Apply Yourself at Learning Poker

I haven’t made a long post for a while, so I’ll write something down now.

This post is primarily aimed at beginners, but it wouldn’t hurt for some of the veterans to read it.

So, you’ve just discovered Texas Hold’em. You start playing and you think it is fantastic, and you become addicted and want to get better at it. So then after some Googling you come across a site called FTR, and after some searching on the Barnes and Noble website, you see a few Poker Strategy books that you might want, so you order them.

But this is the mistake I see so many beginners make. They sign up for FTR and buy books, then they read the books and the FTR stickies. But they fail to actually absorb the information. For the advice given on FTR and in books, you must make the strategies you have read about sink in. A lot of beginners just (for example) skim over DavSimon’s SnG strategy guide, and then they immediately think they are the Ultimate King of SnGs. Then they play 40 or 50 and lose a bunch of money. Then they think ‘How the hell did that happen? I read a guide!’ Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because those people did not let any of the strategies from DavSimon’s guide sink in. They did not absorb the strategies and consider how they can apply them to their own game. And that means they learned nothing, and they are still losing players.

So if you’ve just found FTR, I advise you to read the stickies on the games that apply to you, whether that be MTTs/SnGs etc. But most importantly, make sure the information you have read is really digested so you can really think how to apply it to your own game. As I said before, the mistake I see most often happen to beginners, who want to learn more about poker, is not really ABSORBING strategies they have read. You may want to re-read a strategy guide or a book, just to make sure you can really digest and understand the information (by the way, if you are really not sure what someone means by a point they have made in a guide on FTR, don’t hesitate to ask them to explain it to you).

I hope this helps, and remember, apply yourself to your learning of poker!…

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