How To Play Poker For Beginners

I want to take a step back and reflect on what's been going on in my blog. For anyone reading this that actually wants to learn how to play poker and especially if you are a beginner, here we go.

I feel as if my blog has been rambling some over my last few posts and hasn't spent very much time on the important things such as figuring out how to actually make money. That's why were all here right? To learn from each other in a never ending quest to hone and sharpen our poker skills?

So lets get back on track, I want pass on some of the lessons that I've spent an incredible amount of time (and money) on getting right.

I firmly believe that being good at poker is less about the regurgitation of information and more about the ability to think for ones self. I constantly get asked by friends, students, members of poker forums etc, how do I play X, Y or Z hand when it's already been raised pre flop, blah, blah, blah.

Now rather than think of any one situation we are going to take a step back and start looking at the bigger picture. I'm going to teach you how to play each player type and talk to you about why taking different lines with the same hand vs different players will show more of a profit.

So lets call this lesson one and in lesson one I want to talk about why raising as the first player to act pre flop is better than limping?

Why Raising is better Than limping

I often find players that are beginners like to limp in to a lot of pots in order to see a 'cheap flop'. The irony to this situation is that you are in fact (in the long run) making the flops you see more expensive and lets look at the reasons why.

Firstly when you raise pre flop with all the hands you want to play to play (and are first to enter the pot) you just give yourself a lot more ways to win the pot. If you're limping in then you are normally going to see multi way pots and have to make a hand in order to take the pot down. If you raise though, you can win the hand pre flop or on the flop with a continuation bet, not to mention that you will be letting less people see the flop for free (the blinds) and thus when you do have some sort of hand, you will win more often as you are facing less opponents.

Let us look at a few other good reasons to raise pre flop with your entire range of hands rather than limping in. Well for a start it makes you much harder to read. if you're raising AA, KK, 22, 89s, JQs etc then your opponents have no idea what your playing. If you limp small pairs for example in order to hit a set but raise big pre flop with AA, then you become very transparent to play against and easy to read.

Lastly your image at the table. If you are constantly raising with every hand that you decide to open first with then you'll start to get less respect from the other players which means they are more likely to start playing back at you. They have no idea when we are strong or weak as our bets are consistent so it's for this reason that they are a lot more likely to make a mistake in a hand against us than we are against them.

In short we'll keep our opponents guessing and off guard, we'll win more pots pre flop, more post flop and showdown winning hands more often because there are less people in the hand with us on the whole.

Remember this the next time you're sat at the tables.

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