Poker Play: An Effective Strategy At Any Level

I never had an interest in gambling until I moved to Vegas. I was living in the suburbs of Chicago and working as a kitchen manager of a downtown restaurant. I never had time to socialize since work seemed to take up all my time. I was usually too tired from the long days of managing the restaurant. My wife and I were in the process of building a house in a brand new development. After our house was built, we made the decision to moved to Vegas. The timing was perfect, there was a housing boom in full force at the time and we bought our 2nd home at a great price. I moved out ahead of my wife for the purpose of finding work in the restaurant business. She was a registered nurse and was guaranteed work at a very nice hospital. Everything was good, or so I thought. Still unable to find a job at that point, we both eventually settled in our new home in Vegas and sold our house in Chicago and then divorced. I was single and jobless. I went through a few meaningless jobs before I landed a job dealing poker at Binion’s Horseshoe during The World Series of Poker. I had a natural love for the game and was intrigued by the math involved in poker. My fascination with being able to get good “reads” on people led me on a pursuit to learn all I could about body language and the math behind poker.

I have always had an interest in understanding people. I studied psychology at Middle Tennessee State University in the early 90’s. I have spent the last 11 years studying body language and facial expressions to better understand peoples’ personalities. It has led me down a completely different path than I had anticipated. My aim is no longer to improve my poker game but to use research and studies to help myself and others understand personality.

Poker was originally played by groups of guys getting together for a “friendly” game of cards. Games were held in inconspicuous back rooms, dimly lit, where going “all in” could cost you more than the money on the table. There was always the threat of being raided by police, mugged by gunmen or both. It wasn’t until Benny Binion moved poker to the gambling mecca now known as Las Vegas to legitimize what we know as poker. However, today’s poker is an entirely different game. From excessive numbers of players to accessibility to information found on the Internet about the game and new and improved methods of play, finding the advantages in poker are becoming scarce.

There are three basic ingredients when it comes to playing poker effectively. The first is understanding the numbers behind poker, in other words knowing poker math. Next, is the Togel Sydney ability to read someone’s body language. And the third is understanding a person’s personality. In this article, I am hoping to show you how these three interact with one another and how you can improve your ability to read others.

The first part to learning poker is the math skills. If you are saying to yourself that you are not good at math, that’s ok. With a little logic and common sense, you can understand the fundamentals. Just understand that the math never changes. The statistical chance of drawing a specific card has, is, and always will be a 20 per cent chance. The basic are the percentages or probability of making your hand. For example, when I was playing consistently, I would look for certain percentages of my hole cards (Texas hold em) before I would get up from the game and try my luck at another table. I know that I should see a pocket pair once every sixteen hands, suited cards once every three to four hands, and suited connectors once every forty-six hands. The big statistic that saves me a lot of money is the issue with pocket jacks. I always thought this was a strong hand, however I learned that when holding pocket jacks, my percentages of a higher card coming on the flop are greater than my chance of getting pocket jacks! Lesson: don’t play jacks to strong, you end up a long-term loser. An advanced skill to keep in mind is your expected value. Without going into too much detail about it, it is basically what you expect to get from a given betting session, and armed with this value, helps make your decisions. It’s a little tricky and should be reserved for when you move up the poker ladder to then next level of game. For now just focus on the basic percentages. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Get the basics down. It wont take you long. It took me about a week to understand the basics, then I was off to the races. Once I had an understanding of basic percentages and EV (expected value) I was still hungry for more. I felt like something was still missing from my game. I found that in my ability to read body language.