Five Winning Poker Strategies

Now that you know the rules of community poker games like Texas Hold’em and Five Card Draw, you need to nail down the basic strategies to read and beat your opponents. Poker is a skill game and these five strategies will help you gain an advantage over the competition.

Aggressive play: you start the wagering with an opening bet or you raise your opponent’s bet. This establishes dominance in the hand. Do it with a strong hand because if you overuse it, the other players will label you as a loose player and use it against you.

Bluff: tricking other players by betting with a poor hand. The goal is to get other players out of the hand. You do this by betting big to scare them off, even if they have a better hand. The odds of high cards in the hand dwindle as players exit the hand and your odds of winning it get better.

Check-raise: risky but lucrative strategy where you check with a strong hand. By passing to the next player, someone else will have to start the opening bet and then you can raise them when the action comes back to you. It’s like a slow play or a bluff where you deceive your opponents.

Protection play: opposite move of a check-raise. You wager a lot early to protect your hand and scare off others. It’s best done with a strong yet vulnerable hand like a pair of Jacks when there is a possible straight on the board. It protects your hand.

Slow play: opposite move of bluffing but also protects your hand. In this strategy, you are trying to keep other players in the hand by staring with a small bet. It’s best done if you have a high pocket pair for your hole cards in Texas Hold’em Poker. Other players will stay in just to see the flop. Then, you keep reeling them in with small bets until they are pot committed. Once they have put in enough chips to be pot committed, you hit them with a big bet and the hand is yours.

Rules of Texas Hold'em Poker

Now that you know the rules of Five Card Draw, Let It Ride and Pai Gow, it’s time to learn the most popular community poker game: Texas Hold’em. It has grown exponentially with tournaments like the World Series of Poker and World Poker Tour. It has grown even more online with young people.

Texas Hold’em uses a standard 52-card deck with no Jokers. You form the best five-card poker hand from seven total cards. You bet chips into a pot and standard hand rankings apply. This poker game has four rounds of betting and you start with two hole cards dealt face down. A series of five community cards are dealt face up in the center of the table with a round of betting in between each deal. Hold’em has different varieties like limit, no-limit, Omaha and antes. Hold’em using blinds is the most popular.

With blinds, you have a small blind (person to the left of the dealer) and a big blind (person to the left of the small blind). As you might expect, the big blind is double the size of the small blind. The blinds are thrown in before the hole cards are dealt. The player to the left of the big blind starts each round of betting. They can call the big blind, raise or fold. No Limit Hold’em has no maximum on the amount of raises. Limit has a maximum of twice the big blind.

The first three community cards are known as the flop. This is followed by a round of betting, then the turn (fourth community card), another round of betting, then the river (final community card), and another round of betting. The river decides the outcome of those left in the hand. If there are only two players left, it’s called going heads-up. The pot gets bigger as play progresses, so it’s important to practice proper poker strategy. I will go over more on that in my next post.