Texas Holdem Poker Strategies
Texas hold 'em example Alice holds J♦ 8♠. Bob holds K♥ 7♠. After the flop, the board is 5♥6♥7♦. If both hands are played to a showdown, Alice has a 45% chance to win (which she is unaware of, because she does not know what hand Bob holds), Bob has a 53% chance to win and there is a 2% chance to split the pot. The pot currently has. It’s really difficult to find beginner poker tips that actually lead to winning money at the table. In fact, most of the beginner Texas Hold’em tips that I s.
Texas Holdem is a game of skill, and every new player needs a couple of good strategies up their sleeve! We’ll take you through some of the most effective Texas Holdem strategies around, providing you with everything you need to know for a high-quality pre-flop and post-flop poker strategy.
Good Starting Hands
It’s important to know which hands to play and which hands to fold. A player who never folds and continually checks is one of the easiest opponents for a seasoned player to face. Knowing the true value of your hand, both pre-flop and post-flop, is absolutely vital for a successful poker strategy.
Let’s explore the best poker hands, giving you a good idea of when to raise and when to fold in Texas Holdem.
Pocket Aces and pocket Kings are probably the best pre-flop hands, giving you, at the very least, an extremely strong pair. But remember, the flop can completely change the landscape of the game, and if the board hasn’t improved your hand, it might be worth folding. It’s important not to get attached to specific cards in the pre-flop stage of the game!
Big cards are excellent in the pre-flop. Pocket Queens, Pocket Jacks, Ace King, and King Queen are great starting hands, they flop top pair a high percentage of the time, and as such they can be extremely tough to play against.
Suited connectors are great starting hands – they give you the best chance of making a straight or flush. The most effective way to play a suited connector starting hand is to check rather than raise, making your opponent put as much of their own money into the pot as possible. Suited connectors tend to be high risk, high reward, so you won’t want to play them 100% of the time. If you’re in an early or middle position on the board, it’s best to play these hands with diligence.
Like suited connectors, high value linked cards are strong cards. The flop and subsequent rounds can dramatically improve the poker hand odds of linked cards, providing you with a great opportunity to make it to the showdown with a winning hand.
The Texas Holdem hands with the most playability are the hands that you’re confident of taking to the flop and into the later rounds. Virtually every other starting hand is a losing ticket. Playing weak starting hands is one of the worst ways to approach poker strategy. Focusing on extracting the maximum value from the best poker hands is the best way of maximising your poker odds!
Tight Aggressive Style
The tight aggressive style of poker play is probably the best Texas Holdem poker strategy for a beginner, simply because most of the time you’ll be playing stronger hands than your opponents.
Playing with a tight aggressive style essentially means that you’ll be selective about which cards you take to the flop, but play and bet aggressively once you get there. It’s also a good way of convincing your opponent to fold. If you only play aggressively on strong hands you’ll have a lot of credibility at the table, and your opponents will be warier of taking you to the showdown!
Position
Playing from a strong position on the board is one of the most important elements of a successful poker strategy. In poker, information is king, and the last player to act in the round has the best opportunity to gather information from their opponents. When you’re in this position you’ll have a great shot at reading your opponents, and controlling the round from the get go!
Playing from a late position on the board means that you can play a wider range of hands, since you’ll have more information than your opponents, who’ll be continually second guessing the play. Lots of players get tempted to play from the blinds since they’ve already put money into the pot, but it’s important to remember that they’ll be playing out of position. In terms of basic Texas Holdem strategies, a tighter strategy is usually the best bet.
Poker Odds
Never tell me the odds? To be successful at poker, you’ll need to figure them out for yourself! Poker odds inform your probability of winning the hand, providing you with a surefire way of working out whether to bet. You’ll need to calculate your pot odds against your equity, it might sound tricky, but the maths is simple, and can be learnt by anyone with a little practice!
Slow Playing
Slow play is a poker strategy wherein you disguise the strength of your hand by checking, rather than raising, on a strong hand. When learning how to play Texas Holdem, many players choose to go with an extremely aggressive strategy, but this isn’t always the most suitable option.
Slow play works best when you’re playing against aggressive opponents, particularly opponents who are aggressive in the pre-flop. If you know an opponent plays aggressively even on weak hands, slow play can be a successful Texas Holdem poker strategy. When the pot is small, or shorthanded, slow play can help lure players with losing hands to the showdown, giving you excellent odds of winning the round.
If I were teaching a new player to play no-limit hold’em, and my goal were to get this player up to a professional level of play, how would I do it? What would my lessons look like?
Let’s say I had only three months to do it. With most people, I will admit, it would be a tall order. The learning curve is steep these days, and I don’t think everyone could make it from zero to pro in that short a time.
I’d have to make compromises. I couldn’t try to cover every possible situation. I’d have to find the important bits and skip the rest.
