Poker is a catch-all name for a classic group of card games where you usually aim to make the best five-card hand – and bet that the value of the cards you hold is stronger than your opponents. Alternatively, you can try to bluff your way to victory! Although playing poker and winning can involve a slice of luck, there’s also great skill in being able to outfox other players through strategy and how/when you bet. Poker is not a complex game. Learning the basic rules to play poker and understanding how to play poker online can be picked up in minutes. That is the easy part. It is mastering the game that takes time.
For novice players, it is imperative to balance the fun and excitement of online poker games with the hefty losses you can quickly rack up if you don’t know what you are doing at the tables.
How do you get on your way as the best poker star? Here are four poker strategy tips to get you up and running.
- Get a Feel of The Game for Free:
The only way to understand the world of poker is to experience it. So, sign up now with UniconBet and play free poker tournaments. UniconBet provides you free online poker games that act as your training ground. When you are confident enough to play poker online for real money, then switch the tables and raise the stakes. But, start at the lowest stakes available online and build up as much experience as possible.
- Position is Everything:
The concept of position is one of the most important elements of poker that is often overlooked by novice players. The dealer button is the most dominant position on the poker table because it means you always get to act last for the rest of the pot. The spot immediately to the right of the dealer is the second most powerful position and so on. Here’s an extra special secret no one will tell you: over your entire poker career, you can win more money from the dealer button than from any other position.
- Pay Attention:
Above all, this poker strategy is situational and for that reason, you must always pay attention to what other players are doing on the table. This might be a tall order when you are just starting out but try at least to keep an eye on the player to your right and two players to the left. These players are most likely to be involved with you most often. Pay attention to whether they are playing passively or aggressively and keep an eye out for the number of hands they are playing.
- Develop Your Skills:
While you learn a lot from both wins and losses, poker is not just a game you can master at the tables. You also have to learn a lot more by reading blogs, books, and learning advanced strategies about poker. To PLAY POKER ONLINE is a great way to improve your skills and knowledge, but make sure to choose the right table and stick to lower stake tournaments. And, always remember to keep notes as you play online poker games. This helps you refine your strategies, learn from your mistakes, and makes you better and better.
- Final Words of Advice:
Every player is bound to have a bad session at Online Poker Games. All you have to remember when you are starting out and you are losing your small bankroll is that many poker pros have lost tens and thousands of bills in a single session. But, they managed to bounce back and become the poker pros they are today. So, keep your head high, follow these poker strategies, keep practising, and improving your skills.
Poker card rankings:
The cards in a deck are individually ranked, from top to bottom:
A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2.
When you’re creating your best hand of five cards, you’re usually looking to make a:
- Straight Flush
- Four of a Kind
- Full House
- Flush
- Straight
- Three of a Kind
- Two Pair
- Pair
In order of strongest to weakest. Usually, the higher the value of the cards in that hand, the stronger it is. For example, a pair of Aces beats a pair of Queens, and a straight that runs 7-8-9-10-J beats one that runs 5-6-7-8-9.
Poker order for Texas Hold’ Em – step-by-step:
Here’s our quick and easy 8-step rundown for understanding how things proceed in Texas Hold’em – arguably the most popular type of poker. How the action plays out, however, is up to you and your opponents!
- The dealer shuffles the deck, then distributes cards to all of the seated players.
- Once the cards have been dealt, it’s time for the pre-flop. Here you can fold, call, raise or even re-raise, depending on what you’ve got.
- The flop is when the first three community cards are shown. It’s the first time you can think about building your full hand, so if you don’t have much to start from at this point it might be the best time to fold.
- The turn comes with the ‘turn’ of the 4th community card. As before, you can check, call, fold or raise. Now your position and early signs of the direction of the hand are made clear, you can think about how your full hand might look.
- The river is the reveal of the fifth and final community card. Now you know what you’re (Texas) holding, you can make a far more confident bet based on the situation – or just bluff!
- Post-river marks the end of the hand. Now, it’s time to use your hole cards in conjunction with some of the community cards to build your best hand.
- If you’re still in for the showdown, it’s time to call out your remaining opponents – or be called out yourself to reveal your hand.
- The best hand wins the pot – usually! Bluffing can be your best friend – or your worst enemy – when it’s time to lay down your cards.
Some games such as Omaha follow a very similar poker order to Hold’em.
The Best Online Poker Tips for Beginners:
At the start of any new endeavour, it is critical to set the tone right. Poker is no different. If you are a beginner, or even someone just eyeing the game, sitting on the fence really, you must acquaint yourself with some of the best poker tips for beginners.
