Texas Holdem Practice

If you want to become the best Texas holdem player you can,
you only have a few choices. You can read and study as much
material as you can digest, and you can practice.

The best players do both.

When you want to study you can get a great start by reading
all of the pages we’ve included in the Texas holdem section.
Then you can find suggestions for Texas holdem books on our
books page.

But every player needs to start practicing in order to use
the skills they’ve learned from books, magazines, and web sites.
Keep reading to learn the best way to start practicing Texas
holdem.

Free Practice

Free is one of those buzz words that seem to get people’s
attention. Marketers use it to grab attention and have tried to
build the belief that free is always better. It’s no different
in the online poker world.

While free Texas holdem practice can be good, it’s not always
better than playing for real money. It may be cheaper, but just
because it’s cheaper doesn’t mean it’s better.

When you play holdem for the first time or two playing for
free is a great way to learn the rules, how the flow of the game
works, and get used to the pace of the game. But once you learn
how to play and how the game works, playing free games can
actually hurt your long term ability to win instead of help.

You can sign up for one of the hundreds of online places that
offer free Texas holdem games or you can gather a group of
friends and family to play a game. If you have a choice between
the two options, opt for the live play with friends and family.

The problem with playing free games, especially online, is
the play of your opponents is usually so poor that it can hurt
your ability to win in the long run. While it’s true that a good
player will be able to beat the free games, this doesn’t mean
that learning to beat the free games is the best way to learn
how to beat real money games.

When you get a group together to play consider offering a
small prize of some sort for the winner or top finishers and use
chips just like you would in a poker room. The prizes don’t have
to be big, just something worth playing your best to win. The
simple idea of playing to win something tends to improve the way
everyone plays.

You’ll still see poor players make bad plays, but you
probably won’t see near as many crazy plays as you do on the
online free money tables.

If you’ve never played Texas holdem before, or haven’t played
in a poker room or casino, you should know that they don’t offer
the chance to play for free. The only places to play free are
online or if you create your own game.

But when you transition to real money play online poker rooms
offer much lower stakes than live poker rooms, so even though we
don’t suggest wasting much time playing for free, when you
decide to try your hand at real money play the online rooms
often are the perfect place to start.

Real Money Practice

Whenever you possibly can, practice while playing for real
money instead of for free. Even if you play for less than a
dollar buy in it’s better than the free money tables. The play
is still quite poor at the lower levels, but it’s better than at
the free tables and as you earn to beat the low limits you’ll
build skills that help you beat the higher limits as well.

Online poker rooms have low limit games, often starting at
.05 / .10 or lower. Yes that’s a nickel and a dime. So for a
dollar or two you can practice for real money. This way you
won’t break the bank while improving your skills.

The lowest limit games available in most live poker rooms and
casino is $5 / $10 and the lowest buy in no limit games are
usually at least $100 buy in’s.

Online play is a great way to get started, but don t be
afraid to try some low limit live games as soon as you start
winning on a consistent basis. Many players find the live game
even more profitable than online play because you can see your
opponents and hear what they say and how they say it.

Positive Expectation

In order to be a winning Texas holdem player you need to
understand outs and odds and how to use them to help you win
more than you lose.

The basic premise of winning poker players is to get as much
money into the pot as possible when they’re the favorite to win
a hand and put as little as possible into the pot when they
aren’t the favorite.

Another habit of winning players is finding positive
expectation situations and maximizing the amount of money they
put in play in these situations.

Of course you don’t always know when you’re the favorite and
when you aren’t, but the more you play and practice the better
you’ll get at determining where you are in each hand.

Before we continue discussing odds and outs you need to
understand what a positive expectation situation is and how to
recognize it. A positive expectation situation is one where if
you played the same hand or situation an infinite number of
times you’d win more than you’d lose. This can present itself in
a large number of ways, with some ways being clear and some
requiring some computation to see if they’re profitable.

The easiest way we’ve found to figure out positive
expectation is consider playing the exact same situation 100
times. Calculate all of the money already in the pot and how
much more is going in, both from you and your opponents, then
determine how many times you win the hand, and compare how much
you win on average per hand over the 100 hands. If the number is
positive it’s a positive expectation situation.

This may sound complicated, but once you do it a few times
you’ll find that it’s fairly easy. And most of the time, you
don’t need to know the exact numbers; you just need to know if
the situation is positive or negative.

In the example above of pocket aces against pocket jacks, you
don’t need to know the exact numbers to know that you’re going
to win more in the long run than you’ll lose in this situation.
You also know that the player with the jacks is going to lose
more than they win in the long run. So the player with pocket
aces is in a positive expectation situation and the player with
the jacks is in a negative expectation situation.

Let’s work through an extended example using every step so
you can see how this works. We’ll start with a fairly simple
one.

In this example the kings win a little over 81% of the time.
This means that I you play this situation 100 times you win 81
times and lose 19 times. When you win you win $1,000 so over 100
hands you win $81,000. When you consider your total investment
of $50,000, you win $31,000 in profit over 100 hands.

