Up until the 2000s, seven card stud was the dominant form of poker throughout many parts of the world. But this changed during the poker boom of the mid 2000s, when Texas holdem became the preferred game for every major tournament.

Thanks to this popularity, millions of people now play Texas holdem on a daily basis. And no matter whether you’re just playing with friends or grinding in online casino cash games, the goal is always to win money.

But how do you win if you’re a beginner and / or not very good at poker?

How To Host A Texas Holdem Tournament In today's ever expanding world of poker popularity learning how to host a Texas Hold.

• Tournament vs Cash – the Main Differences A player can enter and exit a cash game whenever they want while a tournament has a fixed start and end. In a cash game, the blinds remain fixed, while the blind levels in a tournament increase at a predefined frequency (typically 15 – 25 minutes).
• So the game of Texas Hold'em is as popular as it has ever been. And dreams are still won (and lost) on the flip of a river card. This is what makes it one of the most exciting card games in the world. As a professional poker player myself for over 10 years now, these are my top 21 Texas Holdem tips that most pros don't want you to know about!
• For a home tournament, many people preferred an evenly spread prize payout. One example is 50/30/20, spread among the top three winners; more winners equals more fun. You can also go top-heavy, where the top players get the majority, and the next two winners just get their entry fee back. More aggressive games opt for a winner-takes-all approach.
• Deep Stack/ Early Stages Tournament Play The early stages of a Texas Hold’em tournament play way different than any other part of the tournament. You have more chips, lower blinds, and a lot more reckless players and fish still left in the field. The value of certain cards and hands increase while the value of others decreases during this stage.

Find out in this comprehensive guide, where we take you from the basics to the techniques that’ll help you beat Texas holdem.

The Basics of Winning at Texas Holdem Poker

Texas holdem is often described as taking 5 minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. This is even truer today with strategy being so readily available, giving more players the opportunity to become experts.

Nevertheless, everybody has to start somewhere with the game, and that somewhere should not immediately be real money poker tables.

If you’re new to the game or just looking for a solid strategy base, here are the basic concepts that you should know.

Table Position

One of the most overlooked concepts among poker beginners is table position, meaning you act after opponents.

Position is measured by where you sit in relation to the big blind. The dealer button is the latest position, while the small blind is the earliest.

The reason why position is so important is because it allows you to gain more information based on your opponents’ decisions. Additionally, having position on most or all of your opponents helps you control the pot size and better read your opponents’ hand strength.

On a 9 seat table, here’s how table position looks:

Early Position

Small blind, big blind, seat to the big blind’s left. You generally want to play strong hands from these spots because you don’t have as much information.

Middle Position

The next three seats. Middle position gives you an idea of what a few players are doing. But you still want to be cautious about what hands you play in this area.

Late Position

Dealer button, best, and the two seats to its right. Late position gives you a good opportunity to steal blinds, small pots, and judge opponents’ hand strength on later streets.

While it’s entirely possible to win from any position on the table, the majority of your Texas holdem winnings will come from late position, while most losses will come from early position.

Limit the Number of Hands You Play

The single biggest Texas holdem mistake bar none is playing too many hands.

Many new players think that they can play a wide range of hands on speculation. But the truth is that most of the 169 possible starting hands are complete garbage.

Before we continue, here’s a look at the top 10 starting Texas holdem hands:

These are premium hands that are playable in many situations, regardless of your table position.

As you can see, popular hands like A Q, K J, and 9 9 are not on this list. Yet many players treat these cards like they’re premium hands, playing them in any situation.

The majority of beginners also have trouble understanding how their hand strength relates to position.

If you have QQ through A A, table position won’t be a factor because these are premium hands. But when you play hands like K J, Q J, 8 8, and A T from early position, you can be put into a difficult situation if somebody raises.

Another mistake that players make is overvaluing speculative hands like suited connectors, or consecutive cards of the same suit, i.e. 6d 7d. While there are certainly times where these hands are valuable, you’ll be better off folding these cards the vast majority of the time.

In fact, you should be folding 80 to 85% of your hands until you develop a better understanding of poker. As you gain more experience, you’ll develop a better idea on when to play certain hands based on opponents, table position, and previous bets.

Reading Opponents

Reading Texas holdem opponents is less about identifying a nervous ticks than it is about paying attention.

When you first come onto a table with new opponents, you have no information about what range of hands they like to play or the type of bets they make in specific situations. The best that you can do in these situations is pay attention and take mental notes.

