Stuart Rutter's Poker Strategies - Poker Basics

Poker Basics

Five steps to improve your game

Rather than the usual boring resolutions, why not turn your thoughts as to what you can do to improve your poker game? There are a few simple things you can do which will accelerate your game without taking away too much of the fun.

1) Be prepared to learn

The single best way to develop as a poker player is to aim to learn every time you play. There are very few players who do this properly - it does take a lot of discipline, and more than anything else the ability to admit to yourself that you may have been wrong. Each time you bust out of a tournament, forget about those infuriating moments of bad luck, and ask yourself instead - “Could I have got away from that cold deck hand?” “Did I miss any opportunities earlier on which could have left me with more chips?” It is very rare that the answers to all these questions is “no”, and very often you will look back and see there are many things you could have done to give yourself a better chance in the tournament.

2) Be pleasant at the table

Of course, this is a worthy thing to aim to do anyway, but it will help you with your game in a number of ways. Try hard to do something which I find very difficult - when that crushing moment of getting knocked out comes, smile and say to everyone “good game.” This kind of humility will help many players understand one of the crucial aspects of the game - namely that there is no room for emotion, and that in the long run nothing really depends on luck. It is the frustrations of bad luck and bad beats that blinds many players from improving their game at all.

3) Track your game

There are now a good number of software tools available that will give you all kinds of information about your and your opponents’ play. Don’t worry - there is not too much your opponents can find out about your play that they should not know already. The way in which these tools are useful is in developing a better understanding your own game. By giving you a breakdown on your profit or loss across all the different hands and different positions, you will see very quickly what hands you should be avoiding playing and how you can fill the holes in your game

4) Keep a notebook of your mistakes

The worst feeling in the game is maybe not taking a bad beat where you did nothing wrong, but the knowledge that you messed up - made a bad call, did not protect your hand, or maybe worst of all got bluffed. It is very easy to want to forget about these experiences straight away.

Instead, put them to the back of your mind at first, and come back to them the next day. Write down the hand, and the interesting things about it - note what your mistake was, and even your opponent’s good play.

In the poker film “Rounders,” Matt Damon is given “the notebook” by his New York mentor - a book listing all the mistakes he has made. The mentor persuades Damon that he can avoid the years of bad experiences with this valuable book, and this may be less of an exaggeration than it seems.

5) Focus better at the table

Make it your resolution to bring all of your energy and focus to the table. Each hand has so much going on that you could never pick it all up, but there is a wealth of information ready for you to gain. It is a difficult thing to maintain your concentration for many hours’ play, but you can do it in small ways - choose one or two players to focus on to try to pick up tells. More than gaining specific tells, you will get a general feel for how players act depending on whether they are weak or strong.

See the 32Red Poker page for more on learning poker.

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