Your New Poker Strategy: Key Concepts
Before we get into the specific topics and their dedicated lessons we need to explain some key concepts about the new strategy that we will teach you on this course.
These are the concepts that underpin your strategy so it’s important that you understand them and what they mean.
Building a Foundation
As much as we can guide you and give you rules to follow, it’s more important to understand the concepts behind what you are learning.
The reason for this is that Poker is very much a situation game, you need to make decisions on the table and sometimes those decisions can only be made based on the situation you are in at that table.
During this course we are going to build a foundation for you to make those decisions, but as you get more experienced you’ll come across less and less new situations which you haven’t faced before.
What Style is Your New Strategy?
There are many different styles of poker play, and if you watch the top professional’s on T.V then you will see various different styles, ranging from a very tight style where players take the minimum of risks, to a very loose style where players take regular risks.
There’s nothing to say either style is better than the other, but loose styles involve taking more risks, and while some experienced players use them effectively, they are not suitable for most beginners. Also a loose player’s bankroll can fluctuate significantly — in some cases players may experience large losses or wins over short periods.
The style of play we are teaching in this course is TIGHT – AGGRESSIVE
What does this mean?
- Tight – this means that we are going to limit the starting hands that we play to the hands that give us the best chance of winning. All the hands where the odds are against us, we are simply going to fold.
- Aggressive – when we do get those hands that we are looking for, we are going to play very aggressively. This gives us a number of advantages which we’ll discuss a little further down this lesson.
Importance of Aggressive Poker
Aggression is a key part to our strategy. Playing aggressively means that we bet and raise to put pressure on our opponents.
By putting pressure on our opponents, it forces them to make a decision, and pressurises them to make bad decisions. It’s our opponent’s bad decisions that makes us our profit. Also if we are forcing them to make the decision then that means we have to make less decisions and there will be less opportunity for us to make bad decisions.
All the time we are aiming to capitalise on mistakes our opponents make, while reducing the number of mistakes we make ourselves.
Reasons for being aggressive
- Limits the number of players – It forces weaker hands out of the pot, which in turn makes your stronger hand even more likely to hold and less likely to be outdrawn. Weaker hands can quite often become a lot stronger hands if given the chance to hit cards on the flop.
- Increases the size of the pot – By raising we are increasing the size of the pot when we have a strong hand.
- Two ways to win the Pot – By being aggressive we have given ourselves two ways to win the pot, not only can we win by having the strongest hand, but we can also win by forcing our opponents to fold, even if they have a stronger hand
All three of the above reasons increase our odds of winning the pot, and winning a worthwhile pot at that. That is the key concept behind our strategy, in that we want to only play a hand when we have the best odds to win the pot, and by playing both Tight and Aggressive we give ourselves the best odds possible.