Mastering Texas Holdem, line mastering any competitive activity, requires three kinds of knowledge: factual (Chapter 4), tactical (Chapter 5), and stategic (Chapter 6).

           Factual knowledge includes the vocabulary, basic concepts, and sought-after goals that define the activity.  Without the facts, you cannot make sense of the game.  A golfer must know the difference between an iron, a wood, and a putter, and why all three are in a gold bag.  Facts are learned by committing them to memory.

           Tactics are the various actions taken to achieve the goals.  Tactical knowledge is acquired through practice.  You play the game and, through experience, gradually obtain the skills necessary for success.  Golfers learn to swing their clubs and read the greens by repetitive practice.

           Strategic knowledge is obtained after the facts are memorized and the tactical skills are acquired.  Strategy is learning to see the game in a broad context.  Once you possess strategic knowledge, your actions are no longer a direct response to individual events, but are considered in the context of a broad purposeful plan.  Only after you reach the level of strategic thinking can you truly master a game.  Great golfers don't play individual holes. They think about the course as a whole.

           While I have used gold as an example, any activity that involves performances requires these three kinds of knowledge.  Musicians have the factual knowledge of how to read music, the tactical knowledge of how to play their instrument, and the strategic knowledge of how to interpret the music.  The facts, tactics, and strategies must be learned in order.  It is not possible to shortcut the learning process by skipping ahead to strategy without learning facts and tactics, nor is it possible to learn music, golf, or poker from reading alone.  You must play.

           This section of the book presents that facts, tactics, and strategies of texas holdem.  The underlying theme is that you win at poker by making better decisions than your opponents make because over time, cards (and hence situations) are equally distributed.  Poker decisions are based on five factors: your cards, your position, the number of opponents, the cost, and how your opponents play.  The factual basic for each decision factor is presented first.  How these facts enter into tactical play will then be discussed.  Strategy is learning to give some factors more weight than others, depending on the game conditions.  To play strategy, you must learn to analyze the reasons and motivations for a poker game.  In essence, poker is a social game.  The competitions for a poker game.  In essence, poker is a social game.  The competition for money takes place within a social context that must be understood before a correct strategy can be formulated.

Facts :-

             The key to making intelligent poker decisions is to understand that successful poker is not about winning hands, it is about winning money.  Since everyone has the same chance of being dealt a winning hand, winning hands are, in the long run, equally distributed among the players.  Over time, money is accumulated by the players who make the best decisions.
Poker decisions require knowledge of mathematical probabilities, but the game is far more complex and cannot be completely described mathematically.  In blackjack, where the dealer always plays the same way, it is possible to calculate the best decision for each hand.  No such calculation is possible in poker because you are competing against different players, each of when plays their own way.  Not only do individual players differ, but each poker table develops its own group dynamics that changes as players enter and leave the game.  The replacement of a single passive player with an aggressive one can instantly alter the mood of a poker table and necessitate changes in decision making.

           The combination of mathematics, psychology, and social dynamics makes poker a rich and fascinating game.  Mastering poker requires hours and hours of playing in different settings with different ethological aspects of the game.  They think poker is all about bluffing and reading body language.  The fact is, poker has an underlying strategy that must be followed for there to be any chance of survival let  alone winning.

           Correct strategy bases decisions on the knowledge available to you of the cards and your opponents.  You never have perfect knowledge of your opponents, their cards, and the cards to come.  Given imperfect information, you must assess what is most likely to happen.  Decisions must be based on the most probable outcome of a hand, not on what you hope will happen.
Before discussing the actual play of hands, it is necessary to have the facts intelligent decisions are based on.  This section, which is meant to be used as a reference, contains tables, graphs, and summaries of important information and concepts.  There are five factors to consider in every poker decision.  After summarizing the five decision factors, each one is discussed in detail.  How knowledge of these factors translates into actual play is the subject of the next chapter.

