How To Be Good At Texas Holdem Poker
How To Get Better At Texas Holdem Poker
How To Win At Texas Holdem
Texas Holdem Strategy Guide
How To Win At Texas Holdem Everytime
How To Play Poker Better

Jun 15, 2019 Of course, against some loose players you'll want to go ahead and bet your strong hand and let them raise you, as that might be a better way to get even more chips in the middle. How to Improve Your Texas Hold’em Skills. Posted by Bradley, November 30, 2011. Texas Hold’em is a poker game enjoyed by enthusiasts around the world. Texas Hold’em is simple to learn but to master the game requires extensive knowledge and skill. Titan Poker is proud to present its players with a collection of Texas Hold’em resources.

To be a winning Texas hold’em player, you need to be good at every part of the game. You need to master 1,000 little things to win the long-term battle. One of the most important things to do is recognize and fix leaks in your game.

One of the biggest leaks I see when playing is how poorly most no limit Texas hold’em players do in the small blind. They play too many hands, call too many raises, and lose more money than if they simply folded every small blind.

You can learn how to improve your small blind play on this page. I cover all of the hands you can play in depth and offer a simple solution that will instantly improve your results without much effort.

The small blind is the worst position at the Texas hold’em table. After the opening betting round, you have to act first for the rest of the hand. This makes all but the best hands unprofitable to play.

All of the best poker books talk about position, but most players either ignore position or don’t understand how much it has to do with profitability. Texas hold’em is a great game because it’s based on a set of 52 cards which never change, but each hand is played with a limited amount of information.

You only know which cards you have and the cards that are on the board. Everything else has to be estimated or guessed, based on the actions of other players and probability. As each hand plays out, you have the opportunity to gather additional information, and each extra piece of the puzzle you put together helps you win.

Here’s what this has to do with position.

When you have to act before your opponent has to act, you give your opponent an extra piece of information. It might not seem like much, but every extra piece of information is helpful. The information you give your opponent when you act first is if you check or bet. Don’t underestimate how important this is.

On the other hand, if you get to act last, you get an extra piece of information instead of giving something away. You also have the opportunity to take a free card by checking if your opponent checks. If they bet, you can determine your odds and fold, call, or raise.

How To Be Good At Texas Holdem Poker

This page is designed to help you play more profitably from the small blind, but the more you understand and use position at all times, the more profitable your overall play will be.

Know Your Opponents

You should always try to learn as much about your opponents as possible, but from the small blind, you need to know how likely the player in the big blind is to raise. If the hand gets to you without a raise, you can enter the pot for a half bet, but if you complete the bet and the big blind raises, you’re left with two poor choices.

Most players call an average size raise from the big blind after putting money in the pot, but if your hand wasn’t good enough to raise with, it’s not good enough to call a raise with while you’re out of position.

The other choice when facing a raise is to fold. This happens to be the best play in this situation, but it means you wasted the completion bet.

As soon as you start playing, start tracking how often the player to your left raises. Pay attention to his or her position when they raise and keep a separate count of how often they raise from the blinds. The best player to have to your left is one who almost always limps when they enter a hand.

If the player to your left raises often, you need to play even tighter than normal from the small blind. I suggest folding any hand that you wouldn’t play from the under the gun position. Under the gun is the first player to the left of the big blind.

In most games, this limits your starting hands to the following. Why should gambling stay legal.

I realize this may seem to be extremely tight, but I can’t stress enough how much the positional disadvantage costs you in the long run. The truth is, even with this small list of starting hands, everything other than A-A and K-K can be tricky to play out of position.

Let’s look at the other hands on the list so that you can see why they can be costly to play from the small blind.

Both Q-Q and J-J will have an over card hit the board often. Because the hands that are most likely to be played by your opponents are high, the chance an opponent has an ace or king is good. So if you play one of these hands and don’t hit a set, you have to play cautiously when you continue.

This tends to lead to winning small pots when your hand holds up, and it can make you lose large pots when you refuse to get away from the hand after an ace or king hits the board.

A-K suited, A-K, and A-Q suited all need to improve to win. And unless you have a nut hand, or close, they tend to lose money after the flop. These hands also lead to small wins and big losses.

Here’s an example.

You see the flop with A-K, and the flop has an ace. This gives you top pair and top kicker. This sounds like a good hand, but let’s look at two possibilities. You bet after the flop in both situations.

The first possibility is everyone folds to your bet. It’s fairly easy to put you on a hand with an ace in this situation, so if your opponents can’t beat a pair of aces, they usually fold.

The second possibility is an opponent calls or raises. What kind of a hand does an opponent need to hold to raise in this situation? It’s almost certain they can beat your top pair. If they call, they’re either trapping you with a big hand like a set or have a strong draw. Neither of these possibilities is good.

When you know your opponent in the big blind is unlikely to raise, you can afford to complete the bet with a wider range of hands. But if they raise often, it’s best to fold almost all of your hands from the small blind.

The other thing to realize is if you have a strong hand, you’re better off raising from the small blind than completing the bet.

Raising

It’s often better to raise instead of checking or calling at the Texas hold’em table. When you raise, you can win the hand if everyone else folds and when you have the best hand at the showdown.

When you check and call, the only way to win is when you have the best hand.

The other advantage of raising is that it forces your opponents to make a decision. Every time an opponent has to make a decision, it’s an opportunity for them to make a mistake, and each mistake is profitable for you.

This leads back to the list of hands in the previous section. If your hand is good enough to play, is it good enough to raise with? I don’t suggest raising with all of the hands above because some of them need to improve to win. But with your best hands, you should always raise.

You’ve already learned the importance of knowing how your opponent in the big blind plays. When you have a good handle on them and know that most of the time you can complete the small blind bet without facing a raise, you can start thinking about the types of hands you can play.

The types of hands you want to play are the ones that can win a big pot. Most of the time, you aren’t going to hit the flop, so when you make a hand, it needs to have the ability to win big. Most players overvalue suited aces because they can complete a nut flush.

The problem is that everyone can see the possibility of a flush and is hesitant to lose a big pot when they don’t have the nut flush.

In many games, the only big pot that happens wit

How To Get Better At Texas Holdem Poker