Poker

[Severian]

A few friends have started up a poker night, just for fun (we each put a £5 in the pot, divide out all the chips equally and last man standing takes the pot). The trouble is that I have never played poker before, so I could do with some training (Texas Hold'em rules).

 

So, can anyone recommend online or offline free poker software that I could use to learn the game? I definitely do not want to play for real money. I tried a few rooms which google through up but even though they say 'free' all the games were for money.

[mooeypoo]

My roomate is a professional Poker player (plays in tournaments and such), so I'll ask her, but you probably find some free demos online you can learn the game with.

 

However, the big issue of the game is face-to-face playing.. yaknow.. "bluffing"

And that just takes experience, I guess hehe.

 

 

~moo

[bascule]

However, the big issue of the game is face-to-face playing.. yaknow.. "bluffing"

 

The entire game is based on how you present yourself to other people.

 

My advice: pick out the best player in the game, you know, the one who's cleaning everyone out, and pay as many times as you can to see his/her cards... repeatedly, as long as he/she lets you. That, more than anything else, has taught me how Hold 'Em is played.

[CurvKyle]

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com is a good free online poker game I play, it has helped me learn the rules of a few different types of poker.

[mooeypoo]

Ha hehe I just asked my roomate, she said the same thing

 

appearantly it's a good site, you already have 2 recommendations for it

 

Good luck with the game btw.

 

~moo

[In My Memory]

I like to play Texas Hold'em with friends all the time, and for a while I played competitively on the TD Waterhouse poker league

 

One of the things I recommend is getting aquainted with software that automatically calculates the exact odds of you winning a hand from pre-flop to the river (the 2 cards you're dealt in the beginning, to the last of 5 community cards laid on the table). I googled around for a bit and found this freeware that looks like it could be helpful.

 

If you are playing for money and you're a beginner, my best advice is, be very passive or you'll lose all of your money very quickly. There are a few stategies that beginners like to use, but almost never work:

 

- fold every hand until you get a good hand. Thats probably the safest way to go, but you just cant build up a chip count fast enough. Most people at the table have already figured out what you're doing when your hands look like "fold", "fold", "fold", "fold", "call", so they wont bother to see call you after the pre-flop or flop, so at best you only win the blinds and antes.

 

- go all in on every hand. A lot of beginners have a habit of wanting to put all their money in the pot right off the bat to scare everyone else into folding (at best, the beginners wins the blinds and antes), but once everyone else at the table realizes whats going on, they're going to wait until they have a larger-than-average hand call the beginner's all-in, and then the beginner will lose the chip advantage that s/he's just spent the last 5 or 6 hands building up.

 

Thats just a rule of thumb above from my own personal experience, however I think its worth nothing you you *might* gain a slight advantage over very skilled players by using the "all-in" strategry in no-limit poker. I've come some poker theorists like David Sklansky who say that a beginner player can outplay even world champions by using doing a simple computation based on the size of the blinds, antes, number of players, and strength of the hands, and either going all in or folding on with no other actions (most poker bots use that principle, and they can usually defeat amateur players, and rank in the top 10 out of 40 players in professional tournaments).

 

- very predictable pattern of raising and better. Most beginners play their pre-flop hands like this:

lousy cards (2 6 offsuit) - fold

decent hand (10 J offsuit) - call

strong hand (A A) - raise

That makes sense intuitively, but making your play more agressive with the strength of your cards gives away what you're holding. A better preflop strategy looks like this:

lousy cards - fold

decent hand - raise

strong hand - call

 

Similarly, during post-flop play, beginners tend to do this:

call when the turn doesnt help their hand

call on the river when it doesnt help their hand

^^^^ thats very bad, because especially in games with small blinds, most people arent afraid to call all the way to river, so when you set your cards down to see who wins, everyone else on the table can see too, and that gives away your strategy.