Starting your poker journey, the right way is highly underrated. Your first few poker games will put you on your path for the future, and more than anything else they will affect your attitude towards the game. The habits that most poker players form in their initial stages of playing become their defined style at the table.
While it is excellent to have your poker strategy and style, most beginners require structure to their play to tide them over until they are more experienced and can tweak their gameplay later with a deeper understanding of the tables.
Now, turning back to the newbies, there are some obvious pointers that you should have down before joining a table. Knowing the rules of the game and hand rankings are some of the most basic tips for beginner players. Other tips are less obvious, but we will take you through all of them in this article.
Strap in and get prepared to cram all these beginner poker tips before your next poker game!
1. Learn your basics:
Before approaching a poker table, you need to have your basics crystal clear. These include poker hand rankings, poker rules, and poker positions. All of these together set the base of the game. This foundation that you develop early on in your journey as a poker player is extremely essential.
Apart from that, understanding hand rankings are useful to play almost all of the poker games. You can check out our hand rankings page to get a solid understanding of the different hands in poker and how they are ranked and valued.
Out of the three basic things that we mentioned here, the poker positions are probably the least understood by beginners. This is also important because as a newbie, you do not want to be in a spot when you are in an early position and not know what your strategy should be.
Position in poker can often be the reason you win or lose in poker.
2. Start small when it comes to poker:
When it comes to poker, you should start small before jumping in to swim with the sharks. Poker can be a brutal game if you go straight for the big pots. Many times, beginners are so excited and think that they have researched so well that they can just dive right in.
This, however, cannot be further from reality. You need to release that as a novice, your goal is to understand and hone your poker strategy and not bleed your money while doing that.
Starting at low stakes serves many purposes.
Firstly, you are more relaxed while playing and can concentrate on the game rather than worry about losing your money if you make one wrong call. You will be risking less and reaping more benefits from low stake games.
Secondly, your skill level will keep increasing as you play more games, and you can keep increasing the stakes in a parallel fashion, thus ensuring minimum losses. It is all about equity in poker after all!
Playing in this gradual manner, working your way up the ladder will not only cut your losses but also build up your confidence to play the games of your dreams eventually.
3. Stick to a playing style:
As a novice, you absolutely need to stick to a playing style which is good for you. You should play a tight but aggressive game. It is essential as a poker player to be able to adjust your playing styles according to the dynamics of the table at any given point. But as a beginner, you need to have a defined play to avoid losses and errors.
You should only play your strongest hands; weak and marginal hands are playable when you are more experienced in the game and understand how to read your opponents.
Playing only your strongest hands helps avoid any tough decision-making post-flop. This will make you play fewer hands but more aggressive ones when you do decide to jump into the action. So, starting hand selection is critical as a beginner. You better have your poker hand rankings memorised for this.
Since a lot of your opponents in the lower stake games are going to be playing a wide range of hands, having a tight play will keep you ahead of them. This will help you learn poker strategy better. You can be raining and betting yourself instead of just calling.
4. Make use of your position at the table:
Leveraging your position at the table is an indispensable skill and the best poker tip for beginners. No matter the game, your position is a huge asset. When you are deciding which hands to play, the position is one of the first things that you will have to consider.
A general rule of thumb that you can follow is that you stand a chance to win more money from later positions. So, you should try to play more hands in a late position. When playing six-max games, you should try to play very tight from early positions. You can then gradually widen the hands you play as you get closer to the button.
5. Start playing on a single table:
In the excitement of it all, you may want to try jumping from one table to another. You should, as a novice, keep your metaphorical blinkers on and have one aim and one aim only, to learn poker strategy. To do this, you must leave out the exciting, tempting parts of poker and strap in, one table at a time.
At this point, you should be noting every slight detail, every move, and possible move that you or your opponents can make and keep strategizing.
Once you are good with the basics, you can try to read hand ranges and then see how accurate you were at the showdown. This is a great way to utilise your time at single tables. You should leave the multiple table tournaments and the likes out of it initially. Trust us, there will be enough time for that later.
6. Sit at a table only at your best:
Your emotional state can greatly affect your game. Emotions can soon turn into your enemy at the poker table so playing when you are angry is not a good idea. Of course, when playing, it is possible that you may become sad when you lose a game. This is part and parcel of the game, and you will need to learn how to live with it.
Compounding the emotions involved in the game by starting one when you are in a bad frame of mind is definitely not a bright idea. Treating poker like a glass of whiskey at the end of a bad day should not be your approach.
