Top Beginner NL Hold'em Mistakes
There are quite a few secrets to becoming consistent and regular winners in online poker. The biggest problem when it comes to cracking the online poker safe consists in the fact that one has to deal with opposition whose skills are continuously changing and improving as well. Everyone out there is set to better him or herself in order to become more successful. What that means is that besides devising various ways to get other people's money at the green felt, one has to be equally adept at protecting his own stack. This is the area where new players are most likely to commit mistakes which may in the end cost them so much that they will simply deny the effects of anything one can secure offense-wise.
Skilled professional players are quite excellent at forcing beginners to commit such mistakes, and at exploiting the proclivity of the No Limit Holdem beginner to jump all-in.
The first and the biggest mistake that beginners tend to commit is that they get married to their hands. Poker is a game of patience, good players spend a great deal of their time at the green felt simply awaiting the right hand to come along, but that is by far not enough: the circumstances have to be right as well and the right hand doesn't always translate into what beginners like to call “premium hands”. What the right hand is, depends on the circumstances and on the kind of opposition one is facing. What beginners do is that they wait and wait until they land pocket queens, pocket kings or pocket rockets and then they fall in love with their hands, and they find themselves unable to let go of them, even when they know that they're on the wrong side of the hand history.
Surprisingly enough, another relatively common beginner mistake is the misreading of the board. While in NL Holdem the reading of the board is a relatively simple affair, there are players out there who manage to get it wrong every now and then. The most common kind of misreading is when beginners fail to realize how favorable the board is for flushes and straights for their opponents.
What one can do to minimize board-reading mistakes is to switch to a four-color deck when playing online. Four-color decks make it much easier to spot possible flush draws although they don't help a whole lot in the case of straights.
Most beginners hit the poker tables feeling a sort of pressure to pull off outlandish bluffs. This pressure is a product of the need to prove - first of all to themselves -that they do indeed have the talent it takes to make it in online poker.
The problem with the bluffs is that players who are not on the third level of poker thought at least, will not be able to create any sort of positive expectation through bluffing. Given that pretty much all beginners are on the first or second level of poker thought, one can see that the odds on the bluffs aren’t particularly favorable indeed.
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