There is no one particular method to improve your poker playing style or poker game capabilities. You can either improve by the virtue of extensive poker experience, with the teachings and advice of your peers, browsing through internet sites, or through reading training guides and books. At any rate, if you’re new to online poker, then you can use this article as a handy guide of sorts to make optimal use of the resources most accessible to you (poker forums, poker statistics, hand histories, personal coaching, tutorial sites, and so on) in an immediate and practical manner.
Posting Hand Histories
For instance, one of the easiest ways for you to improve your poker game is to post your hand history at your nearest poker site forum—in fact, it’s a safe bet to assume that the poker site you frequent on probably has a forum dedicated to this particular practice. Examining your hand history is one of the most economical and straightforward ways to improve your poker game. After all, your hand history isn’t capable of lying about how good or bad you are at poker.
Letting the forum analyze your stats will open you to a wide multitude of opinions ranging from beginners who share the same tendencies as you to world-class experts who can easily pinpoint which aspects of your game requires improvement. Posting your hand history on a poker forum is one of the best and most beneficial decisions you’ll ever make in terms of improving your game.
Analyzing Other Players’ Hand Histories
You should also open your horizons by analyzing the hand histories of other poker players as well. To be true, even if you’re a beginner yourself, you too can share your own unique experiences and knowledge to a group of poker peers to the benefit of the group and your own personal improvement. More to the point, viewing dozens of new hand histories posted every day on your local poker forum will allow you to get a solid grasp of the kind of situations poker players face even prior to experiencing them yourself in a given game.
Exposing yourself to the different viewpoints of players from all walks of life should ultimately pay dividends in improving your playing style. At the very least, you’ll be able to learn how to think outside the box or approach poker-related situations using a variety of solutions. Even if you disagree with a fellow forum poster’s way of solving a particular problem, you should at least be able to take something away from the opinions expressed or learn the psychology behind an action you wouldn’t normally attempt.
Choosing and Reading the Right Poker Books
Choosing books will depend on whether your play SNGs (single-table tournaments), MTTs (multi-table tournaments), or cash games. At any rate, the same forum you used to post and read hand histories should suffice in helping you out pick the best books around when it comes to proper poker game play. If a given book is good enough for your community of poker players, then it should be good enough for you as well. The beauty of using a book to teach you poker is the fact that you’re the one who sets the learning pace. Besides which, you can always reread the chapters or lessons that are unclear to you. Just keep in mind that most of these poker books are priced at the twenty to sixty dollar range.