The good news is that if you’re folding 80 to 85% of the time like we suggested before, you’ll have plenty of hands to observe opponents. You can then use this information when you’re faced with difficult decisions against the same opponents whom you’ve been watching.

You’ll find no shortage of things to look for when observing other players. But key factors to look for include what range of hands they play in each position, when they bet, the size of their raises / re raises, and how often they bluff.

As you play more Texas holdem, you’ll eventually begin seeing patterns in less skilled opponents that you can exploit.

Limit Your Bluffing, Look for the Right Opportunities

Aside from playing too many hands, another mistake that new players make is bluffing too often. We can blame Hollywood for this, but the key is that you understand the reality behind bluffing.

Before we continue, the main types of bluff include: small bluffs, semi bluffs, and naked bluffs.

Small Bluff

Small bluffs are bets that are normally made in late position to steal blinds and small pots. The idea is to keep your bet low so that you risk very little to earn a small profit.

The flop is Js Jh 4c, and everybody checks to you on the dealer button.

Either somebody has a jack in this situation and they’re slow playing it, or nobody has a jack and they don’t like the board.

Odds are that it’s the latter, and you can steal this pot with a small bet that represents strength.

Semi Bluff

A semi bluff is a bet / raise where you don’t have a made hand, but you could possibly still win the pot later.

You raise pre flop with Ac Kc and draw two callers. The flop is dealt 10c 2h 8c.

The first player checks, and the second makes a two thirds, pot sized bet. You make a pot sized raise in late position in hopes of pushing them out of the hand.

Assuming they have any pair, then they currently have you beat. But the fact that you can still win with your over cards or flush draw makes this a semi bluff.

Naked Bluff

The naked bluff, a.k.a. stone cold bluff, is the type that you see in poker movies, where somebody goes all in with 2 7 off suit and forces a fold.

These are the worst possible bluffs because they leave you totally exposed and out your money if the opponent calls.

You raise with 8s 7s in late position to steal blinds, but the small blind calls. You then see a flop of Kc 4d 2c.

The opponent makes a two thirds pot sized bet to open, and you come back with a 1.5x pot sized raise.

You have absolutely nothing in this situation because both your flush and straight draws were killed on the flop. Your only hope is that the opponent doesn’t have kings, or another made hand, and folds.

Naked bluffs can be useful in the right situations, for the right player. But you need to have experience and good reads on opponents before you can turn these plays into long term profits.

A good rule of thumb is to completely avoid naked bluffs until you’re adept at small bluffs, semi bluffs, and reading opponents.

Understand Basic Poker Math

Poker is often miscast as a game where you need to make great reads and incredible bluffs to win. While these aspects can help you gain an edge, it’s far more important that you understand the math behind playing certain hands rather than when to bluff with 3 9 off suit.

Below are the most important Texas holdem math concepts in the order that you should learn them.

Counting Outs

The best place to begin is with counting your outs, or the number of cards needed to make your desired hand.

You have an open ended straight draw, meaning there are four cards on either end that will complete your straight, giving you 8 total outs.

In order to calculate your outs, you need to know how to read the board, which shouldn’t be hard as long as you understand poker hand rankings.

Also note that you can’t count outs that will give your opponent / s a better hand.

You have an open ended straight draw, but two diamonds on the flop. Anybody with two diamonds in their starting hand will form a flush if another one lands on the turn or river.

That said, you can’t count the two diamonds that will complete your straight on either end, thus reducing your outs to 6.

Pot Odds

Pot odds help you decide when to make a tough call based on the amount of money in the pot compared to how much you must contribute to see the next card / showdown.

$20 is in the pot and your opponent bets $10, making the total pot $30. You now need to call $10 to play for the $30 pot, making your pot odds 30 to 10 or 3 to 1.

This alone doesn’t tell you anything, which is why you must figure out your chances of getting the card you need to win the hand.

An easy way to do this is by taking your outs, then multiplying this number by 4, which puts your chances of winning the hand into a percentage.

You have a flush draw, which gives you 9 outs to make your flush. Multiplying this by 4, you have a 36% chance of making your hand, or a ratio of 64 to 36.

The final step is to compare your ratio of winning the hand 64 to 36 to your 3 to 1 pot odds.

Since it’s hard comparing 64 to 36 to 3 to 1, let’s simplify 64 to 36 by dividing 64 by 36, making the ratio roughly 1.8 to 1.

Now, you can compare your 3 to 1 pot odds to 1.8 to 1 hand odds.

The idea is that you want to call if your pot odds are higher than your hand odds. Since they’re higher, you would make the call in this instance.

