Poker Strategy

To the casual observer, poker looks like a pure gambling game - you get your cards, hope for good hands and try to make as much money as you can with them. This isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s not exactly correct, either. Skilled poker players turn it into a game of strategy instead of a game of chance.

So yes, there are some elements of chance but the best players always win in the long run and the worst players always lose in the long run. You could also call it a game of incomplete information, but don’t ever make the mistake of labeling it a game of chance.

Even though you can’t see your opponents’ cards (at least we hope not), you can get a pretty good idea of what cards they have based on the actions they take. Bets, checks, calls and raises all give clues on the contents of your opponents’ hands. Sometimes they’ll take certain actions to mislead you (bluffing, for example) but even deceptive moves can give you information about your opponents.

In fact, you could sum it all up and say that poker is a battle for information. You and your opponents battle it out to get as much information as you can while giving up as little information as possible. You want to know your opponents’ cards, their playing styles, their tells and you even want to know what your opponents know about you!

In the acclaimed book “Theory of Poker,” David Sklansky may have put it best when he said the following:

“Every time you play a hand differently than the way you would play it if you could see all of your opponent’s cards, they gain. Every time you play your hand the same way you would if you could see your opponent’s hand you gain. The same principle applies to your opponents.”

He calls it the Fundamental Theorem of Poker and he is absolutely correct! The more information you get, the more you win. It’s simple to understand but difficult to implement.

There are also some fundamental poker strategies that don’t necessarily relate to information but are important nonetheless. Things like playing tight before the flop, being aggressive after the flop and game selection relate more to money conservation than pure information gathering.

Basic, fundamental poker strategy serves two general purposes:

1. Keep you from putting money in the pot when you have weak hands
2. Help you get more money in the pot when you have strong hands

This is a pretty simple concept too but most people find it too hard to implement. What separates good poker players from the rest is the ability to resist the temptation to do things like play too many hands and chase draws against the odds.

Once you get the fundamentals down, you can move on to more advanced strategies like bluffing, semi-bluffing, hand reading and things of that nature. But first, get your fundamentals down firm. You have to plug your own dam before you can start chipping away at your opponent’s.