Tips and strategy to prevent poker mistakes

Tips for online poker newbies

Nobody is born a poker pro and mistakes are made all the time. However, if you can avoid such mistakes or improve your playing behaviour through initial learning and poker tips and tricks, you should go for it, and experience will do the rest:

As a beginner, you should familiarise yourself with the basic rules, but also with various poker variations, in order to determine your own favourite. This way you will play poker with even more joy and commitment.

Recognising bad starting hands is one of the things that comes with experience. To do this, you also have to participate in a round with not so good cards once in a while. But if you know that the starting hand is not promising at all, you should better fold, i.e. end the game.

Playing tight is a style of play with promising starting hands. For Texas Hold’em, the most frequently used variant in tournaments, these include:

Pairs – The decisive factor here is, of course, the size of the pair. You either win with a good pair (2x ace, kings or queens), or you get an additional card from the board (the 5 open community cards in Hold’em), which however only succeeds 1x out of 9 attempts. So with low pairs, the risk is greater and this starting hand is assessed very differently, whereby the trend usually does not support playing. Since bluffing is only possible in the live casino, this option is also not available in the slot machines.

Cards strategy

2 high cards – Such a starting hand can be played, but is not considered particularly good. If they are consecutive, such as queen and king, you should play, but if they are separated, it is not advisable.

High-low starting hand – Here the decision depends on whether there are many or few players at the start. The fewer the players, the more weight you give to the high card, which you then call with. Constellations like King/Jack to 9 or Queen/ 10 to 9 are medium chances, while King/ 8 to 2 or Jack/ 9 to 2 should be discarded.

Suited Connectors – This term stands for two consecutive cards of the same suit such as Jack hearts and 10 hearts, or 8 and 7 clubs. The constellation is tempting, but one should bear in mind that a flush with 5 of the same suit is not easy to achieve, while 1 or 2 pair is possible, but not the actual goal. With high cards like Ace and Queen Hearts it is worth trying. With Suited Connectors, the goal is to look at the flop with little betting and then possibly clear well. If the flop does not bring a good position, you can still give up without a big loss.

In general, poker requires a lot of patience. The most common mistake beginners make is that they want to take every chance they can to avoid missing out on a big pot. This usually results in a wrong assessment of the starting hand. Statistics show that there are 167 starting hands, but only 20% of them are considered good to play.

If boredom sets in because you can only play a few hands, you should use this time of sitting out well to observe the other players and their behaviour in order to learn from it.

The player’s position at the table often makes the difference in certain situations. A mistake is to completely neglect it in your own online poker strategy.

You can already see that the path to a good poker game cannot be covered in an hour. In any case, you should have a lot of patience and simply consider the above-mentioned mistakes and many others that may also occur as learning lessons. The saying “practice makes perfect” could well have come from a poker player.