Implied Odds

Once you’re adept with pot odds, you can start factoring in implied odds, which take into account whether calls are worth making based on future betting action.

The goal of implied odds is to determine if your opponent will pay you off after your drawing hand is completed. In essence, implied odds can make what appears to be a non-profitable call based on pot odds turn into a profitable call.

The only problem with implied odds is that they don’t have a clean mathematical formula like pot odds. Instead, you’re estimating based on the board and an opponent’s previous betting patterns if they will pay you off.

You work your pot odds out to 3 to 1, and your odds of winning a hand to 3 to 2. Based on pot odds alone, you shouldn’t make this call.

But let’s also say that you hold 8s 9c on a board of Jh 10h 3s, and your opponent bets into the pot. Based on their previous betting patterns, you feel that the opponent will pay you off if you make the straight.

Based on the slim ratio that you’re already facing with 3 to 1 pot odds versus 3 to 2 hand odds, any future raise from the opponent will make this play worth calling.

Reverse Implied Odds

Continuing on the example above, you also have to consider that your opponent could have a flush draw based on the board. And if they hit this flush, you’ll lose regardless of whether you complete the straight.

This is where you should consider reverse implied odds, or the amount of money that you stand to lose based on an opponent making their hand.

Just like implied odds, this concept doesn’t have a clean mathematical formula that you can base your decision on.

But the basic idea is that you don’t want to call without pot odds if an opponent / s can form a better hand than you based on the board.

Essentially, reverse implied odds call on your to forget implied odd when opponents are drawing for a better hand.

Texas Holdem Tournaments vs Cash Games

In order to win in both Texas holdem cash games and tournaments, you need to understand that there are crucial strategy differences between the two. Here’s a closer look at the strategy nuances that you’ll see when moving from cash games to tournaments.

Texas Holdem Cash Game Strategy

One notable aspect about cash games is that you theoretically have unlimited chances to win. If you go all in and bust out, you can buy back in and continue playing.

This allows you to be more aggressive with your chips and play the odds to a T. Furthermore, you’ll find that it’s always correct to chase draws when you estimate good pot odds and implied odds.

Even if you fail to make your hand, which happens the majority of the time, you’re still making smart positive expected value +EV plays.

Another notable factor about tourneys is that you should always be playing with a full stack size. This allows you to get maximum benefit out of any +EV situations where you need to make large raises / re raises or go all in.

Any time that your chip stack is less than the max buy in, you should get more chips to build it to the max.

Texas Holdem Tournament Strategy

Chips gain more value in poker tournaments because, outside of rebuy events, you can’t replace them. This means that you need to be more conservative with your chips in certain spots.

You’re getting 4.2 to 1 pot odds and have a 4 to 1 chance to hit your drawing hand. In a cash game, the correct decision would be to call; in a tournament, this thin value isn’t worth the risk to your stack size.

Aside from representing your tournament life, your chip stack size also plays a role in the overall strength of your bets, raises, and bluffs. The larger your stack, the better you can intimidate smaller stacks that are fighting for their tournament lives.

On the reverse side, having a smaller stack forces you to be more aggressive in situations that you might not otherwise be.

Specifically, when your chip stack falls below 10 big blinds, you need to look for any chance you can to steal blinds and / or double up. Oftentimes, these won’t be your favorite time to go all in, but you can’t afford to let the blinds wither your chip stack to nothing.

Quality of Tournament Players vs. Cash Players

One more thing worth noting is that you’ll generally face weaker players in Texas holdem tournaments.

For starters, Texas Holdem is one of the simplest poker variations to learn, making it popular among beginners and recreational players.

Another element is that players can only lose as much as their tournament buy in. This is more comforting than cash games, where there’s no limit on the amount of money that you can lose.

Online Texas Holdem vs Live Texas Holdem

Another big division in Texas holdem strategy comes between the live and online format. That being said, let’s look at what you need to be aware of when transitioning between the two.

Hands Per Hour

The rate of hands that you play in online poker versus live poker isn’t even close.

At a standard online Texas holdem table, you’ll play anywhere from 60 80 hands per hour HPH on average. If you multi table, you could easily play hundreds of HPH.

Contrast this to live poker, where, even with an experienced dealer, you’ll only play 20 to 30 HPH.

This is both good and bad as far as online poker goes. On one side, you gain more experience through internet poker since you’ll see more hands. On the other hand, you stand to lose more money if you’re not very good.

