Poker Book Recommendations
Ariano Waiker
The only acceptable situation in which to limp is when at least one other player has already limped. This is called over-limping, and it can be a good play because you are getting great pot odds to join the action so you can hit something good on the flop, hopefully.
If you want to truly crush poker, you need to bluff effectively. But bluffing ineffectively is one of the fastest ways to lose your money at the table. So, how do you keep your bluffing frequency under control?
The most effective way to bluff is to let the cards you have dictate if you are going to bluff or not. This means bluffing with hands that have outs to improve to the best hand on a later street, such as straight draws, flush draws, or even just an overcard or two to the board.
This sounds very simple, but it is very hard to do in practice partly because of the way our brains are built. We are naturally curious and we naturally want to win. When we fold, we surrender our chance to win the pot and we don't get to satisfy our curiosity by finding out what our opponent has.
Calling too often and in the wrong situations is the second fastest way to lose at poker (after ineffective bluffs). Whenever you're unsure whether to call or fold versus a bet or raise, do yourself a service and fold.
Pro Tip: When you fold in one of these situations, make sure you note down the details of the hand so you can try to figure out if you made the right fold after your session. Studying and/or discussing these sorts of hands is a great way to consistently improve your skills and fill in the gaps of your poker knowledge.
When your opponent shows a lot of weakness in a heads-up pot (like if they check on the flop and the turn), you can take advantage of them with an aggressive bluffing strategy. Not only should you bet with your usual semi-bluffs, you should also bet as a pure bluff with some nothing hands, ideally ones with good blocker effects.
If you find yourself short-stacked and near the money bubble or a pay jump, only then should you start using a more survival-oriented playing style. You can learn more about this key part of tournament strategy here.
Poker should be a fun experience, regardless if you are playing as a hobby or if you are a professional player. You're going to perform best when you are happy, so it makes sense that you should only play this mentally intensive game when you feel that way.
If you feel frustration, fatigue, or anger building up, you should just quit the session right then and there. You are very likely saving yourself a bunch of money by doing so. Poker will still be there tomorrow.
Pro Tip: Before I play a session, I imagine going all-in and losing my full stack on the very first hand. If the thought of that possibility doesn't bother me, I know I'm ready to play my A-game for a long session. But if going all-in and losing one of my buy-ins on the first hand sounds unbearable, I reconsider playing.
Think about it like this: If you are the 9th best poker player in the world, you will be the best player at almost any table. But if you join a table with those 8 players that are better than you, you become the sucker.
Bottom line is that you generally need to be better than half the players at the table if you want to have a positive win-rate. And if you want to make a sick-good profit, you want to play against the worst players you can find.
If you're in a game with 2+ of these boxes checked, you're in a great position to make money. If none of these boxes are checked, get up and find a more profitable table (unless you feel like putting your poker strategy to a test).
If you play online poker, make sure you take advantage of the table statistics provided by most poker sites. Choose an online poker table with a high average pot size and a high percentage of players seeing a flop. This is a key online poker strategy new players who are still learning poker rules usually miss.
If you want to keep improving your poker skills, check out our recently updated library of poker strategy articles and quizzes. If you're a podcast listener, check out the Upswing Poker Level-Up podcast on your platform of choice.
Here is the original version of this "quick poker tips" article, which was a bit more advanced (originally published July 6th, 2018). You will notice some overlap between these tips and the ones in the updated version.
Developing a solid preflop game is by far the easiest and fastest way to improve your game. However, while developing solid preflop ranges is relatively easy to do having the discipline to stick to them is difficult.
Every professional poker player has a friend who won big money in a large tournament, then proceeded to blow their winnings in cash games or by registering tournaments at stakes way higher than their usual.
Medium-strength hands should usually be played passively, since they are rarely the winning hand in big pots. The exception is when they should be played a bit more aggressively to deny equity.
