Online Poker Tips

Beginners Guide to Online Poker

Unlike in casinos, online poker sites offer beginners the chance to learn the game at their own pace, on their own terms and in the comfort of their own home. Online poker also provides new players with plenty of opportunities to win large cash prizes for relatively small cash stakes.

Getting Started

There is no more effective way to learn poker than to dive in and start playing – but beginners ought not to aim for the deep end just yet. The leading poker sites in the UK provide a selection of games for new and existing players. Many of these games are free to play and most sites also offer freerolls, enabling inexperienced players to understand how the game is played in tournament format.

After getting up to speed on the play-money tables, beginners should make a small cash deposit and find a low-stake table. A stake of $0.01/$0.02 is sufficient to get started, but some players prefer the added competitiveness and caution associated with higher stake games. It is important to note that the stakes refer to the small and big blinds, which describe the two players seated to the left of the player holding the dealer chip, which moves in a clockwise direction after each hand is completed. An ante might also be paid into the pot by each player at the start of each hand.

Betting

Beginners need to appreciate that poker – particularly Texas No Limit Hold`em – is a mathematical game, but it is not scientific in nature. This means that even the strongest hands might lose. Odds play a critical role in determining the outcome of each hand, but there is no certainty attached to this: a player holding a pair of aces pre-flop should not expect to beat a player with 2-7, but he can reasonably believe that his chances of doing so are higher than not. Understanding the difference between chance and certainty can help players avoid blunders of great misfortune.

The rounds of betting in poker are easy to learn. Players can fold, check, call, bet, raise, re-raise or go all-in depending on the type of game being played and the stage of betting. Most of these betting phases are self-explanatory with the exception perhaps of checking, which simply describes the decision by a player to neither bet nor fold. A check is essentially a pass into the next phase of betting (assuming all other players checked too).

Hands and Cards

In a game of Texas Hold`em, cards are dealt in four stages. Each player receives two hole cards that are unseen to others. Then three community cards are placed for all to see on the flop. Another community card is dealt on the turn and the final community card is dealt on the river. Players can bet between each of these phases after the hole cards have been dealt.

Hands in poker determine which player (or players) wins the pot. In order of highest to lowest (or best to worst), poker hands are ranked as follows: Royal Flush, Straight Flush, Four of a Kind, Full House, Flush, Straight, Three of a Kind, Two Pair, One Pair and High Card. Learning these hands is essential for all new players.

Free Poker Online Guide To How To Beat Loose Passive Style Players

You have managed to get to the flop with a good hand but what next? Many of us put so much effort into preflop play that we don’t build a solid postflop game. Postflop as preflop knowing who you are playing against and adapting your play to combat them is essential.

You will come up against 4 primary styles of poker player, tight or loose and passive or aggressive. In free online poker micro stakes (.02/.05 blinds), each style of player tends to make certain key errors. In this free poker online article focuses on postflop play against the Loose Passive type opponent.

Methods to Beat the Loose-Passive (LP) “Calling Station” Player Kind

These guys will often be limping or calling hands preflop and not raising very much.

Postflop they usually check-call down whilst only betting or raising their secure hands.

LPs are the easiest type of player to beat, and hordes of them play in micro stakes games. Essentially, you want to broaden your valuebetting range when you play against LPs and not bluff..

A lot of the time you can bet down (bet all 3 streets) using hands such as weak top pairs and even 2nd pair against most of them and just check/fold your bluff hands. Once you get raised, you should realize that your 2nd pair and even top pair hands become pretty useless and it’s probably best to fold , though, as is always the case, it does depend on the particular opponent.

It is also easy to play draws against Loose Passives. Just check doen until you hit the draw and then bet for value.

Out of position, don’t be afraid to lead on flop and turn if you hit a pair. In nanostakes games you won’t be exploited by these loose-passive players for doing this (against some loose-aggressive and tight-aggressive players you might be) and since they’re unlikely to bet (they’re passive) you will gain value in doing this.

Do always remember that there are levels of player types. Some TAGs are almost LAG, some TPs are almost LPs, etc, so you have to adjust your play to your individual opponents, these player types are just a tool to help you do that.

Learning to recognize player types and the degree to which a player fits a type isn’t easy. Yes, sorry to say, plenty of practice is required though if you really focus on this and keep good game notes it will come faster for you. In your early poker days be sure not to risk very much if any money while you learn.