Assuming you do become great at poker, the online version will provide you with a better hourly rate. You can also get over downswings quicker since you’ll be playing more HPH.

Online Poker Forces You into Quick Decisions

Internet poker sites feature timers that force you into quick decisions.

This is good from the perspective that other players can’t stall when thinking about decisions. But it’s also bad when you’re trying to improve and can’t make snap decisions.

If you start playing bad due to the faster pace, this can lead to tilt, or the mental state where you make bad decisions because you’re no longer in the optimal poker mind state.

This makes being aware of yourself and your mind state one of the most important factors in online poker success.

Live Texas Holdem Offers Physical Tells

Texas Holdem Tournament Tips

The number of tells that you can gather from nervous facial expressions is overrated in live poker. But the fact is that you can gain physical information from live poker players through their facial expressions, hand movements, posture, and talkativeness.

When playing internet poker, the only tell that you have is your opponents’ betting patterns and range of playable hands.

This is still enough to gain crucial information that can help you win. But it also cuts out one weapon since you can’t physically observe how your opponents react in certain situations.

Texas Holdem Bankroll Management

Far too many beginning poker players jump into tournaments or cash games with only a few buy ins to their name.

We get it: the prospect of winning money through poker is exciting when you set your mind to it. But due to the variance / downswings of poker, you won’t last very long without a sizable number of buy ins.

Below, you can see what to plan for in terms of bankroll management.

What Stakes Should You Play?

The first step to poker bankroll management is figuring out how much money you can afford to play with. Look at your finances and bills, then come to a determination on a comfortable amount that you can put towards poker.

The next step is figuring out what stakes you should be playing based on this amount.

A good guideline for cash games is to never play stakes where you have to risk more than 5% of your bankroll at once. If you have $500 set aside, then you should never play a cash game where the max buy in is over $25.

Tournaments are different because there’s more variance involved due to only 10 15% of the field making money. This is why it’s good to play stakes where you can cover at least 100 buy ins.

If you want to play tourneys with $10 + $1 buy ins, you should have a bankroll of $1,100 or more.

Deal with Variance

Expanding on the previous topic, having a solid bankroll helps you survive downswings and variance that might otherwise wipe out your funds.

Given that poker has elements of chance, you’ll go through periods where nothing seems to go right no matter how well you’re playing. Bad beats, poor card runs, and tilt will all wreak havoc on your bankroll at some point.

Pulling out of these downswings not only requires patience and skill, but also enough money to cover the losses.

Focus on More Than Money

The primary reason why people play Texas holdem is to make profits. But if you’re only focusing on how much you win and lose each session, then you’ll do far more of the latter.

Instead, you should focus on goals that will improve your long term skills so that you can make money.

Examples of non monetary goals include:

• Playing x number of hands per month
• Studying poker strategy for x number of hours each week
• Playing sessions for x number of hours
• Spending x number of hours analyzing your own play

Drop Down in Stakes

What should you do when you can’t pull out of a rut and are questioning your poker skills?

The best answer is to drop down in stakes for two reasons: 1) you’ll facer weaker competition, and 2) you’ll be risking less money per buy in.

Nobody wants to work their way up to a certain level, only to have to drop down because they’re not playing well. But sometimes this is the best remedy when nothing else is going right.

Poker Tools to Help You Beat Texas Holdem

Poker Tournament Tips

What we’ve covered so far only scratches the surface of how you can become a better Texas holdem player.

The best tip we can give you is to never stop in your quest to keep improving because there’s always something to learn. Here’s a closer look at some tools that’ll boost your poker skills.

Texas Holdem Articles

Since the mid 2000s, thousands of poker articles have sprang up on the internet covering every Texas holdem topic imaginable.

You can either visit major poker sites and browse through their strategy section or just perform simple Google searches to find the exact topics that you’re looking for.

Texas Holdem Books

Books were once the dominant way to learn poker strategy. After all, the internet didn’t exist and players had no way to quickly access Texas holdem information.

Poker books aren’t as popular as they once were, but you can still find a great deal of information through both ebooks and hardcover works.

One of the best things about Texas holdem books is that they allow you to dive deep into the mindset of pros and how they play their hands.

Coaching

You can hire professionals to teach you poker either in person or online. Regarding the latter, coaches can use screen sharing software to see how you play internet poker and offer suggestions over the course of your play.

This is perhaps the quickest way to improve if you find a good coach. But the downside is that you have to pay a high hourly rate to hire the best coaches.

Forums

Since the Poker Boom, forums have become populated with both Texas holdem tips and discussion groups.

