Tips and Strategies on Texas Holdem Poker

September 4, 2007

Use these quick tips to get a hand up on your competition at the Texas Holdem Poker Tables. These tips and texas holdem strategy can give you a quick boost to win more money playing texas holdem.

Most of these tips and strategies are designed for beginner texas holdem, not the high stakes ultra competitive cash games where it requires many, many levels of thinking.

Texas Holdem Tips and Strategies

Play Tight With your Starting Card Selection. One of the biggest mistakes new players (and old vetrans alike) make is playing too many starting hands. If you are brand new, I suggest you start off playing as a ‘rock.’ This means you are playing the top 10 starting hands. AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, AKs, AKo, AQs, AQo, 99. If you stick to only playing these hands when you start off you will avoid loosing large amounts and you will probably be a winner. This is not an ideal strategy, but to start out, it is fine to play super tight. Tight is right. Once you get more familiar with Texas Holdem you can open up your starting hand requirement.
Play Aggressively when you do play. This means raising or betting instead of checking and calling. If you have one of the top 10 texas holdem hands listed above you should be raising pre-flop, not just calling the blind and seeing the flop. Be the bettor and the raiser, not the checker and the caller. When you bet or raise you give yourself additional ways of winning the pot other than just ‘hitting’ your hand. You could bet and someone could fold a better hand, this is impossible if you are only calling or checking.
When you get check-raised on the turn, it usually means a monster. Especially when playing Limit Texas Holdem. Most limit players will simply call you on the flop and stick the raise in on the turn. This is also true when playing no-limit but even more so when playing on limit. When you get check raised on the turn, you have to fold your hand unless you have a monster yourself or a draw to hit one and the pot is fairly large.
Show down the winner. I know this sounds obvious, but if you are a beginner you are most likely playing in low stakes online games or even playing Free Texas Holdem Online, right? Well at those levels the other players are sticking around and seeing the river, and showing down their hands… ie they will not fold. This means that you have to have a hand that can win at showdown against other reasonable hands. If you have bottom pair on a board of AKT95, your 56s is probably not good if there has been action before you. Fold this hand and do not take it to showdown.
Be super tight when it comes to calling a raise! Hands like KJ, QT, A9 etc… not good hands to be calling medium to large raises with. If you have someone raise it is fine to let these hands go unless the player is just constantly raising and raising pre-flop. These hands are often dominated by hands like AK, AQ, KQ etc… Dump them and save money in the long run. These hands are sometimes fine to play when there have be no raises, but you need to be tight when it comes to calling raises generally speaking.
Pay attention to your position - Closest to the Button is the best position. The more people who have to act before you the better. If you do want to open up and play a wider range of hands like some suited connectors and smaller pocket pairs, make sure you can do so when you have a good position. The button is best.
Play within your bankroll. If you deposit $100 to an online poker room you can not afford to be playing at the $50 max buy-in tables (if the $100 represents your entire bankroll or as much as you want to wager). A general rule of thumb is you need 500x the BB to play in that game. If you were playing $1/2 no limit you would need to have 500x $2, or $1000 in your bankroll to safely play in this game. If you lose on your first session you need to move down to .50/1.00.
Take advantage of the freerolls offered at the major online poker sites for excellent table time practice without risking any of your bankroll.
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These tips and strategies on texas holdem poker are the start to our texas holdem tutorials and can serve as instructions on how to play texas holdem for beginning and learning texas holdem players. To really learn how to play texas holdem poker you simply need to put in the time at the table and play hands, play a lot of hands. Texas Holdem is an easy game to understand but it is impossible to master, so don’t worry if you start out loosing. Most everyone does. Just be sure you start out small and play at the free money tables for as long as you want to make sure you understand the nuances of the game.

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