Divide $31,000 in profit by 100 hands and your average
profit, or expected value, for each time you play this hand is
$310. This is clearly a positive expectation or positive
expected value situation.

Consider the player with the pocket queens. They also have to
invest $50,000 over 100 hands, but they only win 19 times, for a
total return of $19,000. The difference between the $50,000 and
the $19,000 is $31,000 like the player with the kings, but in
this case it’s a negative $31,000. So their expected value is a
negative or minus $310 per hand.

It can get complicated when you try to determine your
expected value in different situations.

This means that you have to determine if it’s more profitable
to call the $800 or fold.

The most difficult thing most players deal with in this
situation is you have to consider the current pot amount, but
you have to ignore the fact that part of the money in the pot
was put there by you. It doesn’t matter who put the money in the
pot. After you put the money in the pot it isn’t yours unless
you win the pot.

In this example, if you play 100 times it costs $80,000 to
play. When you win you get back $2,600. In order to quickly see
if this is a positive expectation play you can divide $80,000 by
$2,600 to get 30.77, which is the number of times out of 100 you
need to win the hand to break even. So if you win the hand 31
times or more you show a positive expectation.

The way you determine how many times you’ll win is by
figuring out how many outs you have. In this example you’ll win
with any of the nine remaining clubs or the four 10’s. But
remember one of the 10’s is a club so you can’t count it twice.
Any of the clubs give you a flush and the 10’s give you a
straight.

Before we continue, if your opponent has three of a kind and
you land a club that pairs the board, in this case a nine or a
six, it will complete a full house for your opponent, beating
your flush. But you’ll also find that occasionally when you pair
one of your hole cards on the river that you’ll beat your
opponent holding a lower pair. So in the end these two thins
cancel out. You can make some guesses about w often each of
these things can happen and include them in your positive
expectation calculations, but we don’t recommend it until you
have the basics covered where you always figure them out
perfectly.

Back to the example, you have 12 cards that win the hand for
you and the deck has another 34 cards that don’t win the hand
for you. This means that 26% of the time a card you need will
land on the river and 74% of the time you’ll lose. The odds are
determined by doing a ratio of goo against bad. In this case the
odds are 34 to 12 against you. This is reduced to 17 to 6, or
roughly 3 to 1. 3 to 1 is actually 25%, which is quite close to
26%.

So out of 100 hands you win 26 times for a total of $67,600,
but remember your total cost is $80,000, so this is a total loss
of $12,400 over the 100 hands. This is an average expected loss
of $124 per hand.

It doesn’t matter what cards your opponent holds or which
cards have been discarded. Any unseen card is included because
in the long run every remaining possible card will be in each of
the remaining spots in the deck an equal number of times.

If this example isn’t complicated enough for you, you also
need to consider if the poker room where you’re playing has a
high hand of the day jackpot or prize. This is because once out
of every 46 hands you’re going to hit a royal flush, when you
land the 10 of clubs on the river, which adds some expected
value to the hand. If this prize is big enough it may move the
negative expectation situation to a positive one.

To further complicate the situation the players that make
this call aren’t necessarily wrong. Remember when we said that
you can’t consider the money that you’ve already placed in the
pot when making a positive expectation decision? You need to be
able to estimate the positive expectation at each step of the
hand, and depending on what happened on the flop and turn, you
may have determined the profitable play was to make a call on
both the turn and river, even if you missed on the turn. So even
though it’s a negative expectation play on the river, it may
have been a positive expectation play on the turn.

Before you start panicking and decide the math just isn’t
worth the trouble, don’t worry. Eventually you do need to know
most of the stuff we just covered to win at the highest levels
of Texas holdem play, but today you need to focus on the more
simple building blocks of outs and odds.

Exercises

You have to understand outs and odds in order to make
profitable decisions and advance to determining positive
expectation situations. Here’s a group of exercises to help you
learn how to determine outs and odds. After you work through
each of the exercises you can see the correct way to solve them
in the next section. Try to solve them yourself before reading
the solutions.

The math behind the computations involves working with huge
fractions, but in the end you’ll hit a set on the flop one out
of eight times and by the end of the hand one out of every 5.2
times. This means roughly 19.2% of the time you’ll hit a set by
the end of the hand.

The reason odds are so important is because you can use
something called pot odds to determine if a call is a profitable
play. If the ratio of the amount of money in the pot compared to
the amount of money you must call is better than the odds of you
winning the hand in the long run the play is profitable, or a
positive expectation play.

Tips

As you’re practicing your Texas holdem skills there are many
things that you need to think about and consider in relation to
practice with the cards. Holdem is played with a deck of playing
cards, but it’s won with your mind, and that means using every
tip, trick, and tactic that you can to win more money than you
lose and beat your opponents in any way possible. Here are a few
tips to consider and use.

