Before you decide to call the raise you must remember where the money is at in the pot. Is the blind already three times the size of the big blind? Has the big blind already called or not? It is important to know this because you cannot play after another player raises in front of you.
Post-flop play is the fourth important area of poker. This is the stage most players sloppily make decisions because they have not really studied the maths and they lack hard and soft control. A lot of decision making is dependent on your hand strength. When you make your decision to call, review your opponent’s hand and determine if you are the underdog. If you have a better hand odds and rewards than the people in the game, call! It’s what the pros do.
I want players to stop thinking that tournaments are a big brain exercise where the best players in the world always win. Tournament players viewership is growing, but it is not due to stronger players making more aggressive plays. Tournament players are just getting more education and are mastering the rules more quickly. The new generation of online poker players are inline with you as far as their skill levels, and that’s great because you can ride the wave of skill by acting like a ignorant bumpkin. Raise and re-raise, and have patience.
To learn to be a strong poker player you must first understand that tournaments are not a big gambling session where the higher skilled players win all of the time. Make small mistakes, program yourself to accepting smaller mistakes and you will be able to reduce your tournament average to a profitable result.
If I was still a poker player and I had to pick between picking an opponent to spend my money on a 50/50 proposition bet or coin flip with red chips, I would pick the coin flip every time. My coin flip results were right 66% of the time and I happened to win a nice stack of chips one time. Don’t ever think that I am some sort of statistical Einstein here. Poker is a game of statistics. 55% of the time I will probably lose but I will get my money in when I have the right hand and I will pick that coin flip over bet if I have the right read.
If you hang around tournament poker circles long enough you will learn the hard way that the truth is not so simple. You will make your living by accepting that your tournament life is not all fun and games. You will have to take a lot of things on board to be a successful tournament poker player. You will have to learn to be patient and disciplined. Be able to do this and you will through out your poker life. But if you hang around tournament poker circles long enough you will realize that the players that go broke have the knowledge and the discipline to stay with it. They have the discipline to never go on tilt, to never bereadable, to KC block out their bad plays with respective coaching or emotional therapy and they will patiently teach other people how to improve so that one day they themselves will no longer be sitting in miserable quarters shuffled up and ready to watch others take their prize money.
Learn to be a disciplined poker88 player and you will become a profitable poker player who will have big dreams of winning big pots in future poker contests. Once you learn to do this you will have learned the formula for success.