The Five Decision Factors

The decisions you make during the course of a hand should always take the following five factors into consideration:

Your cards-
            Betting in poker means you wager that, as showdown, your hand will be ranked the highest.  Unless you believe that to be a likely possibility, you should not bet.  Statistically, in a ten-handed game, you will only have the highest hand 10% of the time.  Knowing   when it is your time to have the best hand is of course the difficulty.  When you have a strong hand, bet aggressively and force the other players to chase you.  It is rarely correct to slow-play; that is, not bet a strong and hand.  If you don't have a strong hand, fold .  In poker, money saved is the same as money won., and staying out of the 90% of the hands you are destined to lose is an important as being in the hands you win; 

Your position:
            Is an extremely important factor in Holder since it is a fixed -position game.  When you are in an early position (close to the blind) you have no way of knowing how large the pot will be at the end of a betting round, and how many players will be contesting it.  To compensate for this disadvantage, you need to play stronger cards than  you would from later positions.

The number of players:
            Contesting a pot determines the kinds of hands that are playable.  The irony is that you can play weaker starting cards when many players contest the pot, but you must have a stronger final hand at showdown.  A high pair is a strong favorite to win against one or two opponents, but if ten players enter the hand, someone is likely to beat a high pair with a flush or a straight.  Conversely, drawing hands (weak initial cards that may give you a flush or straight )  are playable against a large field since the final pot will be large, but drawing hands are seldom worth playing for small pots against one or two players.

Pot odds
            Are the costs of staying in hand compared to the pot size.  In each betting round, you decide if the amount of money it will cost you to finish the round is worth the size of the pot being contested.  The cost to play can range from nothing (if everyone checks) to three large bets (if there is a lot of raising late in the game).  Like any sound investment decision, riskier plays must have greater rewards for success.

Opponent's playing styles
            During the hands that you don't enter, observe the playing card style of each player and of the group as a whole.  Does a certain player only bet when he has good cards or does he bet with anything?  Does a player buy-in for a small amount of money and carefully guard it, or does she buy new chips from the dealer frequently?  For the table as a whole, are showdowns frequent or rare?  A big mistake beginning poker players make is playing only their cards and not considering how other people are playing theirs.  Your opponents' actions are a source of information that must be used.

            Over the course of a hand, some of these factors become more important than others.  Early in the hand, your position, the initial strength of your cards and the potential number of opposing players are the most important factors.  Later in the hand, pot odds and the playing styles of the remaining players are more important.  What follow is a detailed discussion of these five factors.

Your Position :-

            You must play starting cards appropriate for your position.  In an early position, you are forced throughout the hand to make decisions with the least amount of information.  For example, if before the flop you call the blind with a drawing hand, you could be faced with a raise from one or more players with premium pairs.  Since you don't know what raises you will be faced with, don't play cards from an early position that are too weak to justify calling a raise.

            Compared so Seven-Card Stud, the importance of position in Holder is one of the key differences between the games.  Position changes throughout the hand in Stud.  The critical factor in determining a playable stud hand isn't position, but rather, how "live" is the hand.  if your first three cards in Seven-Cards Stud are A, J, J and you look at the board and see the other two Jacks and one other Ace, you have a "dead" hand.  the Jacks with Ace-kicker may look pretty, but your action should be to fold.

            However, in Holder, only three cards initially appear on the board and they are your cards.  To know when your hand is "dead" is more difficult in Holder because fewer cards are exposed.  To judge if your Holder hand is "live," you must observe the bets from the other players.  Therefore, position matters, and since your position stays fixed throughout the hand, you know ahead of time the betting order for the entire hand.

            Associate the value of strength categories of starting hands with your position as measured from the big blind.

Position Recommendations for Starting Hands

Position                        Seat Relative to Button             Playable Hands

Early-position                           (seats 1-3)                    premium hands
Mid-Position                             (seats 4-6)                    premium and strong hands

            What the position chart tells you is that the later your position, the more kinds of hands are potentially playable.  Drawing hands increase in value with later positions, because more information (number of players, potential pot size) is available.  The chart does not mean you should always play poker a drawing hand from a late position.  It means that if other decision factors are favorable-factors that are only known from having a late position-a drawing hand is playable.

OUR PARTNERS
Casino Software India | Party poker | Play Poker
Hold'em no limit | Gamingnews
Online Poker

If you are webmaster, please consider to add your url to these great search engines and directory:

Google - Yahoo - Msn - Dmoz