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How Not To Suck At Poker: Pay Attention

• 31.06.2025 1:28 pm
• Helen
• 0 Comments

Part 5 in the 10 part beginner poker player series, this piece will discuss a crucial ingredient in poker playing, that is often ignored- paying attention.

Texas Hold'em is literally a partial information game. If you can acquire more information, you are going to play better. Everything that takes place at any poker table, irrespective of whether you are in the pot is additional information that you could include into your information collection.

Making full use of Auto Play

Most of the poker hands you will be dealt literally need little or no practically thought. Incase you are following the advice appearing in our first article of this series play fewer hands), understand that your playing should be limited to around 15 percent of all hands. This literally means that 85 percent of the times you are dealt in, you are folding.

Out of the 15 percents of hands you are playing, a good number of them will be simple and mostly one-action hands. You simply raise your then everyone folds, or you are prepared such that when any player moves all-in before you, you play your .

Only a small number of hands you play are really going to require some thought, and only a small fraction of them will require the making of an extremely difficult decision. The moment you need to make these difficult decisions, you will need a large quantity of information as is possible to gather, and it's possible to get it while you are auto-playing.

What do you look for?

To be precise: everything.

Everything any player does while at the poker table is always a clue as to how they play and the type of decisions they are going to make.

Watch carefully how they talk and how they sit. Watch carefully each hand that plays out regardless of whether you are in it or not. Take mental notes each time anyone does anything to be considered extraordinary. It is important to take a note of the amount of money they bought and the manner they bought it.

If they fancy playing in large pots, or they are simply scared of losing or maybe they bluff, watch it and note it well understanding that everything that happens is a hint.

You stand a better chance of making sound decisions at the right time, if you take in as much as possible, consciously catalog it and try to evaluate and remember it.

Making the difficult choices

The moment you are in a hand requiring you to make one hard decision, you have to compile the information that you have about the hand in question and all of the players involved quickly and concisely. Every bit of information you possess is an additional piece of the whole puzzle. The greater the number of the puzzle pieces you have, the easier for you it becomes to clearly perceive the big picture,

Making the right decision in these key moments is simply what separates a losing player from a winning one.