UK Beginners Poker Blog

Ruts to avoid playing poker

Learning how to play poker can be a very tiresome experience. Once you know the bases, you can at least already start to play, but you remain a completely in the blue when it comes to playing well.

As a beginner, you can be caught in certain ruts in terms of play, by making the same errors again and again. You can not even see sometimes what you are doing wrong to correct this mistake. But don’t be afraid, you can read these four tips that new players generally stick to and advice on how to avoid rookie mistakes.

1) Playing your hand too far is the biggest error of them all. New players play far too much with bad hands before giving up. You should only play 20 to 25% with good hands and quit with the remainder that tend to be bad hands.

2) Playing with feeling rather than listening to charts, past situations, and statistics. Many new players play with a hand because they had a good “feeling” about them. Feelings are not good to follow in poker. Poker is a mathematical game that can be played logically. Consequently, you should only play a hand because it has the good dimensions to gain, not because you feel lucky or forced to. You play a hand because the situation dictates it, in the long run playing this hand will save you money. There is a lot of value in patience and analysis.

3) Let your emotions take control of you. Poker can be a stressful game. If you lose some hands and start to let your emotions take control, you will start to make bad decisions. Poker is a business of decision making. To make the best possible decisions means than you must approach the process of decision making with the clear mind.

4) Thinking in the short run. Many players will lose the pot and they will say “oh, I should have laid down my pair of aces considering how that finished with my adversary having made his fifth”.  It is bad reasoning. If you put your money in during good situations, it is the correct way to play, whether you win or lose. Poker is a game where you are in for the long run.

In summary, hold back the number of hands which you play before folding. Base your decisions on concrete factors. Keep your emotions under control and think logically when you evaluate a potential action.

Beginners Poker can be daunting for people new to the game

Texas Hold’em is by far the most popular form of poker played worldwide, but the rules are complex for beginners

Everyone at some point in their life has attempted to play poker, particularly Texas Hold’em with friends or strangers. The problem is though it takes a while to get used to the rules and general play of the game, particularly the combination of cards needed to get ahead in a game. Luckily there are a number of resources online that helped me understand the rules of Texas Hold’em. In this post I will begin to look at the basics and some of the rules. I will then go into more details in later posts as there is a lot to cover!

To win the game, you basically need the best combination of five cards. To know how to win, it’s essential that you know the hand rankings.

A deck of cards usually contains 52 cards and 4 suits.

These are hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades

Ace is always the high card in poker. The suits have no rankings as they are all equal.

In the next post I will go more into rankings!