Is patience necessary to play winning poker?
Hello-
Depending on how many poker players you talk to, you will get several different answers to how much patience you need to play winning poker.
It depends on the game you are playing – SNG, MTT, Cash games.
And then it depends on if you are playing a turbo SNG or MTT to how patient you can be.
It depends on your style of play as well.
If you are comfortable waiting for your big hands kind of like Phil Helmuth and waiting for the right situation to put your chips in play, you may blind down so many chips that when you finally put your chips in late in a tournament, the blinds may be forced to call you with inferior hands and stand a decent chance to beat your hand range. And then you’ll be out and your patience will have been wasted.
But in this same situation if you are playing a cash game, you can open up 4 tables and just wait for good quality starting hands and wait and wait and wait until you get those hands and play them aggressively and more often than not, you will make money. And your patience will have been rewarded.
However, if the cash game players are paying attention to how few hands you are playing they may easily fold hands like AQ to your raise but happily call your raises in position with suited connectors or medium pairs that stand to do well against your big hands that you may have trouble letting go because you waited so long for your big hands and you don’t want to let them go easily.
So like most things in poker, it depends!
Good luck at the tables.
-A
Tags: good starting hands, How to play poker, play good poker, poker strategy, winning poker
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How to play poker | June 29, 2008