This has archived a great deal of poker strategy information that you can use to improve your play. You can even pose your own questions, although forums are becoming a less popular today thanks to the spread of social media.

Poker Software

Third party companies sell software that you can use at poker sites to gain advanced statistics on opponents.

The most popular type of software is a Heads Up Display HUD, which offers numbers and percentages on players’ tendencies.

Some HUDs can even offer you statistics on players whom you’ve never even seen. For this reason, many online poker sites have banned HUDs to give recreational players who don’t use software a fighting chance.

Training Videos

For Texas holdem players on a budget, the best value in poker strategy is training videos.

These videos feature mostly skilled pros explaining different strategy concepts while playing online poker.

This not only gives you more insight into how pros think, but it’s also cheaper than coaching. Many sites allow you to access thousands of training videos for a $30 monthly subscription fee.

Conclusion

One final thought on becoming a better poker pro is to constantly think about and analyze your play.

This is made easier through the use of online hand histories. But when you don’t have access to these, then at least replay difficult situations in your head and try to come up with solutions on how to work through these problems.

You can also pose specific hand questions / problems on forums or ask coaches.

Additionally, you should spend at least one hour studying strategy for every 3 to 4 hours you spend playing. This might not sound like fun, but the improvement that you see in your play will be well worth it.

And once again, there’s no cap on the amount of time that you can spend improving as a player. If you truly want to become a profitable player, then keep fine tuning your strategy and working your way up the stakes.

Welcome to our fully dedicated Texas Hold’em strategy section! This expansive collection of guides was put together by several highly-successful, past and present, professional poker players. Not only have these players been crushing the games for years, but they have extensive experience teaching and instructing students of all levels professionally. Their wealth of knowledge coupled with their experience in teaching makes for a real treat for you.

Normally, you’d have to pay for this kind of specific and valuable information. We’re offering it to you completely free of charge. The information is broken up into different sections based on skill level and specifically what you might be looking for. If you’re completely brand new to the game and don’t even know how to play, that’s ok! Take a minute and check out our complete Texas Hold’em guide. You can always come back and join us here when you’re ready to rock and roll.

For those of you that are ready, let’s dive into the strategy. If you are a newer player or not sure where the leaks in your game are, we recommend starting at the top of the guide and working your way through the entire thing. Just because something is labeled beginner or fundamental does not mean that it does not have some advanced strategy content sprinkled in. Texas Hold’em is a game that requires strong fundamentals if you have any dreams of ever being the best.

If you’re looking for specific information, we’ve added some convenient links here to the specific sections below. Click on the section you are looking for, and you will be taken to the information dedicated to that topic.

Let’s get the cards in the air and start learning how to crush Texas Hold’em.

Things You Must Know First

Regardless of your skill level, there are a few things that you must know before you get started building or retooling your Texas Hold’em poker game. In fact, the more skilled you are, the more important some of these tips are going to be to get the most out of your experience learning with us. Remember, we are not here to make you feel silly or look down on you. We are here to help you improve your game as much as possible.

Check Your Ego, Cash Your Checks

If you think you are the best and refuse to acknowledge that you can learn more and improve, you are doomed never to become a better player. Even the best players in the world admit that they need to be learning and growing their game constantly. They won’t refuse to listen to advice or suggestions because they think someone is a worse player than them. They will use their judgment on whether or not advice is important, but they are always open to improving.

You need to be the same way. Put your ego down at the door and open yourself up to changing your game. There is nothing wrong with admitting that you were doing something wrong or that there is a better way to do it. It does not make you any less of a poker player. What will make you seem like less of a poker player is if you start to struggle to beat the game because of your stubbornness.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel Overnight

This is the most important tip from this entire strategy guide. Whenever you go to change your game, you don’t want to try and do it all overnight. If you start adjusting a million things at once, your game is going to fall apart completely. Take one area of your game and work on improving it first. Once it gets better, move on to another area.

Imagine if you were working on a car and you adjusted every single part of the engine all at once. The chances that everything would work correctly would be so minimal. In fact, you’d probably break parts that were working just fine because you were trying to change too much. This is the same with your poker game. Start small and slowly rework everything. You’ll see better results, and you’ll know what is working and what is not. If you change everything and start losing, you’ll never know which things worked and which did not.

Take your time. Poker is not going anywhere. It’s as simple as that.