Bankroll

Your bankroll is the total amount of money you
have to play Texas holdem. Most players just use the money in
their pocket and don’t physically set aside an amount for their
bankroll. This is a mistake. You should always keep your
bankroll spate from your other money.

If you need to add money to your bankroll then recognize what
you’re doing and make a conscious decision to do it. On the
other hand, when you win and want to use some of your winnings
for something other than your bankroll then make a conscious
decision to do that as well.

By keeping your bankroll separate from your other finances it
makes it easy to track your progress at any time. It also is a
great feeling when you go on a winning streak and you take some
of your profit out the first time.

One area that’s almost never discussed is how tipping the
dealers has a direct impact on your overall profitability. By
keeping your bankroll separate there’s no way around seeing what
tips do to your profit.

No one can tell you whether you should or shouldn’t tip, but
you do need to be fully aware of how much it costs you,
especially if you ever want to try your hand as a professional
poker player.

The other thing you need to consider about your bankroll is
making sure you have enough to withstand the normal ups and
downs associated with Texas holdem. Even the best holdem players
in the world have ups and downs and have losing sessions. Most
players have losing weeks and months from time to time, even
while showing long term profits.

You have to have enough money to ride these waves both from a
practical standpoint as well as a mental one.

If you don’t have to worry about having enough to keep
playing it helps you mentally while playing. But if you find
yourself thinking about your bankroll while playing you probably
don’t have enough.

Play at a lower limit than your bankroll would normally allow
you to play.

Normal bankroll recommendations vary, but having between 20
and 30 buy in’s for a no limit game and between 200 and 300 big
blinds for limit games are fairly common suggestions. This means
if you play a no limit game with a $500 buy in you need $10,000
to $15,000. We suggest having at least $20,000 until you have a
winning track record of at least 12 months.

When you play as a limit player at 20 / 40 it calls for a
normal bankroll of $8,000 to $12,000. We recommend at least
$15,000 for this limit. Having too much money is not a problem
for holdem player; not having enough is a problem.

One unseen benefit of having extra money in your bankroll is
if you run across a game at a higher limit that has players you
know you can beat it allows you to take a one-time shot at the
higher limit with a fraction of your bankroll without putting
you in danger.

Even if the worst possible thing happens and you lose both
buy in’s you still have a bankroll of $18,000 for your regular
game.

Psychology

Entire books have been written about the
psychology of poker so we can’t cover everything here, but we
want to give you a quick overview. For a more detailed look at
the psychology behind texas holdem, you can go to our page
dedicated on the subject.

Everything that happens while
playing poker has an impact psychologically on the players.

How you handle things at the table and how you think about
the game away from the tables goes a long way toward your
eventual success or failure.

One of the best ways to handle the things that Texas holdem
throws at you is having a solid understanding of how odds and
outs work. While you were studying the exercises above you
probably noticed that even when you have a strong draw you tend
to lose more often than you win.

With a flush draw you win nine times on the river but lose 37
times. So it can be frustrating to not hit your flush draw for
the third straight time, but it’s no reason to let it change the
way you play.

No matter what happens at or around the table make sure you
stay focused on finding positive expectation plays and making
them. Play by the numbers and eventually you’ll come out on top.

Mindset

Working hand in hand with psychology, your mindset
both at the holdem tables and away from them plays a large part
in your long term success or failure. The best players have make
a conscious decision to do whatever it takes to be the best
Texas holdem player possible and followed through on that choice
with massive amounts of action.

It’s not enough to say you want to be a winning player. You
have to decide to do it and ten take action. And once you start
you never give up no matter what. This is the level of
dedication and mindset required to beat the game in the long
term.

Do you have what it takes and are you willing to do whatever
it takes?

Competition

The level of competition you face while playing
holdem will have a great deal to do with how much money you make
or lose. If you play with a group of players who are better than
you it may help you become a better player, but you’re going to
lose money while you’re playing. On the other hand, if you
always play with players who are not as good as you you’ll win
money in the long run.

The actual mix in most games is a few players will be better
than you and a few will be worse. But this shouldn’t ever stop
you from trying to find games with players worse than you. This
alone will increase your profits from playing Texas holdem.

Tells

Tells are anything a Texas holdem player does to give
away the strength of their hand or what they plan to do. You
need to be aware of the other players at the table including how
the act and how they talk. Are they doing or saying anything
that can help you beat them?

On the other hand you need to be aware of how you act and
talk at the table. Make sure you aren’t giving any indication of
the strength of your hand or what you plan to do.

We have an entire page dedicated to Texas holdem poker tells
so please check it out for a complete discussion.

Conclusion

When you want to be the best Texas holdem player you can
possibly be you need to practice as much as possible. Start with
free practice options and advance to real money practice as
quickly as possible.

Go over the practice exercises on this page until you know
and understand them as well as possible. Then deal hands out and
try to determine the best way to play them and look at the odds
and outs for different hands.

The most important thing is to never stop learning. Once you
have everything on this page down you should investigate the
rest of our Texas holdem section. It includes a complete
education that can help players of every skill level.