Improving Your Poker Skill

Have you ever asked yourself how to become a better poker player?  If you’re serious about it there are a few things you can do to improve your game.

The first thing you have to do is get online or at the live tables and play as many hands as possible.  This means instead of hanging out with your friends or watching T.V you’ll sit yourself down and do nothing else but playing poker.  If you think the pros play just for a few hours, then this game is not for you. The serious players know that poker is a way of living; some of them take poker as a job and play 8 hrs a day and sometimes more.  Playing online poker is a great way to sharp your skills against live players as you learn a lot of things about the games and how people play certain hands. 

Besides from playing poker as much as you can you also have to be a good spectator.  Most of the time there is a Pro on Full Tilt Poker and they are always great to watch and see how they react to specific circumstances.  There’re also plenty shows running on TV that you can watch and learn from.  I know for a fact that ESPN and the Travel channel always have poker tournaments scheduled on their programs.  ESPN usually has the World Series Of Poker on and the travel channel has the WPT. By sitting there watching the game you can start recognizing certain reactions, the more you watch the more you can pick up on those little involuntary movements players make when they are holding the nuts or bluffing at a pot. 

And the last thing you can do to improve your game is actually pick up a book and read when you can’t play or watch the TV.  Now you won’t get all the knowledge and experience you need from a book or a TV show, but there are vital things you can learn from them such as the Odds.  Getting to know the pot odds of any given hand can really come into play when you’re actually playing.  There are lots of literature out there that can help you to understand the game of poker a little bit better, some of this material was written by the greatest poker players in the world including Doyle Brunson, Barry Greenstein and Dan Harrington to name a few.

And another thing you can do is to read a little about psychology. That can help you to understand and recognize how people handle different situations, like how they handle good and bad flops by muscular reactions, gestures, facial features, etc.  That can also help you to learn how to control your own facial expressions so your opponents can't read you that easily.