 

A better way to play is like this:

with a decent hand

raise on the preflop

call on the flop

raise on the turn

call on the river

 

^^^ the advantage to raising on the turn makes the opponents think that you have a much stronger hand, but its also scary to see someone making such an agressive move when theres still

one more card left to be dealt

(which makes your hand seem even stronger). 4 out of 5 times, players will fold after you raise on the turn. However, when you call on the river, it confuses players into think you're trying to downplay your hand, and they may not be willing to risk. However, I've been stuck in a situation when I'm on the river and I call, but then my opponent raises (I usually take this to be an overly aggressive bluff, so to take the pot by force I might be willing to go all-in; it isnt strategically effective just to call the raise, and it is outright idiotic to re-raise because that gives the opponent and opportunity to go all-in and take the pot).

 

with a strong hand

call on the preflop

raise on the flop

call on the turn

raise on the river

 

 

^^^ That works good for downplaying your strong hand, and usually on the flop your opponent is willing to call your raise if they've built up a modest hand. The technique above is a way of milking the maximum number of chips out of your opponents without scaring them off.

 

- bluffing too much. A bluff is overrated and should be used sparingly, especially if you come across players like me whose gameplay is determined almost entirely by mathematics (I treat poker like the mathematical game that it is, and never expect to win on a longshot). In fact, what I see from a lot of beginners is that they want to bluff on really lousy hands because they want to force their opponents to fold before the river, but thats a good way to lose a lot of money. Poker is a 10% psychological game, and 90% mathematical, and the people who win world champion tournaments are ones who can determine precisely the strength of their hands and the relative strengths of everyone elses hand.

 

- showing your hand after everyone has folded. <--- for that being nothing more but commonsense, you should see just how many novice players are too happy to show off their hand. Its not uncommon to hear "ha ha, I cant believe I just won with nothing", or "thats no fair, everyone folded out just when I was holding a pair of kings". No matter how strong the urge is to show off your hand, fight it like the devil, keep your cards to yourself. And if you have a dealer whose very rude and likes to flip over your cards for you, punch him in the nose.

 

 

 

One of the things that helped me learn to play poker is to record your hands (most online programs will do that for you), then have a professional poker player analyze it line-by-line and tell you what you should or shouldnt have done, and also tell you how the odds of your hand winning are calculated.

 

You can also try going to your library and picking up any of dozens of poker strategy books, I recommend Tournament Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky (ISBN 1-880685-28-0) and

No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice by David Sklansky and Ed Miller (ISBN 1-880685-37-X).

 

Also, it helps to wear cute denim skirts. It doesnt make you a better poker player, but it does make you the most adorable player at the table, plus you get to gloat "na na na na, you lost all your money to a girl in a skirt".

[Severian]

Thanks for the suggestions.

[padren]

I am just learning, and I can let you know what my current strategy is: (and if anyone has suggestions I am quite open)

 

Basically, I am starting out online with FullTilt and trying to learn the basics of playing hands - when to fold, when to get in etc, without worrying about winning lots of chips. My thinking is, when online, everyone has a harder time reading people, so there is a natural across the board handicap on that factor in the game.

By watching how much I am in chip wise when I loose, as well as when I win (without looking at the size of the pot and how much others are in too much) I can gauge roughly how well I am doing at just playing the cards themselves.

 

When I feel more confident with that factor, I'll move on to learning how to pull people in when I have good cards, and not getting rolled over when I don't.

 

At that point, I'll be worried about my total chips before and after each game, and try to get good at playing the cards I have to get a good chip count.

 

From there, I'll try to use more tricks for riskier stuff, such as stealing pots even without the best cards by bluffing, milking pots by sucking people in when I do have the cards, etc.

 

At that point, I'll be more comfortable about learning the face to face aspects of the game, since I'll have the other elements fairly down.

 

 

This way, while I am learning, I am learning online against different groups of people who won't get used to reading my developing methods over a long period of time - since I'll be playing different people with each game. By isolating the factors by changing my goals within the games I play, I don't have to worry so much about what element I am weak at that breaks me - so I don't have to figure out if its my read on the cards, my bluffing skills, my suckering skills, my strategies being too transparent etc.

 

 

My friends that play often give me advice, such as never fall in love with a hand and always always think about every hand that can beat yours before you decide your hand has good odds. Until you are good with that, don't even worry about reading other players to see if they likely have the cards that can beat you, since reading them is a whole other skill set that is worthless if you don't have the fundamentals down.