Your first step in poker should be a small one

The first step in your poker education comes with your first awareness that poker hands are not created equal, and playing catch-up is a surefire recipe for disaster. This is something I learned first-hand on a warm summer night in 2001 -yes, I came of age in the pre-boom poker world. Like many young males I had dabbled in kitchen table poker throughout my youth, and like everyone else I greatly overestimated my skills -before I go further let me give a big THANK-YOU to my brain for trying to spare me from hurt and pain by remembering my big wins and great bluffs, while wiping my memory, Men In Black style, of any losses or bonehead plays I made along the way!

It was during this time that I found myself christening a friend’s new Condo with a $.50/$1 home poker game, and unlike my previous experience with 5-Card Draw and a smattering of Stud, these guys were playing all sorts of poker variants: Criss-Cross, Chicago, Roll Your Own, and so on. I was lost, and I realized I was in way over my head, and I think I lost $25 or so. I realized that I needed to go home and research these games, so the next time I knew how to play them.

It was during this research that I had my EUREKA moment, not because I now knew the basic game play of Chicago, but because in trying to find out about these games I stumbled across something known as a starting hand chart, which led me to numerous other strategic articles on poker. It didn’t take me long to realize that I hadn’t lost because I didn’t know the particular game; I lost because I knew nothing about poker! Even worse was the realization that the “experts” I had lost to the previous night were HORRIBLE poker players!

I now call these types of players the blissfully ignorant, and they are by far the most profitable players in any poker game, you can find them in virtually every card-room and casino throughout the world, mainly on weekends. They play virtually every hand; they call when they should fold; and their actions mean precisely what they intend -calls mean weak hands and bets and raises represent strength, and wild, crazy, bets usually signify a bluff. Most of the time these players go home down a buy-in, and in a few rare occurrences -when the deck hits them in the face-they go home with some extra money in their pocket.

If you’re one of these blissfully ignorant players the first thing you need to do is go buy any $10 poker strategy guide -it doesn’t matter which one since they are all mostly the same, and really the only thing you want to learn is that in poker skill wins. Once you know this, you are ready to really start playing the game!