Basic Poker Strategies: Secrets and Techniques

The goal of the game is to get the best combination of your own and shared cards. The most popular variation of poker is “Texas Hold’em”, which involves from 2 to 10 players.

The winner of the game is the player who manages to get the best combination of 2 own cards and 5 community cards that are on the table.

Different styles and strategies

When playing poker, each of us meets opponents with different styles and strategies of play.

Styles are evaluated by two main parameters:

• the number of hands with which the participant starts playing for the pot;
• how aggressively the opponent plays his own cards.

Players are divided by the number of hands they play into loose and tight hands, and by their level of aggression into passive and aggressive hands.

Loose poker players play a fairly wide range of hands, while tight poker players play strong hands that have a high chance of winning a hand on the preflop. Nowadays, many poker players follow an “average” strategy that tends toward one particular playing style.

Key poker techniques

There are several key poker techniques that are considered to be the foundation of poker strategy for every player who is just starting out. Actions can be used according to several reasons: one, to give opponents a false impression of the strength of your own hand; the other, to increase the pot, to provoke your opponent to erroneous actions. Below we’ll try to give you some illustrative examples.

Half-bluffs and bluffs

Half-bluffs or bluffs are one of the basic techniques which make it possible to deceive your opponent. This technique is used in the game of poker very often and all participants in the game.

A semi-bluff means to bet on a hand that does not yet offer any particular combination or a sure hand. By bluffing, the poker player is betting with weak cards that have almost no chance of winning the hand. By this action, or rather by betting, the poker player seeks to convince the other participants that he has a strong hand and tries to get them to discard their playing cards.

Other techniques

• A contbet is a bet made on the flop by the participant who made a raise before the flop. In addition, a continuation bet does not depend in any way on whether or not his starting hand could strengthen on the flop.
• A check-raise is a technique in which a player checks during a betting session with the intent to flop your opponent when he raises.
• A double barrel is a bet that was preceded by a bet on the flop. In other words, it is a type of bluff, which is made after the conbet.

Naturally, it is impossible to contain in one article all possible poker strategies, so we suggest you to pay your attention to one of poker schools, there you can surely study existing poker strategies more thoroughly and learn to apply them correctly and competently in practice.