Poker Strategies
With the invention of online poker, the game has exploded in popularity. Now everybody and their brother seems to know something about poker when ten or twenty years ago it was not that big of a deal outside of Vegas. Go figure right?
Luckily, that means a lot of people who aren’t very good at poker are now playing poker. If you know, even just a few simple strategies that can put you way ahead. I’ve compiled a few of my favorites in this post to give you some fun ideas on how to win.
One interesting strategy is to fold every time that you get a hand. Do this regardless of whether or not you think you can win. Then, every ten hands are so start betting significantly, but not outrageously. Once you have a few people in against you, bluff big and blast them out. If you have a winning hand, this works even better. The basis of this idea is that people think that you are very conservative, so if you were going in it’s a big deal.
Another interesting strategy is to play extremely conservatively and only go when when you are guaranteed to win. This is not just a good way to keep yourself from losing a lot of money, but it can make you a lot of money as well. The trick, is to slow-play your bets. When you start betting, bet small to keep your opponents in play as long as possible. If you’re guaranteed a win you want people to bet as much into your pot as possible. That maximizes your winnings.
The most fun strategy, if you aren’t worried about losing money or the game, is to play excessively erratically. If your opponent doesn’t know what you are doing or why you’re doing it, they won’t know what’s coming at them next. It’s tricky to pull off, but if they think you don’t know the game very well you can pull off some pretty fun bets and win big when they least expect it.
That’s just a few fun strategies you can try. There are a lot of other really interesting ways that you can win more often while still having a good time. Most of the other strategies rely on very technical concepts, and are not nearly as fun or interesting as playing psychological games with your fellow players.