If you’ve been dreaming of becoming a pro poker player and you’ve tried many online games thinking you’re ready for the real thing, think again! Here are some of the dos and don’ts newbie players should always keep in mind before playing Texas Hold ‘Em with the big boys:

1) Never play drunk – If you want to make playing poker your career, you’ve got to treat it as a profession. Would you be drinking on the job if you were a programmer for an IT company? Although many players admit that having a drink or two can help them relax, drinking more than they can handle usually leads to throwing away a stack of chips.
2) Don’t Bluff because You Can – Many beginners bluff their hearts out assuming that bluffing is a part of Texas Hold’em. Unfortunately, many of them have no idea how bluffing works, so they end up losing more money than winning. To make sure you don’t lose money from bluffing unwisely, refrain from making a bluff just for the sake of bluffing. You need to learn when to bluff and with which players to bluff on because bluffing does not work every time on everyone.
3) Fold More – The most common mistake of beginners is that they tend to play too many hands that they can handle. Since most poker players start out wanting to be in on all the action, they choose to play all hands and avoid folding at all cost. Unfortunately, playing more hands do not guarantee winning more rounds; instead, it usually leads to losing more.
4) Never Play When You’re in a Bad Mood – While this may be a given advice, many poker players forget about their moods and play even when they’re mad or sad. When you play emotionally, you don’t play your best because your actions are irrational. In addition, your opponents can sense your bad mood and take advantage of it in the game.
5) Always pay attention to the community cards – Aside from paying attention to your own hand, make sure to be aware of what’s happening on the table. This is particularly important when playing Texas Hold’em because you should notice straight and flush possibilities as well as the best possible hand to fit the flop.

Playing poker is not like chess wherein you only have to notice your opponent’s moves and guess his next moves; instead, you have to pay attention to all the poker players along with the cards on the table. You should be attentive not only on your hands, but also on everything and everyone on the table.

Following these simple tricks can help you improve your game when playing Texas Hold’em. Although it won’t help you in mastering how to bluff or how to win the game, these tips help in reducing preventable losses.

Beginners (or rookies or fish – as they’re also known) are the main losers in live and in online poker. They’re the crowd which supplies sharks (good professional or semi-professional players) with a more or less steady trickle of winnings and thus they are indeed the life-blood of the poker industry.

Most of these guys never intend to play such an important role in the industry, they’d be well content with walking away with someone else’s money, however because of a few mistakes that they keep on making, turning a profit becomes quite impossible for them.

Let’s take a look at the most common beginners’ mistakes, as knowing what you’re doing wrong is the first step in correcting your approach and in becoming a better player.

Rookies often misjudge (misread the board). Some people consider they have a hand (like a straight) but they in fact fail to connect. They act as if they had a good hand, and are then astonished to find they showed down a K-high against a set. While they can happen, such mistakes are few and far between because it takes a major noob to commit something like that. Online poker rooms will display the hand that you have, so if you can pay just a tiny bit of attention, you should be safe from such misreads.

Other board-texture related misreads are more subtle. Hammering home a set is almost always the right choice, except when it’s not. If – for instance – there are four suited cards on the board, your set will lose value in an exponential way depending on the number of players still in the hand. If there are more than 2 players in there with you on such a hand, your set is almost certainly not the best hand at the table anymore. This gives birth to an extremely dangerous situation for a beginner who tends to lose a lot whenever he gets stuck with the second best hand. You should never be “married” to your hand. A trip is most probably the best hand at the table the majority of the time, but you’ll just have to accept the fact that sometimes it’s outmatched.

Firing off senseless bluffs is another rookie player trademark move. People like to bluff because they know it from movies and from here and there that in poker you’re supposed to do that. They do not select the circumstances under which they fire out these bluffs in any way. They just make them. Known as “dark tunnel bluffs”, such moves only serve to fatten up the stack of a player whose only concern was to draw as many chips into the pot as possible on the hand in question.

Good players bluff too, but they use a set of information-stealing techniques before to determine whether or not a bluff is a viable option under the given circumstances. Rookies fails to grasp the idea that given the right kind of hand, a good player will never fold regardless of what they throw at him.

Playing above their skill level is another rookie mishap. Here’s an extremely eloquent example in this sense: you get hit by a big hand and you decide to get crafty with it. You cleverly disguise your pocket rockets barely limping along and giving out all sorts of signs of weakness.

