Together with the terrific increase in popularity of online poker games and Texas Holdem Poker in particular, millions of new players are attracted to numerous online poker rooms. The majority of these players have already had a certain experience with home and casino games, but they definitely are inexperienced newbies in comparison to winning Texas Holdem pros, frequenters of the web’s most crowded poker rooms. Although all widely televised Texas Holdem events, such as World Series of Poker and World Poker Tour attract millions of new players, promising great entertainment and huge earnings, you mustn’t believe everything you see on TV.
If you watch one of those thrilling Texas Holdem games, where some average player grabs an incredibly huge pot and feel ready to deposit half of your monthly income to repeat his exploit, then you’re already on the slippery way to bankruptcy, or at least serious losses. Remember that some of the TV plays are hopelessly bad and that everything shown on TV is just a show after all. They show you a lucky guy, who won his million at ease, but they won’t tell you how many months he spent learning Texas Holdem strategy, practicing tricks and improving his play. I just try to say that if you are planning to become a winning Texas Holdem player, you need to pay attention to your knowledge and skills, not TV.
First of all, poker hands you see on TV don’t exactly represent what makes a Texas Holdem player really strong. Each of the world famous super stars spent months studying and practicing the fundamentals of Texas Holdem poker and keep improving their skills even now, when they have already became top-ranked poker professionals. They devote the majority of their time to study new things and improve their knowledge and practical skills.
Although Texas Holdem seems to be a very simple game, it has a number of shades and niceties, which are as important as knowledge of basic tactics and rules. They aren’t very flashy, but they must be studied and continually mastered before you can consider yourself a real professional.
The essential skills required for a steady and successful Texas Holdem career are:
1. Discipline. No skills and luck matter if you aren’t patient and disciplined. Each stage of your Texas Holdem career requires both – starting from the patience, when you study and up to strict discipline, when you play.
2. Knowledge and understanding of the betting structure and all the ensuring consequences. You must know how to steal the blinds from your opponents and you must be able to protect your blinds, you must learn to build a pot encouraging your opponents to bet and you must be aware of pot odds and much more, because all ring Texas Holdem game concepts appeal to betting.
3. Learn all specialties and niceties of different types of Texas Holdem poker. The majority of televised Texas Holdem events run No-Limit Texas Holdem, which is slightly different in comparison to Limit Texas Holdem, but although these are two branches of the same game, many tactics and tricks applicable in No-Limit Texas Holdem tournaments are simply useless in Limit Texas Holdem ring games.
4. You must perfectly know good starting hands and hands worth to call and raise with. Tight play implies folding the majority of hands you get dealt with, but in the long run tight players always dominate their loose opponents, even though loose players may seem to be winning more games.
5. Finance and money management. You must know how to manage your bankroll and how much money you need to enter a certain game.
Study the basic fundamentals of Texas Holdem and move on improving your skills and earning your first money using your brain, not luck. Going this way, you will quickly feel the real value of knowledge and skills and see their efficiency and advantage over luck and loose play.