Fundamental Strategy

We’re about to put the “fun” in fundamentals. Sorry for the cheesy intro. In all seriousness, we are about to have some fun building or solidifying the foundation of your Texas Hold’em game. If you’ve been playing for a while and are ready to skip this section, please wait. From our extensive experience instructing, we’ve found that almost every player except for the elite has some sort of leak in their fundamentals.

This is by no means an insult to your game, but is just us being realistic. We highly recommend that everyone at least read through this section once. If you are brand new and know that you have some fundamental leaks, then we recommend spending some time in this section before you look to move on to the more advanced stuff. The information will always be here, and the games aren’t going anywhere anytime soon so take your time and do this right! It will pay off in the long run.

Beginner’s Tips

This is the number one starting point where anyone on their poker journey should begin. We’ve collected a massive number of tips to help new (and rusty) poker players get into the action. Have a tournament or a game coming up soon and need to get up to speed quickly? Not sure where else to start? You’re in the right place.

The best part of these beginner tips is that they aren’t as obnoxiously generalized as some beginner’s tips lists are. While we do talk some general theory and strategy, we also give you some actionable steps that you can take immediately to improve your game.

Factors Affecting Starting Hand Requirements

Texas Hold’em hands start with pre-flop action. This is your first and arguably biggest decision that you’ll make in the hand. If you have a firm grasp on which hands you should play from what positions, you’re going to set yourself up for success. If you don’t, though, you may be starting yourself down a dark road where you’re destined to lose a lot of chips or money.

Have a chart that you follow? If you follow the same starting hand requirements for every position every time, then you definitely want to read this guide. There are A LOT of different factors that go into what hands you should and should not be playing. We cover all of this and more in the guide below.

Trouble Hands Strategy

Trouble hands are probably the number one profit killer for poker players. These are hands that look great, they feel great, and they make you think they’re great. However, they’re hands that are easily dominated and can get you in a lot of trouble. They have a fantastic knack for giving you the second-best hand which is about the worst position you can be in with poker. We break these hands down and how to protect yourself from falling victim to their beautiful trap.

Bluffing Strategy

Bluffing…everyone’s favorite thing to do that they typically do the worst. Bluffing is an important part of no-limit Texas Hold’em and is integral to your success as a player. Does this mean you should be bluffing a ton? It does not. The biggest problems that people have with bluffing are that they do it too often and they do it at times that don’t make sense. Bluffing is all about telling a story that makes sense in a situation where it is profitable. We’ll walk you through every aspect of bluffing and turn you into a “professional bluffer” if there even is such a thing.

Pre-Flop Raise Sizing

One of the quickest ways to identify a bad player is by looking at their pre-flop raising sizes. Believe it or not, mistakes here can give away an enormous amount of information about your hand. As we already mentioned, mistakes pre-flop can set you up for failure on the rest of the hand no matter how well you play. This does not exclude pre-flop raise sizing. Learn the dos and the don’ts to help set yourself up for success.

Tournament Specific Strategy

If you’re playing Texas Hold’em tournaments the same way that you’re playing cash games, you’re going to have a bad time. While the game that you’re playing is exactly the same, the nuances in the formatting and the end goal of each make the strategic implications lightyears different. In the guides below, we walk you through the important strategies needed to crush tournaments and the specific strategies needed for each tournament type.

Differences from Cash Games

As we mentioned briefly above, tournaments are WAY different than cash games. Your goal is to outlast the rest of the field, not just win some chips. The blinds don’t stay the same, and the conditions of the game are always changing. Because of this, you have to be prepared to adapt appropriately or else you will get swallowed up by your opponents.

Understanding Blind Structures

A lot of players don’t realize that the structure of the blinds and antes plays a huge role in how you approach a tournament. As all structures aren’t created equally, all tournament strategy plans should not be created equally. We will walk you through how to interpret a blind structure, how to understand it properly, and most importantly how to alter your strategy accordingly. You’d be amazed at how many players struggle with this.

Deep Stack/ Early Stages Tournament Play

The early stages of a Texas Hold’em tournament play way different than any other part of the tournament. You have more chips, lower blinds, and a lot more reckless players and fish still left in the field. The value of certain cards and hands increase while the value of others decreases during this stage. It’s important to understand what you need to change to succeed through the early stages. If you never make it out of the early stages of a tournament, you’re never going to make any money.

Medium Stack/Middle Stages Tournament Play

As you now know how to work through the deeper stack stages of a tournament, you need to shift your focus to eh medium stack/middle stages of the tournament. As stack sizes shrink, your strategy is going to need to change. Things that you could do during the deep stack phases are no longer viable. Hands that were more valuable during the deep stack stage start to become less valuable. Hands that were less valuable start to grow in value.