Start of with the lowest stakes games or with free online poker games and work up from there.

For a mega version of this article with all 4 player types covered and some advanced postflop play tips see the free online 076e514191926188245c1b6b1f169fe9 blog at NoPayPOKER.

Free Poker Online Swift Quick Guide To Implied Odds And How You Use Simple Math To Calculate Them

In this free poker lessons online article we look at the poker math area of implied odds and how you can use it when playing tight aggressive poker.

In the last 2 articles we looked at Outs and Pot Odds. See the link at the bottom of this page to find them.

Pot odds are of most use where there is no future play in a hand, that is you are in the final win or lose stage. For spots where there’s future play, there’s another (slightly) more complex concept, called implied odds.

Working out implied odds is trying to figure how much value our hand may have in the future if we hit it.

Lets look at an example using deep stacks.

> Let’s say we’re HU against an opponent and we’re each 10,000bbs deep and have 9 flush outs.

> Our opponent raises to 3bb preflop and we call.

> We flop a 4 flush.

> Our opponent bets pot (6bb).

> We have only an 18% or so chance to hit on the Turn if our 9 flush outs are good and we have pot odds of 1-1 so by Pot Odds we should fold.

Implied odds, however, are attempting to estimate our future value when we do hit.

> Let’s say we call and hit the turn.

> On the turn, our opponent bets pot again (now 18bb, 6bb due to preflop action plus his 6bb bet on the flop and our 6bb call).

> We flat again.

> The opponent pots River, that’s 54bb now and you raise to 150bb and get called by the opponents Top Pair.

While you didn’t have pot odds to call at the flop you did so anyway for the possibility of winning a much bigger pot if you hit at the turn or river due to your opponents bets.

Against an opponent who will be aggressively betting the turn and river a high percentage of the time, we can definitely call the flop bet (and maybe even the turn bet) even when we know we don’t have the best hand.

> 300bb pot win on the river.

> That’s

> 50:1 on our money, and we only needed

But this is how implied odds is an imperfect science.

In our specific example we got 50 to 1, but say the opponent pots turn and river with any hand, but only calls our river raise with top pair.

> Let’s also say our opponent has top pair 20% of the time (just making up a number here).

If that’s the case, our calculation grows more complex.

> On the turn our opponent puts in another 18bbs every time, and on the river our opponent puts in another 54bbs every time, but our raise to 150 is only called 20% of the time.

> Which means that the value of our raise is 30bbs (150x.2).

> So long term, we have to call 6bbs on the flop to win 102bbs (18 on turn + 54 on river bet + 30 from our river raise).

Your implied odds now are not 50 to 1 but 102:6, or 17 to 1. 4:1 we needed to call the flop, so it’s still profitable of course.

But actually the estimations are far more cloudy.

> Let’s say our opponent is just betting the turn with top pair and is turning off at the river with no top pair top kicker?

> Or our opponent is betting top pair on the turn only 70% of the time and is betting the turn as a bluff 15% of the time (with his bluff range)?

> It’s not really possible to sit at the table (or at your computer) looking to estimate the precise implied odds of a play.

At best implied odds are an estimate, and that means never perfect. Whereas pot odds are simple definite math concept.

To try and more accurately “guess” implied odds, we need to think about our opponent’s tendencies (as usual).

> If our opponent is loose and aggressive, our implied odds are usually much higher than our direct odds.

> If our opponent is tight and nitty, our implied odds and direct odds are usually closer.

Overall the idea of implied odds tells us that it is often profitable to draw even if you do not have the direct pure odds to do so.

We have to estimate our implied odds to understand what the “genuine” cutoff is for when chasing our draws is mathematically unprofitable, but this is good guessing in the best case and requires plenty of training to be even OK at.

Fundamentally it is about figuring an opponents range accurately and being able to assess with decent accuracy what he or she will do at each step of a hand with that range, so yes, not easy!

If you have grasped everything up to this stage, you’re doing pretty good. In the next free online poker lesson we’ll look at reverse implied odds.

Alternatively you can go and check out my much longer full lesson on poker math with Calculating Outs, implied odds, reverse implied odds and more at the NoPayPOKER.com free poker online games training blog where you will discover all and get a link to a helpful pro if you’re stuck.