Learning to play poker: a novice’s experience

When I had just begun playing poker I was the raving maniac. A player who kept on calling and betting irrespective of what hand I was dealt. I never ever used the fold button and kept on loosing irrespective of who I was playing against. I would call this my kamikaze phase. Come to think of it the Kamikaze Pilots of World War II at least knew what they were up to. It took me the hard way to learn that just looking up a few poker rules and regulations and reading a few blogs does not qualify you to play online poker overnight. The kamikaze phase continued for some time till it came to a point that I started folding more frequently then the rest of the players in the poker room. I finally realized that one needs to vary your poker game play else your opponents begin to read your moves. The only saving grace in all this was that I was playing with play chips and not hard cash.

The next phase was a more calculating one. I happened to come across a couple of poker odds calculators. These tend to give the mathematically correct odds to know if you should be in the hand or not. Why I say mathematically correct odds simply because you have no way of knowing which cards may be there in you opponents hand. Also there is a large chance that there could be another Kamikaze maniac sitting on the same table as you. What really set this phase apart was that I began to look and calculate odds before deciding what to do next. I have still a long way to go and every day is a new day. I think I must add here is the fact that the more you play poker online, the more you gain in terms of experience and tactics which make you a better poker player as time passes. There are no short cuts in life and the same holds true for poker