Over the next several weeks I will be writing a series of articles that cover what I consider to be the most important skills in the game we call Texas Hold'em. The order of importance for these skills will vary from game to game, in other words from a low Limit table to Pot Limit to High Stakes No Limit. But for now I will say the below is the order of importance for our discussion:
1. Table selection
2. Hand selection
3. Reading opponents' hands
4. Opponent assessment
5. Seat selection
6. Heads up play, bluffing, and semi-bluffing
7. Check-raising and other Traps
8. Getting tells
9. Pot odds calculations
( I purposely left out "betting or betting amounts" cause of 3 things 1. Another writer and forum member VanMan has informed me that he would like to write a few articles on the skill of betting and 2. Betting is totally dependent on the type of holdem game you are playing 3. I will glaze over this in the check raising and pot odds sections. It is important to mention that many people have used this list of importance and written short articles on it but I am hoping to dive further into each item and explain scenarios fr each of them)
I will go in order in this series of articles discussing and giving my opinion and tips on how to improve this skill and as always I am open for discussion of these articles in the forums.
1. Table Selection.
The first in this series is Table Selection. It is by far the most important skill to master and love, and it will make you the most profitable player that you can be. It does not matter how good you are at playing poker if you are always sitting down at the table with people that are as good as or better than you. Why you ask? and you say "well I am just as good as them why not sit down and play?". The reason is simple over the long run with people of equal skill you will lose money because of the Rake. The Rake will kill your profitability. So you need to improve your skills at spotting and locating fish. A fish as I am sure you know is a bad player, maybe someone that is new to the game or just some addicted gambler or maybe they really just suck. Most of your income will come from these very few and far between very bad players. I say that they are few and far between because I like to believe that anyone with some common mathematical sense can play an avg game.
So right now you ought to be asking yourself, well where and how do I find these fish. The simple answer is Party Poker . Party Poker has thousands of newbie/fish coming to party poker every day, the reason for this is I am sure that they advertise like no other poker site. But even at party poker you need to beware that where there are fish there are sharks. So how do you find the fish? Take notes, watch people as they play when you find someone that consistently makes bad moves , weather they get lucky or not, write it down. Or even better yet open the notepad that party poker gives you for each player and just right a simple comment like "fish". This will help tremendously when you are looking through the different tables at the site and you happen to see several tagged fish sitting at the same table. You will know that this table is the one you should sit at. The other thing to do is add fish to your buddy list. It will alert you to when they are online. Or simply right their name down on a piece of paper and use the player search function to find them.
Another way to find fish is to share information with your friends. Create a FishList like we have started here at Weston Poker. This information will be valuable to everyone in your group, and will help you and your friends profit.
So what to do if you don't have a fishlist or any notes , how should you play then? In a cash game nothing stops you from getting up from a table and leaving. Simply put it really is like Michael said at the beginning of the movie Rounders " If you cant spot the fish in the first thirty minutes , you are the fish". So get up and leave the table in search of friendlier and more profitable waters. This applies for online as well as B&M Casinos.
Other things that you can do to improve your odds of finding a fish filled table include Subscribing to an online database , there are a few places that track and record all SNG tournaments and the winners and losers from those. You can also buy software like poker tracker to build you own database and keep precise hand histories and stats of players. The best scenario is that you use every tool in your arsenal.
There is nothing more useless than an unloaded gun.
