How To Win Online Holdem

  1. How To Win Online Texas Holdem Tournaments
  2. Free Ultimate Texas Holdem Online
  3. Best Online Texas Holdem Sites

Poker is one of the greatest games on earth. The combination of skill and luck, the psychological element, and the fact you can make money from it all help with its popularity. But in order for you to make money from poker, you need to learn how to win at poker, which is actually easier than some would suggest.

Learning how to win at Texas hold’em can be broken down into four categories. (It can probably be broken down into many more, but for the sake of simplicity we’ve opted for four.) Those categories are:

  • Learn the basics
  • Learn advanced concepts
  • Apply your new skills
  • Continue the learning process

If you're looking for easy to remember and quick poker tips that will help you win at No Limit Hold'em, you’re in luck! Today we’ve compiled 10 tactics and strategies that will make you a more confident and profitable poker player.

Learn the Basics

It should go without saying that in order to discover how to win in poker, you need to learn the basics of the game. When I first started playing poker, I didn’t know anything about the game, even including what hands beat what. You’d be surprised at how many people sit in a real money game and expect to win at Texas Holdem poker without even a clear understanding of the rules and other basics.

Those basics not only include knowing the poker hand rankings so you know what beats what, but also the various positions at the poker table and how they affect your strategy, pot odds and implied pot odds, and the importance of following solid bankroll management rules. Once armed with this information, you’re ready to add a few more strings to your bow and move one step closer to discovering how to be a winning player.

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Learn Advanced Concepts

The next stage in your quest to win at poker every time is to learn some of the more advanced concepts. Fill your mind by studying such aspects of the game as three- and four-betting, as well as how to play against the various different player types — e.g., tight-aggressive, loose-aggressive, and loose-passive — because each opponent type needs to be approached with a different strategy.

One advanced concept became public knowledge in the mid-1990s when David Sklansky penned The Theory of Poker. It is in this book that you will find Sklansky’s thoughts on what he calls “The Fundamental Theorem of Poker,” which reads:

“Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.”

Online

This text may seem long winded, but the idea being expressed is quite simple. What the theorem is essentially saying is that the correct decision to make in any given poker situation is one that has the largest expected value, or “EV” as it is commonly abbreviated. If you were able to see your opponents’ cards, you would be able to calculate the mathematically correct decision and would win at poker every time!

Obviously, it is not possible to calculate the correct decision to mathematical certainty as poker is a game played with incomplete information. But you can use all of the available information presented to you to make a decision that would yield long-term positive results — decisions that are +EV.

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Apply Your Skills

While it is practically impossible to learn how to win at poker every time in a monetary sense, due to the luck factor, by making decisions that are +EV you actually are winning every time you play poker, at least in the long term.

As a simplified example, imagine you are heads-up with an opponent in a hand where the board reads . You hold and your opponent has accidently revealed , so you know that you need to complete your flush to win the hand. There is $100 in the pot and for some reason you opponent decides to only bet $20. In this situation you should snap-call, because even if the river is not a spade you actually gain in the long run.

Why is this the case? Because the pot odds you’re receiving are 5-to-1 (calling $20 to win $100) yet your chance of hitting your flush with one card to come is about 4.1-to-1. As the pot odds are greater than the odds of hitting the hand, you actually make money in the long run even if your flush misses! That is to say, if you faced the same choice many, many times and always chose correctly, you do stand to come out ahead thanks to your consistently “+EV” decisions. And that folks, is how to win at poker every time!

Of course, the game is more complex than that overly simply example suggests. But in essence the idea still holds. The key to how to win at poker is to make more +EV decisions that –EV ones, and then play enough for the math to make the results run true. Sadly, this can take longer than you could imagine, but it does happen eventually!

Continue the Learning Process

It may seem to an outsider that the best poker players have discovered the secret of how to win at poker every time, yet this simply isn’t true. What is true is those at the top of the pile are extremely skilled poker players, but they are also some of the hardest working people in the industry, constantly working on their game and trying to improve.

One way to improve your own game vastly and increase your chances of learning to win at Texas Hold’em is to play around with different scenarios to see what the mathematically correct decision would be. Load up the PokerNews Odds Calculator and look at how much equity your hand has on different boards and against different possible hands for your opponents. There are other tools out there that allow you to see how your exact hand fares against a possible range of hands, too.

How to win at online texas holdem

Knowing this information and being able to draw upon it while in the heat of a hand could be the difference between winning or losing at poker or losing. Always look to extract as much value as mathematically possible, if you want always to win at poker.

This article was originally published on Jan. 15, 2016. Last update: Jun. 8, 2019.

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Whether you're playing with friends or at an online site, the goal of poker is to win. Of course, this is easier said than done today when you consider that there's a wealth of poker strategy available today. But that certainly doesn't mean your case for becoming a successful player is hopeless. This is especially the case if you read the following step-by-step guide on how to win at Texas Holdem poker.