These types of hands tend to play better as bluff-catchers, as they protect the weaker hands in your range--like ace high or weak pairs. This is very helpful because your opponents will not be able to easily bluff you once you check.
But it's very important you set aside time to study. Reading poker articles, playing around with poker tools, and talking over hands with friends are a few of the many ways you can improve your game away from the table.
Applications shows that in order to bet with a balanced range (a range composed of the optimal number of value bets and bluffs) on the river, we need to bluff less on each progressive street. This is because our bluffs will have more equity on earlier streets, as well as the opportunity to bluff again on a later street.
Bet sizing aside, the choices themselves are not many: you only need to choose between checking, calling, betting, raising, or folding. But figuring out which one of these actions wins the most is seldom obvious.
This is why you should always avoid rushing when making a decision. An extra moment's thought could provide the crucial insight needed to make the right choice, and it'll help you keep emotions out of your decision making. Do this and you'll win more, and learn more while playing.
That said, it's important to avoid all unnecessary tanking. You should never, for example, take 15 seconds to fold your 9s5c preflop from under the gun. Not only will it piss off your fellow players, you will actually hurt your own win-rate by reducing the number of hands played per hour.
The problem with going it alone is that you're more prone to biases. With another 2 or 3 or 4 different poker minds around you, you can more easily find what's right about your thought processes and thus eliminate most of the bias.
But in order to get paid with them preflop, you also need to add in an appropriate amount of bluffs. Sure, 3-betting only premium hands will work at first, but your opponents will soon catch on and start folding. Bluffs add depth to your preflop strategy, and help you to build more balanced range.
There is no harder spot in poker than playing out of position with a high stack-to-pot ratio. The situation is so complex that even solvers use almost exclusively mixed strategies which are impossible to execute as a human.
One trick to bypass this is to play more defensively and check more of your good-but-not-great hands. This will prevent opponents from stealing pots from you once you check, since you will no longer be check/folding as often. Additionally, those hands that you would typically check/fold, but which still have equity in the pot, will get to realize their equity once your opponents see they cannot bluff you off so easily.
That being said, one of my favorite quick poker tips is that you should remember that Ace-high often still has a decent chance to win the pot even if you check it down. Turning this hand into a bluff in that spot not only opens you up to be exploited by loose calls, it also wins less than checking because you are not actually folding out that many better hands.
Each day I will release a new 1-minute-long episode of Little Poker Advice where give some quick advice to help you improve your poker or life. You can either watch the video version or listen to the audio version on PokerCoaching.com, or you can subscribe and listen to the audio version on iTunes.
Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments section. The goal of this podcast is to help you improve by showing you how I think at and away from the table. The more questions you ask, the faster you will progress. Thank you and good luck.
The amount of resources online to help you get better at poker is vast, including the poker strategy section right here on PokerNews, but there's still nothing quite like having a physical copy of a book in your hands and reading through first-hand strategy and tips from the pros.
So, we asked Nolan Dalla for the top 10 best poker books ever written that you need to read to help you improve your game. Nolan is best known as the longtime Media Director of the World Series of Poker but has been involved in poker as a full-time and part-time player, writer/reporter, author, consultant, and casino executive for more than 20 years.
Most readers have probably not heard of this book. Even serious players would have a hard time identifying it. However, it should be remembered fondly. When agreeing to this assignment, one of the first calls I made was to Dan Harrington. I asked him which strategy books had meant the most to him. Without hesitation, he listed Winning Poker Systems as a monumentally important contribution to poker theory. Released in 1973 when there were virtually no poker books on the market, this was a groundbreaking first step in what would later become a foot race to lay out the best strategy for winning. While terribly dated now because it mostly addresses obsolete poker games like five-card draw and lowball (which were the only legal games played in California at the time), it was the first book to chart starting hands and stress the importance of position. David Sklansky has also repeatedly sung the praises of this book and its author, Norman Zadah, then a young doctoral student who was studying for his degree in Applied Mathematics at Cal-Berkeley.
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