggle for survival at a different one.
Preflop action is the nemesis of beginners. This is the most frustrating aspect of the game for these guys. They do not realize however, that all of this action is just a foreplay for the post-flop betting stage. That’s exactly the reason why most rookies have a lot of trouble with starting hand charts too. They do not see the starting hand they commit on, as part of something bigger. They look at it in an isolated state, no wonder they have more trouble with starting hand charts than without them.
Once you begin to grasp why the chart recommends you commit on a certain hand, and you understand how you’re supposed to play that hand further down the stretch, you are beginning to see the big picture, and in the same time you’ll find that preflop action is no longer a thorn in your side.
Likewise, once you realize why Texas Holdem is a betting game above all else, and how postflop action works, you’ll be increasingly successful at it.
When you can truly affirm that you see the game of poker as a sum of all the different elements it involves, you can probably also state that you’re a successful player.
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