joe “Are you ready for some Holdem room madness?” I hear your ask. This is a phrase I hear bandied about a lot when the game of Texas Holdem is played, but is it really true? Who says players are just going to sit at a random card room or place a bet at a brick and mortar casino and lose all their money? It’s not like this where you are just going to lose all the time, but there are some things that can be taken away or changed to still improve your chances of winning.
With the popularity of Texas Holdem reaching fever pitch, rooms of players are beginning to form. If you are a player who is starting to feel that its just not the same, then you need to join a room and start playing. Just take a look at the larger players than you and you will see that they have unique interests, a variety of games and a lot of commiserations.
Interests
One of the best features in any poker room should be their interests. Do you have a Texas Holdem bag full of Guides, Poker Secrets, Hand Histories and Books? It seems to me that this is the beginning of a tale that would have you falling in love all over again, if only in a slightly different way.
Your beginning poker experience is probably not going to be all that much of an experience, so when you go out and join the poker arena, you need to make sure that you are going to be able to hold your own. Don’t fall for the trap of thinking that just by staying at the same table all night that you are going to start winning, because it’s just not going to happen.
Poker Secrets
Read.Read.Read! If you are serious about improving your game, you have to constantly read. You can do so by going to the library, checking Tide, searching eBay, calling up all your friends that are into poker and asking them what books they recommend. Whatever you do, you need to be reading. You can find a lot of books online that will have something to say about improving your game.
If you are lucky, you will end up with one or two excellent books, so why not take the time to read through them and consider them when you are deciding where to play? I have made the mistake in the past of going in and playing a tournament and then not reading or practicing enough, so if you do that, you will probably never improve.
Learn to play.The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that just because you know a lot about poker, then you are going to be good enough. Learn to play without losing money and you will start to improve. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just cause you know a lot, you will be winning. I hear this all the time, “I was playing my friends and I was winning, so I figured I would come back home and play some poker.” This is the worst thing you can do because then you will just be losing money.
You need to be real with yourself and admit that you aren’t always going to win and you may not be winning now but this is the only way to develop the type of patience that is necessary to make you a great player.
Hand History reviews are a great way to improve your game. Take the time to study each of your hands and then compare them to a hand history of another player. The more times that you make the same mistake, the more you should consider this as an unfortunate occurrence that you need to improve.
pots that you pot out too often are going to get you in trouble, so pot control is important. Sure you can get lucky sometimes and get a monster hand, but you want to pot out each time you have the best hand and impress the table. equals showboating, which unfortunately happens a lot on a poker table when its your turn to act.
