Starting From Scratch

All things have to start somewhere, and so does your poker career. Even the top pros have been newbies once, though they have probably forgot most about the issues facing a newbie. Poker is a great sport, but in order for you to succeed at whatever level of competition you chose, there are a few things you got to realize, before you even get started. In this article I will try to give my educated opinion on this.

Question number one: Why do you want to play poker? To make money right? WRONG. Though it is indeed possible to maintain a steady income from poker, you should not expect to achieve this. Most players don't. Consider this fact. At a 0.5-1$ limit table there is max. 3 winning players seated. The rest are losers paying off the 3 winners and the casino. How likely do you think it is that you will be one of the three winners at the table as a complete newcomer to the game? If you work hard on it you can BECOME a winning player, but a big ego won't help you in achieving that. Keep in mind that the 10th best player in the world is a loser when seated at a table with the best nine.

But don't despair. Poker is great fun, and if you strive to become better, some day you can become a winning player. It all comes with experience and self discipline. Poker rule number one can therefore be stated as: Expect to lose. You might be the local home game champ, but that wont necessarily cut it for you on the local casino or the Internet, where you are facing some much more experienced players. Instead you should expect to lose, and work really hard on learning from your losing sessions. In time you might end up as one of the tough players there. I still feel grateful whenever I leave a game with more then I sat down with, even though it's not even enough to pay for the fare to the casino. And I don't feel devastated when I lose what I sat down with either. After all this was not completely unexpected. Expecting to lose makes the emotional swings more bearable, and it also keep your mind more open to working with yourself to become a better player. Questions going something like "I play solid poker and have lost because I keep getting sucked out at the low limit tables. Should I move up limit in order to avoid getting sucked out?" keep popping up at the forum. Well as poker is a knowledge game what exactly makes you think that you should do much better against more knowledgeable opponents? Study harder and you might make it at the small tables one day. They guys at the higher limits have paid their dues on the lower limits and so should you.

Poker rule number two: Make a poker budget and stick to it. I know a lot of good poker players who just wont cut it in the long run, simply due to bad self-discipline. When I started out playing poker some two years ago I made the most important decision of my whole career. Not believing that the rake could be beaten, I decided that I was willing to spend 50$ a month on my new found hobby. Those 50$ lasted me a week at 0.5-1$ and 5+1$ sit'n go tourneys. When I was bust I stuck to my decision and went back to the play money tables for the rest of the month. Now why is this so important? First off gambling can put your personal economy in serious jeopardy. I simply fail to understand why people are willing to take risks where the possible consequences are devastating. Poker is about making wise decisions first and making money secondly. If you start out safeguarding your personal economy, you're fit for gambling. If not - well don't say I didn't warn you.

But apart from this general recommendation not to gamble the whole farm, I think budget making has a lot of virtues throughout your whole career. The first thing you need to achieve is to get stabilized at any limit. When you're a consistent winner at the play money tables I would consider moving to 0.5-1$. When you're a consistent winner there (over at least a month period) and have made 300$, you're fit for 1-2$. But before you enter 1-2$ you should make a budget for 1-2$. Saying something like - I will dedicate these 100 bucks for learning from playing 1-2$ I don't expect to win, but I'll fight the best I can, and if I fail I promise myself to learn from my mistakes. When you've lost the 100$ you move back to 0.5-1$ until you've won it back, at which time you'll set up for a new attempt. Though the limits I'm striving to break are a tad higher then this nowadays, I still manage my roll this way. Why gamble with your entire roll, when you can gamble for your winnings only? And I don't think you will learn more from staying at a limit where you don't belong yet. Move down and think through your experiences. And this could go for poker rule number three: Take the lessons you pay for.

The best players I know still use a lot of time discussing and reading on poker. They know what they're worth but generally don't brag about it. The personality of a good poker player has to be one where his ego doesn't stand in the way of learning from the experiences at the table. I think the two most common threads at the forum are "online poker sites are rigged" and bad beat stories. The authors stating that online poker sites are rigged are basically stating that since I am a good player and have lost, there must be something wrong with the software. Personally I have always looked at it from the opposite direction. Assuming that the software is solid, there has to be something wrong with my game. And after a long hard look at my game I have usually found out what it was. Bad beat stories tend to state, "Since I'm a good player and have lost, it has to because I was very unlucky." Again this belief directs your attention in the wrong direction. Trust me on this one. Your game can always improve. But it wont unless you start looking into it. And don't be too sad when you lose either. You are much more motivated for analyzing your game after a major but whipping then after a huge win. Do yourself the favor of replaying every single hand of the session in your mind after suffering a big loss. This is how you learn.

Poker rule number 4 - read, write and discuss poker as much as you can. I shall not discuss the specifics of low limit poker here (though I might in a later article), but suffice it to say that Lee Jones' Winning Low Limit Holdem will probably be the best investment you'll make in your entire career. Also you should find other players to discuss poker with. Coaching is vital in improving your game. But for starters the forum of this site is a great place to do exactly that.

And finally I could add poker rule number 5 - acknowledge your limitations and chose your table accordingly. For some reason table selection is not discussed as much as it should be. At your local casino you might not have much choice, but online you have a vast number of sites offering most poker variants at limits from 0.5-1$ or lower and up to 100-200$ along with pot limit and no limit games. In the beginning you should shop around a lot, utilizing the sign up bonuses to get going. But apart from utilizing the bonuses this will also help you find out where your particular style of play fits best. Poker is a very dynamic game and the style of play that works against one lineup will make you lose against another. In other words - how to play poker should be very dependent on the situation. Most players never reach a skill level where they can adjust their game dramatically to fit the table conditions at hand. For instance quite a few players at the forum, whose skill level I do not dispute, are finding it hard to beat the very low limits. In my opinion this has to be due to limited adjustment capabilities (or poor mental control after being out drawn a lot). Now as a newbie, your primary problem is to find a table where your newbie game will make you a winner. Chances are that this will be a low limit table, or the cheap sit'n go tourneys. But beware that there can be a hack of a difference between how you do at the same table on two different poker sites. The reason for this is that the player mix varies quite a lot between sites also. So shop around until you find a place where you keep winning slowly but steadily.

When I reread the above I see that this article is not much about poker at all. Also I might seem to be preoccupied with the losing part of poker. Well - pretending to be a winner hasn't produced many winners, and considering worst-case scenarios should be a normal part of any risk assessment review. If you expect the worst, you're likely to be in for a few pleasant surprises. Becoming a strong poker players basically takes the same as it does to become a top athlete in any other sports. And what a great sport poker is. So make up your mind, set your priorities straight, and prepare for a heck of a ride.

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