Basic Texas Holdem Poker Strategy

It's worth stressing that, above all, you need a solid grasp of basic strategy. But what exactly does this encompass? A great place to begin is with a starting hand chart. The single biggest mistake by beginners is trying to play too many hands; starting hand charts quickly break you of this by serving as a guideline for which cards to play preflop. When you gain more experience with no limit holdem strategy, you can branch out and play more hands based on the table dynamic.
The next step is to gain an understanding of simple poker math concepts.'Pot odds' is among the most-basic and helpful because this helps determine whether or not you should make a call post-flop. For instance, you and a single opponent see the flop and the pot is worth $10; your opponent bets $5 and you are now left deciding whether it's worth risking $5 to win a pot that's worth $15 (including opponent's bet). This makes your pot odds 15:5, or 3:1, meaning you need better than a 3:1 chance of hitting your drawing hand to make this a profitable call.
Pot odds are only the tip of the iceberg, and you should continue adding implied odds, reverse implied odds, equity, bet sizing and more to your knowledge arsenal. Other concepts that you want to master as a beginner include limiting your bluffing, knowing table position and bankroll management.

Study Opponents and Focus


Image Credit - Yanning Van De Wouwer
One of the first struggles that you'll incur when trying to learn how to win at Texas Holdem involves paying attention to the game. Unless you're starting out with a fast-fold variant, which we don't recommend, you'll find that poker is a really slow-moving game. So you might be tempted to multi-task while playing or even try playing more than one online table at once (multi-tabling).
But we highly discourage doing anything like this right away because you should be 100% focused on your opponents and trying to figure out what cards they're playing. Specifically, you want to think about what their 'range' of hands is based on their previous actions. This is only something that can be gained by watching your opponents during every hand—

How To Win Online Texas Holdem Tournaments

including the ones you're not involved in.

The goal is to build a profile of everybody at the table so you can figure out what range they play in each situation. For example, if you see another player get caught trying to steal blinds with 6-5 unsuited in late position, you know that they have a wide range in these situations, allowing you to call against them with more hands.
Keep in mind that it's tougher to read opponents as you move up in stakes. So it's nice to hone these skills, along with your overall no limit holdem strategy, in the micro stakes before moving up in limits.

How to be Good at Poker - Intermediate Tips

Whether you want to know how to win a poker tournament or master Omaha poker strategy, there's always a deeper level to take your knowledge. So once you've spent enough time grinding and studying poker tips, it's time to take your game further.
How
Some of the intermediate concepts that you want to study include value betting, continuation betting, 3-betting and creating your table image. Learning all these Texas holdem tips won't guarantee that you become a pro; however, intermediate strategy does at least serve as a bridge between starting out and becoming a long-term winning player.
For example, profiling your opponent and putting them on a range of hands falls in line with basic poker strategy. But understanding their raise range and knowing when to 3-bet takes things to another level. Part of learning concepts like these is gaining experience against a wide range of opponents at specific stakes. But it also pays to continue using a variety of tools for improving your poker skills, which we'll discuss next.

Tools for learning Poker Strategy


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The quest for learning how to be good at poker never ends—and that's what is so great about the game. By continually improving and picking up new poker tips, you stand a better chance of winning money. And what's nice is that you have a large variety of options when it comes to poker strategy. Here's a brief rundown on some different tools that you can use:

Free Ultimate Texas Holdem Online

  • Poker Articles - Abundant, and very good for learning the basics of how to win at poker. It's especially nice when articles are categorized in beginner, intermediate and advanced sections.
  • Poker Books - These are a good way to get inside the head of a pro and see how they think when playing the game. Just be sure that the concepts are relevant and not outdated, though.
  • Training Videos - There was an explosion of training videos in the late 2000s, as players moved away from books/articles and craved visual strategy. The great thing about training videos is that you get to see players actually playing online poker as they discuss different topics. But beware that not everybody who does training videos is a long-term winner.
  • Live Streaming (Twitch) - This has become one of the most-popular ways to learn poker tips because you get to watch skilled pros in real-time. Plus, you might also be entertained by some of the better Twitch performers. Jason Somerville,Bertrand Grospellier and Jaime Staples have become stars through live streaming.
  • Coaching - You can get one-on-one training by hiring a coach. The quality of coaching you get often depends on whom you hire and how much money you spend. But this option is worth pursuing if you want a good player to critique your play and explain what you need to do to get better.
  • Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) - These are tools that help keep track of various stats on opponents and your own play during a session. Some online poker sites have banned these tools while others still allow you to use HUDs since they aren't technically cheating.

Best Online Texas Holdem Sites

As you can see, there are lots of different ways to get better at poker. The main thing that you need to do is dedicate enough time to the matter and take advantage of all these methods so that you have a strong chance of learning how to win at Texas Holdem poker.