Pablo Luna
Whether it be to make more money or to impress the other players and feel extremely good and proud about yourself, upping your mastery of this game is a worthwhile venture. If you’re longing to play at professional tournaments, your game most definitely needs fine-tuning. You may simply want to put an end to your losing streak and shock your friends by walking away with the pot. Whatever the reason, there are many ways to improve your understanding and thereby your performance in poker. It adds some more excitement and thrill when all players are similarly skilled and really battle it out through the cards.
Take A Shortcut
If you’re looking for fast results, truly effortless wins, then most likely cheating is not new to you. You might say this is harmless fun but be careful with whom you employ such tactics, it could get hairy. If you’re determined to press on then special poker contact lenses are the way to go. Invisible ink contact lenses to be more specific. For this to work, you will need to be playing with a deck of specially marked cards. With infrared light technologies built-in to the lenses, the fluorescent markings on the cards, hidden from the naked eye, will be brought into view.
The lenses are color-free, making them undetectable. Invisible ink glasses are another option to consider if lenses are not your favorite go-to spying devices.
Seek Out The Weaker Players
This has obvious benefits. If you know your skillset is unmatched by any of the people sitting at a tournament table, you would have created an avenue for cool and calm play and guaranteed wins. Nothing anyone does, no moves made will frazzle you. You will be able to spot a bluff a mile away and thwart away any attempt to overcome you.
While back-to-back wins will boost your confidence, you can also improve your game by teaching what you know to friends who do not grasp the game as you do. Some say the true test of solidifying that you indeed know a topic is to be able to impart that knowledge to someone else. In instructing them, you may be surprised you learn something more that will improve your game.
Keep Your Cards Private
Some players, at the end of the game, like showing off how good their hand was. They would turn over or throw their cards face-up on the table. This action that can be construed as boastful can have some negative implications. It could be that the winning hand was not good at all but in fact, was a poor hand bluffed successfully. By revealing your cards you open up yourself for analysis by the other players. They will think back on your moves and try to connect the dots which led to your triumph. They could even zone in on your bluff tactics if they study you long enough.
Keep your cards close to your chest even after the game is concluded. The more secrecy around your playing, the greater the mystery and the more difficult it will be to pin you down.
Use A Poker Guide
As a beginner, this will greatly help you improve. Opt for a guide that is able to meet you at your current skill level and build you up from there. No use in struggling to understand a guide that is leaps and bounds ahead of your abilities. Use it to learn different strategies of the game. A good guide won’t just lay out ten strategies but will explain what each entails. In that way, you don’t only memorize them but you understand and internalize them. Being taught the proper time to implement every strategy will also serve you well. Knowing them but not when to use them is useless.
Give yourself time to fully learn what the guide is attempting to teach. Avoid getting frustrated with yourself. To become better, time and patience are required.
Control Your Expressions
Your very emotive face won’t be a plus for you in this game. If every player can easily read your expression, you are bound to lose every game. You might think that a quick flash of disappointment went unnoticed by the other players. Out of five or six, expect that at least one person caught it. Serious poker players instinctively know to study the movements of the other players for tells in their game. The fewer tells you to have, the better. Do whatever you need to in order to master your poker face. Stoic, unresponsiveness is the goal. While this state is not socially acceptable, in poker it is gold.
Practice in the mirror, try it out with your friends so that when you get to a real game, you’re ready.
If you’re serious about the game, use these suggestions to improve your skill, and increase your luck.
