TACTICS AND STRATEGIES

THAT WILL MAKE YOU A MORE CONFIDENT

AND PROFITABLE POKER PLAYER

 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

01 Play Fewer Hands And Play Them Aggressively

UPSWING POKER

02 Don’t Be The First Player To Limp

03 “Semi-Bluff” Aggressively with Your Draws

Fast-Play Your Strong Hands to Build the Pot and Make

04 More Money

05 Defend Your Big Blind (with the Right Hands)

06 Fold When You’re Unsure

07 Attack When Your Opponent Shows Weakness

Play Solid Poker Early in Tournaments (Don’t Worry About

08 Survival)

09 Only Play If You Feel Like It

10 Only Play In Good Games

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Play Fewer Hands And Play Them

01 Aggressively

T here is a limit on how many starting hands you can play

before the flop in No Limit Texas Hold’em, even for the
world’s best players. If you try to play too many hands, you’ll
bleed away your chip stack (unless lady luck is on your side).

Developing a solid preflop poker strategy is by far the easiest

and fastest way to improve your bottom line. However, while
developing solid preflop ranges is relatively easy to do (like by
downloading our free preflop charts) having the discipline to
stick to them is difficult. Don’t allow yourself to get impatient
and play a hand not worth playing.

The best approach is to play a tight range of strong and/or

playable hands, and you need to play those hands aggressively.
Playing all of your hands aggressively, including the more
speculative ones like 7 6 or 5 5 , allows you to disguise
the strength of your actual hand.
K
A When you raise, your opponents won’t know whether you
have A-A, A-K, or 7-6, which makes you super tough to play
against. Tight and aggressive wins the game!

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Don’t Be The First Player To

02 Limp
imping (just calling the big blind preflop) is an absolute no-
L no as the first player to enter a pot. There are two main
reasons why this play should be avoided:

1. You can’t win the pot before the flop like you could if you
raised.
2. You give the players behind very enticing pot odds,
making it more likely you face multiple players and thus
less likely you win the pot.

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.

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Semi-Bluff Aggressively with

03 Your Draws
f you want to truly crush poker, you need to bluff effectively.
I 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.

When you’re just starting out, bluffing with total nothing hands
prior to the river is not advisable (except in one situation that
I’ll tell you about shortly).

Think of these draws

as your backup plan
in case your bluff gets
called.

Poker players
call these hands
“semi-bluffs” because
of their potential
beyond the bluff itself

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Fast-Play Your Strong Hands to

04 Build the Pot and Make More
Money
t’s a sad sight when a player checks their flopped nut flush
I three times, and then has to awkwardly table their monster
of a poker hand when their opponent checks back the river.
Slow-playing too often is a mistake common among players
who are afraid of chasing their opponents out of the pot when
they have a strong poker hand.

In most cases, it’s best to bet your strong hands to build the
pot and protect your equity. That’s not to say you should
always bet/raise your strong hands post-flop. You can check
your strong hands if:

• It’s unlikely that you will be outdrawn.

• There aren’t many scare cards to prevent you from
getting paid on later streets.
• Your opponent’s range is heavily weighted toward hands
with no showdown value.

However, when you feel uncertain, just bet (or check-raise if

you weren’t the preflop aggressor). Yes, it’s disappointing when
your opponent folds, but that’s not nearly as disappointing as
getting outdrawn or missing out on potential value.
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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Defend Your Big Blind (with the

05 Right Hands)

T he big blind is a special position because you already have

1 big blind invested in the pot. For this reason, whenever
you are faced with a raise while sitting in the big blind, you will
have better pot odds to call than the other positions – think of
it as a discount.

Because of your discount and the fact that you are the last
person to act preflop, you can profitably call with many more
hands than if you were sitting in another position. That’s not to
say you should call raises with trash hands like 9 5 , but the
more borderline hands like K 9 and Q 6 become playable
in most situations

Exactly how wide you should defend depends on a multitude

of factors – here are the four primary ones:

1. Position of the raiser (play tighter against the early

positions and looser against the late positions).
2. Number of players in the hand (when 1 or more
players has already called the raise, play tighter and
only call with hands that do well in multiway pots).

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

3. The size of the raise (the larger the bet sizing, the
tighter you should play and vice versa).
4. Stack sizes (when short stacked, play fewer speculative
hands and prioritize high card strength).

There are other important factors too, like how often your
opponent will continuation bet post-flop, but the four above
are the main ones you should consider.

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

06 Fold When You’re Unsure

ant to know the biggest difference between a bad

W player and a professional player? It’s the good player’s
ability to lay down a good hand like top pair when they think
they are beaten.

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.

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Attack When Your Opponent

07 Shows Weakness

P layers don’t check with hands that can call multiple bets as
often as they should. This means that, when they do check,
they usually have a relatively weak hand that will often fold
if faced with multiple bets. This is the “bluffing with nothing”
situation I alluded to earlier.

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.

Suit combinations for each hand type

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Play Solid Poker Early in

08 Tournaments and Don’t Worry
About Survival
here’s a time and a place for stack preservation, and the
T beginning of poker tournaments isn’t it. This is one of the
most misunderstood aspects of tournament poker strategy.

Consider that in order to finish in the money, you’re going to

have to at least double or triple your starting stack (usually
more). Instead of playing defensively, you should be playing
solid and aggressive poker early on in order to build up a stack
for a deep run.

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.

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

09 Only Play If You Feel Like It

oker should be a fun experience, regardless if you are

P 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.

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

10 Only Play In Good Games

“ IF YOU CAN’T SPOT THE SUCKER IN YOUR FIRST HALF HOUR

AT THE TABLE, THEN YOU ARE THE SUCKER.”

T his is as true now as when Mike McDermott (played by

Matt Damon) said it in Rounders (1998). If you want to
play poker and win, you need to play against weaker players
than yourself.

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.

You should always put yourself in positions where your chance

to win is largest. This is why it’s important to leave your ego at
the door when playing poker.

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.

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 10 Quick Poker
Strategy Tips

Here is a checklist for a good poker game:

 At least one player is limping regularly.

 There are many multiway pots.
 Re-raises are either very rare or very frequent.
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.

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