Poker Teaching App
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The ‘No Time for Study’ Plan. This poker study plan is exactly what the time-strapped poker player needs. This is a KISS-inspired plan that only requires 10 minutes of study per day. This means the majority of each week’s poker time is dedicated to playing and purposefully practicing the skills you’re studying. World Series of Poker (WSOP) This highly renowned poker series also has one of the best free apps. 'The best interactive poker training software on the web bar none. APT is more than just a training site, it’s a community of like-minded poker enthusiasts who learn and train together.' KENNA JAMES, POKER AND LIFE COACH Advanced Poker Training will take your game to the next level and help you become the player you were meant to be. Jonathan Little is well-known for providing tons of free quality poker strategy tips. Raise Your Edge. Raise Your Edge has not been around as long as some other poker.
Below are your FREE POKER RESOURCES
Scroll down and you’ll find the free resource you signed-up for along with plenty of others. Click to download and step into action as you work to improve your game on and off-the-felt.
The Ultimate Poker Resource Guide
41 Statistics and Win Rates Tracker
This super-useful stats and win rates tracker will help you find areas of opportunities in your database of PokerTracker 4 hands. It was shared in episode #320: The Simple and Efficient Way to Study Your Online Poker Hands on 12/4/20.
7 Characteristics and Exploits Against the 4 Common Player Types
This handy sheet for understanding the characteristics of different poker player types and ways to exploit each was just discussed in podcast episode #289: How to Spot and Exploit the 4 Common Poker Player Types on 5/1/20. Previously mentioned in podcast episode #123: Gathering Information On Opponents.
The ‘No Time for Study’ Plan
This poker study plan is exactly what the time-strapped poker player needs. This is a KISS-inspired plan that only requires 10 minutes of study per day. This means the majority of each week’s poker time is dedicated to playing and purposefully practicing the skills you’re studying. This was discussed in podcast episodes #219: A Poker Study Plan for those with no time and #260: A Simple Poker Study Plan.
Statistical Tracker
This Statistical Tracker (in Word format) will help you track your changing statistics as you study and work to improve your game. It contains all of the important PokerTracker 4 stats found within the LeakTracker function. This was discussed in podcast episode #246: 8 Micro Stakes Poker Questions’ originally released on 7.15.19.
The Top 11 Poker Profit Boosters
Are you looking for some simple fixes to the actions that are costing you money on the felt? This PDF consolidates everything I taught in episode #240 into an easy-to-follow one page guide to earning more profits. This was discussed in podcast episode #240: 11 Profit Boosting Solutions to Poker Losses’ originally released on 6.7.19.
10 Action Steps from ‘Exploitative Play in LIVE Poker’
I’m sure you know how good this book by Alex is, but have you gotten all from it that you can? Put these 10 Action Steps (download here) into practice as you read the related chapters to understand the strategies Alex discusses. This was discussed in podcast episode #231: ‘Exploitative Play in LIVE Poker’ by Alex Fitzgerald originally released on 4.16.19.
KISS Cash Game Ranges
These ranges were created for my book Preflop Online Poker. I’ve given out previous KISS Cash Game Ranges, but these are the most recent (updated 1.12.19). These ranges are exactly what you need to give yourself a mathematical edge and crush the micro stakes games. The ranges here contain basic instructions on how to use them. Read Preflop Online Poker for more detailed instructions.
Double-Studying Your Hands Spreadsheet
This spreadsheet will help you take notes on the initial review of a hand and each subsequent review. The purpose of double-studying hands is to see how your knowledge has developed through your studies and play. This was discussed in the YouTube Video called Double-Studying Tagged Hands posted on 11.27.18.
Board Texture Spreadsheet
This spreadsheet was created first for my 28 Days of Poker Study, but it ended up being a perfect fit for the Cbet MED series. I filled out the first table for you, but it’s your job to do the rest. I could give the answers to you, but you really won’t learn much if I did that. You’ll get so much more from this spreadsheet if you just spend an hour on it while using Flopzilla. Discussed most recently in episode #209: Q&A on 3bets, Cbets and Set Mining. Originally from episode #134: Cbetting Board Textures MED #6 Class #2 on 4/14/17.
HUSNG Poker Challenge Tracker
This tracker allows you to track your HUSNG progress. First discussed in episode #175: “Valuable Lessons from 263 Heads Up Sit and Go Matches (HUSNG)” on 2/10/18.
66-Day Challenge Tracker
This 66-Day Challenge Tracker will help you develop healthy habits through 66 days of purposeful action. Discussed in episode #168: Sleep, Eat, Move, Improve… Your Mind on 12.10.17.
Observation HUD
This PokerTracker 4 HUD was created to help myself stay focused on the action at the table instead of over-relying on HUD stats. Discussed in episode #144: Observation HUD and the Simple Truth on 6/23/17.
30-Day Poker Study Challenge Tracker
This great 30-day tracker will help you build the habit of poker study into your daily routine. It’s not designed to make you a poker master or a specific skill ninja, but will help to ingrain the valuable habit of study into your life. First discussed in episode #42: Plug Your Leaks #4: Poker Study Apathy on 3/8/16.
Leak Plugging PDF
This 6-page leak plugging PDF gives you all the information you need to diagnose and plug 6 different, common and costly poker leaks. This was shared in 4 leak plugging podcast episodes #38, #42, #47 and #49 from early 2016.
7 Steps to Poker Book Learning PDF
This great one-page PDF contains the 7 steps to getting the most from every poker book you read. First discussed in episode #21: How to Learn from Poker Strategy Books on 2/2/16.