While each stage of the tournament is important, this could arguably be one of the most important to get good at. Mistakes in this stage can be costlier and ruin your chances of making the money. Never fear, though, we will teach you everything that you need to know.

Short Stack Tournament Play

Being on the short stack is not somewhere we ever want to find ourselves in a Texas Hold’em poker tournament, but it inevitably will happen more often than you’d like. While you don’t have a lot of wiggle room to make moves, there are a lot of strategies that you can employ to steal chips, get that double up, and get yourself back into contention for the win. Playing the short stack is much more complicated than most players are aware of.

Bubble Play

The bubble of a Texas Hold’em poker tournament is either an exciting time or a terrifying time depending on what kind of player you are. For some, it’s a time that they can beat up on scared players who are trying their hardest to squeak into the money. Those players that are terrified of not making the cash despise the bubble time. We’re going to teach you which of these players you need to be, how to prepare yourself mentally to do that, and then how to strategically pick up a lot of chips to win the tournament. A lot of professional poker players would argue that a tournament is often won on the bubble and not so much at the final table.

The Art of the Deal

Sometimes in tournaments, you are presented with the opportunity to make a deal to end the tournament early. Players will negotiate how much each player will earn and if they want to continue playing for any portion of the prize pool. This happens when a tournament is top heavy or there is a steep increase in prize money.

For example, if first place is $1,000,000 and 2^nd place is $500,000, the final two players might not want to play heads-up for half a million bucks. Instead, they might agree to each take $700,000 and play for the last $100,000 and the trophy. This is called making a deal. Making a deal requires some skills and finesse to make sure you get the best deal and don’t screw yourself out of some serious cash.

Selling Action

What you may or may not know is that a large percentage of the time poker players do not have 100% of their action during a tournament. What does that mean? It means that a lot of times they have not paid their full buy-in themselves. Someone else or several other people have invested money into that player with hopes of a return.

Selling action is a great way to get into bigger tournaments that you might not otherwise have been able to. It’s also a great way to cut down on risk. It does have its drawbacks as well that you need to be aware of.

Types of Tournaments

As there is a multitude of different types of no-limit Texas Hold’em tournaments, there is also a multitude of different ways that you will want to approach these events. You aren’t going to want to play a freezeout the same way that you are playing a satellite tournament. While some of the strategies will bleed over for each format, there are things that will be independent for each style.

In the guides below, we walk you through what each type of tournament is as well as what specific strategies you need to use to dominate that format.

Cash Game Specific Strategy

At this point, it should be very clear to you that cash games and tournaments are lightyears different in a lot of ways. Not only are they formatted differently, but the strategies used to beat each are different. In the guides below, we’ll walk you through the specific things you need to know to beat no limit Texas Hold’em cash games.

Game Selection

One of the most overlooked strategies for Texas Hold’em cash games comes before you even sit down at a table. Game selection is the process of choosing which game you’re going to play. While this has some to do with which stakes you’ll play, it has more to do with picking a table within those stakes. Finding games that are easier to beat can be the make or break to your poker session. We will walk you through all the nuts and bolts of selecting the most profitable game to play.

Tracking and Analyzing Sessions/Software

Cash games are all about finding small edges and hammering them home. As the conditions you play in stay relatively the same (blinds/table size/etc.), a small leak can turn into a big one when it happens over thousands and thousands of hands. If you’re playing multiple tables at once, these leaks will compound and could have an even bigger effect on your end of the session bottom line.

Texas Hold Em Tournament Tips

This makes it that much more important to track your sessions, track your play, and use the tools available to analyze this information to make improvements to your game. We’re going to show you the right (and wrong) ways to track your data, the best ways to analyze it, and the tools and software available to help you do all of this more efficiently.

Advanced Strategy Concepts

If you’ve jumped straight to this section, we highly recommend that you go back and at least read through the earlier sections once. Properly understanding these sections depends on you having a firm grasp of the concepts we have already gone over. The worst that happens is you solidify your fundamentals and are that much more technically sound. Don’t worry, we will wait for you.

Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s jump into our more advanced concepts. The titles of some of these sections may seem less advanced to you, but that’s ok. Part of taking your game to the next level is knowing the advanced sides of the easy concepts. We hope you enjoy what we have put together for you here. This is the gold pot of this guide, and our Texas Hold’em guides.

