Poker Education

Unlike casino games, online poker can be turned into a positive EV venture by the poker player. All it takes is skill, patience, self-control, the willingness to learn, and a little bit of dedication to top it all off.

The internet is loaded with online poker sites, most of these operations however have one purpose only: to generate money for their creators via affiliate setups. There is nothing wrong with that, the only problem is that blinded by greed, most such website owners and webmasters fail to ever provide any truly relevant and useful information about game-play besides promoting their affiliate schemes (certainly there are exception to this too, but they are few and far between).

Therefore, one of the best ways to get together advanced knowledge about the game is to read poker books. They’re being sold all over the internet and they do contain useful information indeed. You don’t even have to actually go out and purchase them without knowing what you’re getting for your money. Most of the valuable poker works are available for download through poker torrents. Check them out and buy them if you like what you see.

Another way to get your mind around some advanced poker tactics is to watch them on video. That’s right. Check out videos of some of the most important live (and even online) events in poker history. If someone can teach you a thorough poker lesson, it has to be those pros featured in these vids. There are WPT and WSOP torrents available out there, but if you’re looking to improve your cash game, High Stakes Poker is featured as well.

A word of caution about using these videos as serious educational tools: the actions depicted in them might not always be the right ones to take against less skilled opposition. There are some pretty obvious mistakes in these videos (after all, the featured professionals are human, too), so don’t take everything that happens there for granted.

Never use the play money tables of any poker site to try to gain some knowledge of more advanced aspects of strategy. Play at these tables is so abysmally bad, it will teach you nothing. What’s worse is that play-money tables tend to teach you all the wrong moves, and will late interfere with your development as a poker player. Use the play-money feature as a means of getting used to the interface and the mechanics of play. As soon as you feel confident you’ve cleared those points, move on to real money.

One way to enjoy real money play, cost-free, is to take part in freerolls. There are frerolls out there that do not have any requirements towards participants. No FPPs needed, no real money account, nothing. Play is chaotic in the beginning stages of these freerolls too (kind of like play-money tables), but it settles down later and there are some pretty good players taking part in these tourneys you can actually learn a lot from.