It is basic human nature to do silly things when we aren’t level headed. Poker requires a very level headed player to make the most practical and profitable decisions. Starting games only when you are in a good mood can go a long way in making you a better poker player and improving your win rate.
7. Train yourself in calculating poker odds:
Poker is as much a game of mathematical precision as of skill and psychology. Understanding the technical aspects of it like, pot odds and hand charts will help you identify your odds of hitting a winning hand. After all, you are playing the game to be able to score some pots and win some sweet bucks, right?
8. Play a straight forward game:
One of the best beginner poker tips is to play when you have a hand and fold when you don’t. It is really good to keep it simple and not try to bluff much as an amateur. The more experienced players will likely be able to see right through your bluffs and own you in the game.
As you gain more experience and move up the stakes of the game, this straightforward approach will no longer be an option. You will be sitting at bigger tables which will call for a more aggressive play. Bluffing will become indispensable for you to be able to stand up against the aggressive and tight players at those tables.
A straightforward game, however, doesn’t mean that you chat about your folds and raises in the chat boxes available online. Dropping hints like that will only give your opponents an edge over you and enable them to beat you at your own game.
9. Learn to use a poker software
Every beginner poker player must make use of a basic poker software to be able to compete against other poker players. Tracking software is of great help because you can use it to see statistics on your opponents and understand how they are playing.
Quick stuff will help you spot the different types of opponents that you will be facing and equip you to change your strategy depending on this.
10. Folding is key:
Another crucial beginner poker tip is to learn to fold more hands than you play. When your opponents are calling and raising all the time, you should consider folding your hands. Even some of your stronger ones. Mostly, a One Pair hand, even a top pair, should be folded.
When you are just starting out, you will feel reluctant to let such hands go, but this is the one thing you need to learn if you want to be a successful poker player. You will be starting with the low stakes and players in the lower stake games do not bluff much. This means that if they are calling and raising like there is no tomorrow, they probably hold some of the strongest and highest-ranking hands and are drawing confidence from them.
In conclusion
When starting out as a poker player, you should keep in mind all the best poker tips for beginners that have been discussed above. There are many things that you will learn through practice and playing your games at the tables. Experience will teach you the most important lessons but to be able to understand them, you should have your basics down.
Go slow and steady when it comes to improving your game, the more you rush, the more it is plausible that you will make errors in your judgement. Even poker professionals learn something new in each game that they play.
Keep playing and mastering the game. Starting from low stakes and freeroll stakes, you can work your way up to higher stakes with real money to get a sense of achievement from the game.
One of the best places in India to master your game and develop a poker community is UniconBet. To make your poker journey smoother, we have a bunch of educational articles and tools to help you improve your game and live up to your full poker potential. We also offer you an instant registration bonus and a deposit bonus to start your poker journey right!
Online Poker vs. Live Poker?
The rules of poker are identical whether you’re playing a live poker game in person or against other players online. There are some key differences, however.
Online poker generally tends to be faster, comes with less risk (you can play for smaller amounts) and more accessible (you can find a game anytime, anywhere you are in the world).
On the downside you’ll usually be playing against strangers and won’t be able to look anyone in the face. It takes a little getting used to but there are still many ways to figure out if someone is bluffing.
For more detail on some of the key differences between live and online poker, check our tips here:
Both online vs live poker have their differences and strategies. The live arena is where it all started but, since the late nineties, the internet is where poker has flourished. Today, everyone has a choice. You can play online poker vs live, and vice versa – or even move between the two.
The third option is what most do, with most of their time spent online.
In this guide, we’ve outlined why online poker is on the rise, especially in these unprecedented times. And more importantly, how you can make the switch and remain profitable.
You need to know the differences in play between online vs live poker and how to adjust accordingly. Here are the similarities, differences, and concepts you need to grasp when moving between live poker to online, and vice versa.
| ONLINE POKER | LIVE POKER |
| FAST – PACED | SLOWER ACTION |
| TOUGHER COMPETITION | SOFTER GAMES ON AVERAGE |
| MORE AGGRESSIVE STYLE | MORE PASSIVE PLAYERS |
| MORE PRE-FLOP PLAY | MORE LIMPS AND POST-FLOP PLAY |
| MULTI TABLING POSSIBLE | PHYSICAL TELLS AND TABLE IMAGE |
| SATELLITE INTO BIGGER EVENTS | MORE MULTIWAY POTS |
| POSSIBLY MORE VARIANTS | SHORT TERM VARIANCE |
| HIGHER VARIANCE/SWINGS | NARROW HAND RANGES |