While your opponent does fire a few probing bets at you, which you so cleverly just call, you fail to realize that you’re giving away free cards and do not in any way protect your hand. As he makes two pairs, a set, a straight or a flush at the end of the hand when you decide to go all-in against him, you’re ready to cry foul at the sight of his showdown hand. Surely, there’s a glitch in the software which is clearly tuned against you. Well guess what: the glitch is most likely not in the software but rather in your playing style.

Another mistake that pretty much every rookie player commits is that he doesn’t take the time to read around a bit about the intricacies and subtleties of the game.

Amazingly few people (and almost no rookies) know about the advantage rakeback can deliver for them. Signing up for a deal is all it takes to turn rakeback into a perpetual source of extra poker income, yet no rookie ever seems to take advantage of it.

Lowball poker is like a 5-card Stud Poker, with one huge difference – the winning player is the one with the lowest card. If you’re already familiar with playing 5-card stud, but would like to use lowball poker to make your poker night more interesting, then you should learn this game. However, be aware that having low cards are just as hard as having high cards.

Lowball poker is played by dealing five cards to each player, placed face down so no one can see the cards except the player. Depending on your set of cards, decide if you’d like to bet or fold. Before you can move to the next round, you need to fold, raise your bet or match the highest bet. Although you’re not sure if your final hand would be enough to win the game, you can bluff your way during this round of betting.

Determine the bad cards and remove them. Any player still active in this round may chance the cards they don’t like to receive new ones. You can trade one, two, three, four or all cards and the dealer would give the replacement cards, facing down. This time, you need to decide whether to place more bets because it would be your last chance to bet. If any of the players choose to ‘check’, he neither folds nor bets, but bets from other players can still be made. The final cards are then placed on the table to see who has the winning hand.

The scoring of lowball poker may differ depending on the variation of game you used. The standard version of lowball is called California lowball. This game is usually scored as Ace-to-five low, which means that the winning hand is an Ace and the next best hand is Two, Three, Four and Five. Another variation of lowball is called London lowball wherein the game is scored Ace-to-six low. This type of game recognizes a straight as a high-scoring hand, so it never scores in lowball poker. Another version of lowball poker is called Kansas City Lowball, wherein the Ace, flushes and straights are considered high value.

Poker games have set limits that establish the minimum and maximum amount of money you can bet during each poker hand. Although the betting limits vary from one game to the next, the 5 types of limits are usually available whether you’re playing Draw, 7-card Stud, Omaha Hold’em, Texas Hold’em or any other types of poker. Regardless of where you play poker – may it be in casinos, online or a private poker room – you need to understand the betting limits of the poker game.

1) Fixed limit – One of the most common types of poker limit is fixed betting, wherein you decide on the bet amount for each set. When you follow this limit, you are playing games like $1/$2, $20/$40, $40/$80 and so on. The first amount is the minimum bet you can make during the earlier rounds of a poker hand, while the last or higher amount is the minimum bet you can make during the later part of the same hand.

2) Spread limit – When you use spread limit, you need to bet on a range of amounts, such as $1 to $5, $10 to $20 and so on. If you use this type of betting, you can place any bet within the range of amount at any time throughout the round.

3) Pot limit – Usually used by advanced and professional poker players, pot limit is a high-limit game wherein you can choose to bet any amount from the blind bet to the total money in the pot.

4) Half-pot limit – Usually found in European games, this type of betting is similar to pot limit, but you cannot bet on more than half of the total amount in the pot.

5) No limit – Considered as the highest limit game in poker, this type of betting is used to give players the option of placing bets in any amount between the blind bet and the total money at the poker table.

When you hear someone describing the ‘betting structures’ of the game, they are discussing the betting limits. You can always ask the dealer about the limits of a poker game to ensure you’re in the same boat as your opponents. Of course, never play a game if the limit is higher than you can spend.

Poker is a game about reading people, not just about reading cards. If you try to win poker using a mathematical and disciplined approach, your opponents who read people would only take advantage of you. If you learn how to bluff and how to spot your opponents who are bluffing, you can be a good poker player.

