Can you remember what it was like when you started out on your poker adventure, all wide eyed and hopeful? You had learnt the basic poker hand rankings and you were going to take on the world! Nothing was going to stop you as you blazed a trail straight to the final table of the WSOP in your fist year.
Maybe that’s you now. Maybe you’ve just learnt the basics and you’re ready to plunge in and have a go. Do it! Just don’t risk your shirt because with the best will in the world you’re probably going to lose.
But the experience that you pick up from those first games is probably the most powerful lesson you will ever learn in poker. Realizing that you can’t just stroll in and clean up might come as a bit of a jolt to you, but the experience gained will be worth it’s weight in gold.
As you go on, if you hope to progress and improve, you will look and listen and read and learn and devour everything you can get your hands on about poker. You will learn tactics; basic ones at first like when it’s a good time to bluff and when to raise and re-raise, what cards to play and what cards to fold like a hot potato.
Then you’ll keep improving your education and learn the value of pot odds and the real biggie – positioning. With each step along the way you will improve your experience and learn a bit more, but you’ll still be wondering why you’re not in the big time yet now that you “know it all”.
Then gradually, piece by piece, the jigsaw puzzle will start to fall into place. You will realize that you just did something for the first time and actually understood why you did it. You will make the switch towards thinking as a poker player rather than remembering a set of rules and tips that you used before.
At that point you will have gained enough of the one thing that is going to make you a poker player to start actually behaving like one – experience.
You can read a hundred poker books, watch poker on TV all day and all night and discuss it with your friends or in the poker forums until the cows come home, but the one thing that you cannot get unless you play a lot of poker is experience.
So get out there and play poker!
Article © www.Love-Texas-Holdem 2006