Texas Holdem Tips And Strategies
I’d also have to tailor the lessons a bit to a specific type of game. The most important skills in some game types are not as important in others. With this in mind, here are what I think my top five lessons would be for a new player trying to beat the $2-$5 no-limit hold’em games in Las Vegas.
Lesson No. 1. Don’t limp into pots ever. And don’t call preflop three-bets unless you are trapping with an ultra-premium hand.
Limping into pots, calling the preflop raise, and then check/folding the flop when you miss is an enormous leak. It’s also one that nearly every player who hasn’t been specifically coached out of it exhibits.
In my opinion, most players would see an immediate improvement in their winrates if they simply refused to limp in with any hand, especially if they chose to instead fold most of these hands.
For most players, refusing ever to limp means playing much tighter, particularly from out of position. Until you’re already an established pro player, tighter is better.
Lesson No. 2. Don’t pay off big turn and river bets.
This lesson might be different in some types of games, but in the Las Vegas $2-$5 games, it’s easily a candidate for the single most important piece of advice. Do not pay anyone off. When someone makes a big turn or river bet or raise, your one pair hand (or whatever other hand you’re thinking about calling with) is a bluff-catcher. That means, in the great majority of cases, your opponent won’t be trying to make a value bet with a worse hand. Either you’re beat or your opponent is bluffing. And players in these $2-$5 games do not bluff often enough to make calling worthwhile.
So you don’t pay off. I know it can be frustrating to feel like you’re getting muscled out of a huge pot, but the fact is, most players in these games do very little muscling. They try to make hands, and then they bet the hands they make. A big bet usually means a big hand. You don’t need to call to find out for certain.
Lesson No. 3. Your opponents will limp into pots, call raises, and check/fold flops. Take advantage of this weakness by raising lots of hands with position, betting the flop, and often also betting the turn.
It’s a simple play, but it’s one that generates a very consistent profit in these games. Players play too loosely preflop, are too willing to call preflop raises after limping in, and are too willing to check/fold the flop or turn if they miss. With many players, you can ignore your cards and raise the limps, bet nearly all flops, and bet most turn cards as well.
Say two typical players limp in a $2-$5 game. You raise to $25 on the button. Both limpers call.
The flop comes 10 8 2. They check, and you bet $50. One player calls.
The turn is the 5. Your opponent checks, you bet $120, and he folds.
Texas Holdem Poker Strategy Pdf
In this scenario, and in many like it, it doesn’t matter what you have. Your opponents are beating themselves by playing call/call/fold so often. All you have to do is put the bets out there and let your opponents run repeatedly into the brick wall.
Texas Holdem Poker Cash Game Strategies
Yes, there is some nuance to this, and some boards are better bets than others. But against many opponents at the $2-$5 level, most flops, turns, and even rivers are good bets. Keep betting until your opponents prove to you that they won’t beat themselves by folding too much.
Lesson No. 4. With value hands, don’t try to blow opponents out of pots. Instead, play most value hands with the goal of keeping a player in through the river.
Texas Holdem Poker Strategy Books
Value hands — hands like top pair, two pair, or any other hand you think is a favorite to be best — lose their value when all your opponents fold. If you win without a showdown, you might as well have been holding 7-2. (See Lesson No. 3.) With your value hands, you generally want opponents to get to the river.
Most players like to see showdowns if they feel like they can see them without losing too much money. No one likes to fold and think, “What if I was good?” If your opponents get to the river, often it’s an easy sell to get them to call a final value bet (as long as you don’t make it too big).
Calling these value bets is one of the biggest mistakes that $2-$5 players make. (See Lesson No. 2.) Allow your opponents to make this mistake.
Most players try to end hands early when they feel like they have the best hand. “Don’t want to get drawn out on,” they think. But this is backward thinking. End hands early with strong bets when you have nothing but a weak draw. Allow hands to reach showdown when you actually have something to show down! (Makes sense when I put it that way, doesn’t it?)
If I have top pair, I’d much rather get called for $30, $50, and $80 on flop, turn, and river than get called for $30 and then blow my opponent out of the hand with a $100 bet on the turn. The chance to win $160 with the hand instead of $30 outweighs the risk that I’ll get outdrawn.
Lesson No. 5. Think every hand about what strategies your opponents are using and how they’re thinking, and (almost) ignore the two cards in your hand.
I’ll put it bluntly. Most $2-$5 players beat themselves. They tend to play strategies that are extremely transparent, overly simplistic, and inflexible. You can beat some of these players simply by betting every time it’s your action (See Lesson No. 3.) You can beat other of these players simply by waiting for hands that beat top pair/no kicker and then making value bets. (See Lesson No. 4.)
Your job as a poker player is to identify the strategy each opponent is using and deploy a counter strategy. In many cases, the two cards in your hand become irrelevant. My experience is that the players that are always thinking about their hands never figure it out. It’s the players who are thinking on the next level that do. ♠
Ed’s newest book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.