Best way to learn/ make some money

[jimmer]

I think it's great you'll willing to study a few books before playing poker. I think we all must play people everyday, who have been playing years and still make major errors because they haven't read basic theoretical concepts.

Now i don't know you as a person and i don't want to knock your confidence, but i think there is one area which will cause you problems.

The problem is; the inconsistantcy of other players. I'm guessing a large majority of your studies involved learning the theoretical concepts, which combined with many case studies, would give you a logical solution or outcome?

This is the same concept a logical poker player uses to assess their chances of playing any particular hand. However some poker players don't play logically. This is because of various factors from going on tilt, to bluffing.

Over the course of say 100,000 hands, the poker players who have the most knowledge, will finish higher than the ones who haven't. But in the short term, you'll experience many players (especially on the lower limits) who will play completely the reverse to the way the norm suggests you should.

I hope this makes sense?

Good luck to you.

[72o]

When i started to play poker i decided to play limit. Not because i was afraid of big bets (my first few games have been no-limit) but because i had absolutely no idea how much to bet. By playing limit I learned a lot about the betting structure.

It's always a good advice to start with limits as low as possible. Even weak real-money players are much stronger than playmoney players and you will loose a lot of big blinds in the beginning. Since you need a stack of the size of 100 big blinds or at least 60 times the big blind even .10/.25 limit tables may come quite expensive. Unfortunately most online poker rooms don't offer 1/2/5 cent limit tables. But most of them offer $5 buy-in NL single table SNGs. I'd reccomend to start with ultra-low limit ring tables if available and once you became familiar with real-money poker switch to $5 NL SNGs.

Concerning poker books: My point is if you are not smart enough to figure it out yourself you aren't smart enough to win. I read "Low Limit Holdem" and my impression was that it is one of the more intelligent poker books. Nevertheless a beginner won't get much out of it because the information isn't very concrete. You won't really understand the book until you know it already.

For a beginner there are only a few rules you have to know:
Play only quality hands.
Fold if you don't hit the flop.
Believe your opponents. Hight bets almost always mean a strong hand. Almost no player has the guts to make a big bluff.

These rules sound simple but it is hard to obey them. As long as you are not able to obey these rules you will never become a winning player. I've seen a lot of players who are playing for years and have studied a lot of books (at least according to their chat comments) but who were terrible loosers because they weren't able to fold a hand.

Concerning starting hands: 72 hits the flop as often as AK does. But if you hit the flop with AK you got top pair and if you hit with 72 you got nothing. It's not about winning more often but about winning more securely. It's essencial to know when to throw money in the pot and when to fold. When you start playing real-money poker you will encounter players who seem to win most of the hands they play. That's not because they buff all the time (what they to of course but not all the time) but because they play only quality hands like AJ etc. So if they hit the flop they are likely to hit top pair or at least something worth to bet on.

That's all you need to know for the first weeks. And if you are smart enough you will figure out the rest by yourself.

EDIT: A last word. When beginners encounter good players they are often unable to believe what tey see. The stack of the good player only goes up but almost never goes down. So they start to become paranoid. They think the player is cheating, colluting or whatever. That's the same bunk as stories about alien spaceships in the Area 51. Instead of thinking about the reasons why they are loosing they are looking for excuses for their poor play. Even many (if not even most) people who played for years think that way. That's what is meant by the sentence "they are not learning from their mistakes".

You might think that this will never happen to you but the poker situation of having absolutely no information about the hand of your opponent and the need to fold to high raises without knowing wether you opponent really has a hand or is just cheating on you has a high paranoid potential. So be alert.