Poker Tips

Today, I want to offer you my poker tips to reflect on periodically.  No matter who you are you can always improve.  The first tip is for you to always reaccess your poker game.  Do this honestly.  Think how other players see you.  If you can, video tape yourself during a poker match.  This will give you a world of knowledge into your tells.  I’d be willing to bet most don’t know how much information they give off or how their table image in general.  I know I probably don’t.  A few years ago I decided to ask my friends if I had any tells.  Turns out I was throwing chips when I was chasing and placing chips when I had a made hand.  What incredible knowledge to gain.  I would never have guessed I did that, but with an easy evaluation, I was able to easy eliminate a major poker tell.

The second poker tip is to ask yourself how your poker outcomes are coming to be.  For example, are you winning but getting extremely lucky in doing so?  Or are you playing well but just getting sucked out on.  You have to remember these things if you’re a solid player.  Don’t get too high or too low on any one outing.  You don’t want to lose all your confidence because someone hit a 2 outer on the river, nor do you want to endure Jerry Yang/Chris Moneymaker syndrome where you become fabulously overconfident because of one great run.  Moneymaker now thinks he’s too good to play against a lot of WSOP rookies and really is in the same boat.  He had a good run but I’ve yet to see him do any other real damage.  Yang’s in lala land walking around taking pens out of people’s hands to autograph their napkins.  He bought hook line and sinker into the whole celebrity scene.  Its really funny how much differently he acted only year later.

The third poker tip for today is to control your emotions at the tables.  I know we all see the pros act stupid and throw fits but we all know better than to act like that.  Besides negatively reflecting upon your rep, you take yourself out of the game.  Your focus is no longer on the cards, its complaining.  Your mind needs to be on poker and strategy the entire time.  Poker is a mental game.  The further your mind is away from calculating your situation, the more likely you are to lose.