Establishing Ranges

If you’ve never heard the term range before, we have a lot to go over which should be exciting to you. Poker is not ever about putting your opponent on an exact hand. If you have the ability to do this successfully, you’re probably already the best in the world. We can tell you, though, that’s probably not the case. Texas Hold’em poker is about putting your opponents on potential ranges of hands that they might have based on information you’ve taken from the hand and from history.

We’ll talk about how to build these ranges, how to apply those built ranges to your strategy and talk about how those ranges fit with your own ranges. It may seem confusing at first, but it will take your Texas Hold’em poker game to the next level. You want to know what the elite players are thinking about? This is what you’ve been looking for.

Continuation Betting

In the early days of poker, the continuation bet was the secret sauce. All you had to do was raise pre-flop and then blindly bet 100% of flops, and you would win in the long run. Unfortunately, those days are behind us. We will talk about why that used to work, why it doesn’t, work anymore, and what you should change about your game to effectively use continuation bets to turn a profit. This is one of those sections that surprises people that it’s more in-depth than they thought it could be.

Floating

If you think this has something to do with laying on top of the water, you’ve got a lot to learn. Even if you do know what floating is in regard to Texas Hold’em, you probably still do have a lot to learn. Floating is an advanced concept that was developed to combat the continuation bet. We’ll break it down for you and let you know the best ways and places to employ it for maximum efficiency.

Pre-flop Raising vs. Limping

This is one of those topics that might seem pretty self-explanatory, but we see players screwing this one up all the time. While there are no hard and fast rules on the topic, there are some things that you need to be aware of. How you choose to implement them into your strategy will be up to you. Whether you use a strategy or not, it is important that you know them in case it is something that your opponent is choosing to do.

3 & 4-Betting

3-betting is a concept that most players know they should be utilizing, but few do enough. Out of the ones that are utilizing it, a large number of them are using it incorrectly. On top of all of that, we see a lot of players reacting incorrectly to other player’s 3-bets. If there’s a top list of sections that we highly recommend you read in this strategy guide, this section would be on that list. Do yourself a solid and take a few minutes to go through the information we have put together for you.

While 4-betting is slightly less important depending on the stakes you are playing at, we still wanted to cover it. 4-bets can be important to protect your opening ranges and also as a nice combat to a player who is 3-betting incorrectly. If you’re confused, that’s ok. We will take you through every aspect of 4-bets and how to use them properly. We’ll also touch on how to react to 4-bets.

As a bonus, we will also touch very briefly on 5-bets for those of you that are clinically insane and like to light money on fire. There’s nothing like a cold 5-bet to get the juices running in the morning.

Live Poker Specific Strategy

Live Texas Hold’em and online Texas Hold’em are essentially the same game, yet there are some strategic differences that you need to be aware of. In the guides below, we’ll walk you through a few of the things you need to be aware of to crush live poker in a brick and mortar setting. This includes home games as well as playing in any casino poker room in the world.

Reads and Tells

One of the big advantages for most players playing live is that they can see their opponent’s faces. This allows a trained eye to catch tells and reads about what a person might be holding. We did say that this was an advantage for most players, but we specifically did not say all. One of the more important aspects of reads and tells is making sure that you are not giving off your own. Your opponents may not be great players, but you don’t want to give them a leg up on you by wearing your cards across your forehead.

Online Poker Specific Strategy

Texas Holdem Tournament Strategy Youtube

Just as there are strategies specific to playing live, there are strategies specific to online Texas Hold’em. A lot of people think that online poker is just clicking buttons. While they are somewhat correct, there is a lot of strategy that is different than playing in a brick and mortar setting. We will break everything down for you to help you be the best internet poker wizard there ever was.

Reads and Tells

Texas Holdem Tournament Strategy

There are reads and tells on the internet? Believe it or not, there actually are. While these sometimes can’t be trusted with as high of reliability as the live poker ones, they’re still valuable to know. Let us show you the parts of online poker that only the most brilliant and OCD of minds can see.

Putting It All Together

If you’ve made it this far and have not gone crazy from information overload, congrats! We’ve just unloaded years and years of knowledge on you in a very short time. Hopefully, you’ve learned a lot and have already started implementing these changes into your game. If there are sections you are unclear on, take some more time and go through them again. We don’t expect you to have picked up everything the first time through.

Remember, Texas Hold’em poker is a game that is learned quickly but takes a lifetime to master. There’s no reason to rush things and get ahead of yourself. Take your time and make small changes, so you don’t throw your whole game out of whack. The sky is the limit for you, and with hard work implementing what we taught you here today, you’re going to be crushing the world soon.