One of the easiest ways to determine if your opponent is bluffing is through his or her body language. To become good in bluffing, you must be able to hide your fears and anxiety, which are both very hard to hide. Once you join a game, observe your opponents’ tells – foot tapping, sighing, hand shaking and other gestures done unconsciously that would reveal if they’re bluffing.

When your opponents are talkers, observe them when they quiet down. Most of the time, talkers stop talking when they have a strong hand, while talk more when they are trying to bluff and distract you in the game. If one of your opponents made a large bet, this is usually a good sign he or she is bluffing and is planning to buy off a victory.

If you’re playing Texas Hold’em, check the cards on the table to determine if your opponents are bluffing or not. Most bluffs are made when community cards are on the table to make you believe they’re not bluffing. However, if the cards on the table are of no use to anyone, this can make a bluffer fail his goal.

When you attend a poker game regularly, you may have an idea of your opponents’ playing history. Most aggressive players tend to bluff, while a tight player rarely makes very large bets except when he has an impressive hand. On the other hand, if you’re planning on playing poker online, spotting bluffs can be extremely difficult because you can’t see their gestures. The only thing you can do to determine bluffs online is to observe your opponents’ style of play.

Playing poker is not only a lot of fun, but it is also an exciting way to earn extra cash. However, when you start to lose continuously, the fun gets out of the game. To avoid this, you need to learn how to read your opponents. When you say “read”, it means that the opponents sent out messages through their behavior and body language while playing the game and you have to interpret these signals so you can win the game.

Be observant enough to locate the “tells”. In poker, a ‘tell’ is the physical reaction, habit or behavior of a person that gives his or her opponents information about their present hand. If you’re in a casino, you can watch a set of players from a distance, but don’t look at their cards and observe their gestures, eye movements, twitches and other behavior they unconsciously make while they’re playing. Come closer to the table and observe if there are evidences of tells on some of the players you’re watching. You can start playing with them and continue to observe their movements and tells until you are sure if these gestures represent good or bad poker hands. Use these observations to your advantage.

Acting is an important part of poker. When you lead your opponents to believe you have a weak hand when in fact you have a strong one, and vice versa, you are using common game assumptions to your advantage. When professional poker players use this, they reverse these assumptions to bluff other players.

When observing players, spot any changes in their behavior or any kind of giveaways. Some quiet players start to talk when they have a bad hand, while others may start to hold their cards protectively when they receive a good hand. Giveaways like a red face, shaking, deep breathing and jittery gestures usually mean a player has a good hand and is unconsciously “giving away” that he has. Of course, always be aware of your own gestures and behavior so you would not send out giveaways to your opponents.

Reading your opponents is one of the best ways to win poker, but remember to enjoy the game every time and never spend money you’re going to miss if you lose.

Poker is a type of card game played by two to ten players. It has several variations, including Stud Poker, Community Card Poker and Draw Poker, being the most commonly played. This article is a quick guide about the basics of Draw Poker.

Before you can play draw poker, you need to understand several jargons used in the table, such as ‘bluff’, ‘conservative play’, ‘aggressive play’, ‘action’ and ‘tell’. In addition, before starting the game, you should decide the amount among yourselves and keep the token bet in the pot. The bet can range from just a few cents to a hundred dollars.

The dealer should distribute five cards for each player, starting from left to right with the cards facing down. Each player receives one card and the second card is given in the second round, and so on. The remaining deck of cards is now placed in the center of the table.

Each player would now pick up the distributed cards and make a bet based on the cards at hand. The player on the left side of the dealer would start the betting, followed by the person on his left side and so on. If the dealer is playing the game, he would be the last one to bet.

You should decide the type of betting to use – see, raise or fold, which would largely depend on the game. If you use the “raise” option, this means that you are increasing the amount of bet. “See” means the present player needs to match the bet of the last player and “fold” means you choose to quit instead of wasting your bet on a bad set of cards. When you choose to use the “check” option, you decide not to make a bet. However, this option can only be used when none of the other players has made a bet on that particular game.

If no one has betted money, you can “open” the betting when your turn comes. If you want to change and the discard the cards at hand, pick up another card. Be aware that you can only exchange three cards, but this would depend if you want to discard the cards or not. Once you’ve changed your cards, no other player should see your cards. You can again start to bet for the next round.

In casinos, up to three rounds of betting is allowed. At the end of each round, all players would show their cards and the one with the highest hand takes the pot. The secret to winning