There is a lot that goes into playing poker well. More than most give the sport credit for. There are elements of strategy, maths and body language involved.
But once you’ve got your strategies and odds handled, what else do you need to do to make sure you are at the top of your game? There are a lot of little habits you can get into to make the whole experience easier. If you’re looking to take your game to the next level, you’d better take up some of these simple habits. Take a look at our tips for keeping your game strong.
Hiding your tells
A big part of poker is keeping your face straight, and unless you’ve made a habit of depicting that you’re unhappy throughout your lifetime or had some skills in telling your mum you didn’t in fact roll in mud despite your t-shirt being brown, you’ll probably need some practice at it.
There are a few different ways you can go about this. Sometimes you simply need to dive in. Head to a site like GGPoker (ggpoker.co.uk) and get to playing with a webcam pointed at yourself. Record yourself playing and watch out for any tells that give you away. From there you can work on trying to mask them.
Or you can give yourself a test before you get into the games. Stick on your favourite comedy show or movie and sit in front of the mirror. Work on trying not to laugh for an exercise in trying to keep your face straight.
Confidence
A big part of keeping your tells in check is to appear confident, and a big part of appearing confident is to actually be confident.
Most of your confidence will come from your playing. As you win more, you will gain confidence in your decisions, which is an important part of playing and winning poker games. Indecisiveness can ruin a game, either by causing you to make a wrong move or by giving away that you’re nervous about what you’re doing.
But you can also trick your mind with all the usual things to make you feel confident, like standing taller, thinking about your best moments when you did feel confident, avoiding thinking negative thoughts, and taking a breath when you need to.
Wear something you feel good in, so that your confidence comes from the ground up and have faith that everything will turn out the way you want it to. Because you’ve got this.
Mental arithmetic
A big part of poker strategies are the odds. You’re going to have to quickly count what cards are on the table and deduce odds in order to figure out how likely the next card is going to be in your favour. This means a lot of adding, subtracting, and division. Possibly some multiplying in there.
You can keep on top of your math skills with a mobile game, but don’t trust all those ads. You won’t improve your brain with the latest Candy Crush rip off or Angry Birds. Instead look at the classic sudoku, in a particular mode. Some games call it jigsaw sudoku. It’s when the grid is split into further clusters, and the sum of the numbers are in the corner. So, if you get a cluster of two that make up 16 you can only fit a 9 and 7 in those because 9+7=16. Simple arithmetic used over and over. Normal sudoku is just about making sure that every line, group, and box is filled with a different number with no maths involved, so that won’t keep you thinking.
