Learn how to play poker

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

Playing good poker is about making as few mistakes as possible

Hello-

If you want to play good poker and make money playing poker, you need to learn how to minimize how many mistakes you make – be it a cash game, sit n go, or multi table tournament.  The person who makes the fewest mistakes has a better chance to make the most money than the one who makes several mistakes throughout a cash game session, sng, or mtt.

You can minimize your mistakes by playing fewer hands to start with.  The fewer marginal hands you decide to play, the easier your decisions will be when your chips are on the line and you flop top pair with your K6s or similar.

You can make better decisions when you are rested.  I just started a cash game session today and quit after only 32 hands because I didn’t realize how tired I really was.  I had spent most of the day running errands with my girlfriend and we were out in the sun and that wore me out.  Trying to play good poker after a long day is not one of the better decisions to end the day.

If you still have to play poker after a stressful day at work and you just want to blow off some steam, drop down a level or two so if you do happen to make a bunch of mistakes, the financial consequences won’t be so bad when you come back to your sense and get some much needed sleep.

Now I’m tired and going to bed.

Good luck at the tables.

-A