Play Your Opponent not the Cards

There are professional poker players that have claimed that you do not even need to be a math magician to be extremely good at poker. Sure, playing the percentages certainly works to your advantage, but what good is that if there is always another is knocking you off your hand when you actually have the better percentages; you just do not know it. You have to learn how to read players, and you have to learn how to play your opponent and not your cards.

You cannot expect to be a great poker player if you are only one dimensional and only play with the best of cards like Ace/King suited. It’s always great to have monsters but they usually do not come to you that often. You have to learn to play with terrible cards. You must learn how to prey on the weak, and take advantage of the strong. You must be able to be able to bluff someone off a decent hand and trick people into thinking you have the worse hand. Playing your opponent is just as, if not more important, than learning the math.

First off, you obviously want your opponents to call when you are not bluffing, and fold when you are. When you talk about playing your opponent, you are not only talking about the type of person they are, but what type of position they are in. Is your opponent a chip leader? Is s/he last to act? Is s/he a calling station? Learn to notice when a player is on tilt. A good poker player can make a living off feeding on the players who cannot control their emotions. You also have to learn how to get a player off his or her hand.

Bluffing is a very hard art to master. You have to look for signs of weakness, if you see any doubt in their actions you should go for the kill. Sometimes it is easier to bluff good poker players than bad ones because a good one will fold two pair when a bad one will call you down with a pair of Queens with a four kicker. Being able to spot calling stations is an important trait in online poker.

There is absolutely no point in bluffing a terrible poker player who is a calling station because he is going to call you down all the way to the river. In a lot of cases, if you were able to choose whether or not you had bad hand or a good hand versus certain players you would choose the bad hands versus the good players, and the good hand versus the bad players. You have to have the ability to categorize the type of players your opponents are very quickly and use both their strengths and weaknesses against them.

Aggressiveness is a trait that you should play with, but it is also a trait that you’re opponents may have that will cause you a lot of trouble. But that trait of theirs can work against them. When you are playing against an aggressive player he should be your main focus at the table. You should try to get in as many cheap hands or "limp-ins" as you can against him because you know he’s going to pay you off - however make sure you are not paying much to get in pre-flop if you do not have a good hand (you should also make sure that your usually going to act after the aggressive player if you limp-in with a sub par hand.

If you do catch a good hand on the flop, maybe one with a lot of outs, or one that puts you in the lead you should just call his bet on the flop, letting him think that your trying to draw out and that he has a chance to bet you off this hand. On the turn you should probably go with the re-raise option, depending on the card and you will usually see that the aggressive player will fold his hand right after he gave you a good amount of chips. You shouldn’t have to count on the cards to be a good poker player.