Texas Hold Em can be intimidating. Here are some strategies to improve your overall game.

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A Texas Hold Em Article to Instantly Improve Your Game

When playing poker, keep your attention at the table


By Johnny Kampis

If you?re playing poker the patient and correct way, folding most of your hands, you?ll be left with a lot of downtime where you?re not involved in the action. That doesn?t mean you should just rest on your laurels, or turn your attention to the baseball game on the television.

To become a better poker player, you should pay attention at all times when at the table, learning your opponents? tendencies. Who is aggressive? Who is timid? Who raises with only strong cards? Who bluffs a lot? All of these questions can be answered if you just pay attention.

Over the years, I?ve developed a couple of mental exercises to help me focus on the action while playing Texas hold?em. These exercises can also increase your decision making and problem solving abilities at the poker table.

The first one is to guess what each of your opponents is holding based on how he plays the hand. Say the flop comes J-10-2 with two spades. There is a bet, a call and a raise. What sorts of hands could these players have? Perhaps the better has something like J-K for top pair and the caller has a straight or flush draw and the raiser has two pair or a set. The more you study your opponents, the better you will be able to guess their holdings, and that ability will only help you in the long run.

During a recent friendly game, one player bet out on a board of A-A-10-2 and Steve called. A third player raised, the initial bettor called and Steve re-raised. Before Steve turned his cards over on the river, I called out ?Ace-Ten,? and that?s precisely what he had. How was I able to guess this? Steve had a monster hand and didn?t want to chase out the other players on the turn so he just called the initial bet, but after there was a raise behind him he could go ahead and re-raise and get more money in the pot. If Steve held three aces, without a full house, he most likely would have raised on the turn initially to try and eliminate any flush and straight draws. You can only learn these kinds of tendencies by paying attention.

A second exercise I like to employ while playing hold?em is to think up a hand and visualize how I would play it. Let?s pretend the flop is 8-J-3. Now, I may have folded a 5-2 or some other junk hand, but I?m going to now pretend I have a 9-10 in my hand and the action is to me. Do I bet, check, raise or fold? Or I could pretend I have flopped a set of threes. Now what do I do? This exercise allows you to continually think about how you would play certain hands, which will only help you when you actually hold those cards.

Source: http://www.wisehandpoker.com/articles/index.php?article=be-attentive.html

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