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.