Poker Journal Questions PDF
This 2-page Word document contains 12 questions to help you keep track of your play sessions and study sessions in your poker journal. First discussed in episode #15: Poker Journal on 1/27/16.
3bet Re-steal Poker Challenge Tracker
This nifty tracker will help you improve your 3bet skills. First discussed in the blog post called 3bet Re-steal Poker Challenge on 7/2/15.
The Best Use of Your Time
If you’re looking for a good place to start your poker education journey, I suggest you check out my MED’s of Poker Series of podcasts, starting with Episode #87. This series gives you a poker skill development road map to follow. Spend one week studying each episode in the series as you play with purpose every day. Man, I wish somebody had given me a path to follow when I started taking poker seriously and began studying the game.
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If you love reading books, I’ve written 3 so far. Check ’em out:
- How to Study Poker Volume 1 – this gives you all the study techniques I use and share with my students that lead to quicker skill improvement.
- How to Study Poker Volume 2 – this book demonstrates all of my study techniques from volume 1 as I take you through 4 weeks of studies I actually completed on hand reading, defending against check-raises, preventing tilt and much more.
- Preflop Online Poker – I give you a road map that helps you build foundational preflop skills like open-raising, 3betting, defending your blinds and exploiting your opponents.
If you’re into video learning, check out my YouTube Channel where I have over 600 videos for you to learn from. Here are some of my YT playlists:
Nearly everyone learns and teaches poker in the same way. I think there's a better way. Decide for yourself.
I learned poker — and I suspect you probably did, too — by starting with the poker hands. That is, we begin on the poker path by first learning what beats what.
We teach new players that a pair beats no pair, two pair beats a pair, three of a kind beats two pair, and so on all the way up to a royal flush. We might print out the hands for easy reference while they are playing their first game.
Then we typically teach how the cards are dealt (differently for different variations of the game). After that we teach how to ante, what the blinds are, and other essentials of betting, checking, raising, calling, and folding.
This method surely works. Poker is not that hard of a game to teach, and newcomers generally learn how to play this way well enough, often within just 10-15 minutes or so.
But I think this way of teaching poker is wrong! Or at least it obscures what is the most important aspect of the game.
Consider for a moment what the essence of poker is. What makes it different from all the other card games? It's the betting, isn't it?
Bridge, gin rummy, Go Fish, hearts — these are all card games with a strategy that involves the playing of the cards. Though you might play these games for money, they are not about the money, nor is money an fundamental part of the game. In these games, any money wagered is incidental to the correct strategy.
Poker Games App
By contrast, poker is a betting game played with cards. In fact, if you think about it, the cards themselves are really incidental to the game, which is essentially a contest that is focused on the money.
Even if you play poker only for chips (as I did when I was a child), the game still is all about the money substitute — the accumulation of chips. Take away the chips and the money, and poker is really no game at all.
The way we teach poker should reflect that. I say start with the betting, not the hand rankings. Yes, start with the betting even for the very young and completely inexperienced.
Here's what I do.
Set aside the five-card game of poker initially. Instead teach one-card poker. You can call it 'poker war,' because it's really just the game of 'War' played for money.
You remember War, don't you? It was probably the first card game you learned. I was taught it when I was five. It's absolutely the simplest card game there is.
Take a deck and split it in half. Let your opponent pick one half, and you take the other. You each turn over a card, and the high card wins both cards. Turn over the next card, and the high card wins both cards. And so on. That's pretty much it.
If you both turn over cards of equal rank, you deal three more cards to each player and then turn over the fourth, and the high card wins all of the cards. You keep this up until one player has all the cards. Pretty simple.
With 'poker war,' you start the same way. You each get half the deck, but you also each get an equal stack of chips. Before you turn over a card, one player puts in one chip and the other player puts in two chips.
You then follow the same rules of betting as in no-limit hold'em. You may call or fold or raise — as little as two chips or as much as you have in your stack. If you want you can also teach the betting as it is in stud games or limit games, with antes and bets of fixed amounts.
The key is that you are teaching the betting first, in this case with the players betting on a single card. If there's a showdown, the high card wins. If a player folds and there's no showdown, the last aggressor who wasn't called wins. If there's a tie you split the pot. You start with two players and you expand it to as many players as are learning.
Once players understand the basic rules of betting, you explain and demonstrate basic strategy. You explain what a tight strategy is, and you give some examples by showing how one might decide to only bet with an ace. You explain the limitations of that strategy, telling how it would soon be detected by an opponent who would then refuse to call any bet you made, but who would bet every hand to win the antes.
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You would then demonstrate bluffing and how someone might win some pots without the strongest hand simply by betting strongly and getting his opponent to fold his hand — even to fold a better hand. You'd then discuss the problems of bluffing too much and how opponents would learn to call your hand even when they weren't very strong.
You could then demonstrate a loose-aggressive strategy, a wild strategy, a calling station strategy, and so on. New players would first learn to understand betting strategies without thinking about the more complicated five-card hands and the resulting situations that arise when you are considering cards to come.
Only after the new players played 'poker war' for a while and began to understand betting would you introduce the complexity of a five-card hand and the dealing of a game that presents the hand in stages with betting rounds in between. In this way they would understand the hands in the context of the betting, helping them grasp the importance of betting first rather than initially focusing on the absolute strength of their hand.
Then you'd teach them how the five-card hand would be assembled. For example, if the game is hold'em, you'd explain the two hole cards, the flop, the turn, and the river, and how a five-card hand is made from the best available among the seven total. First betting, then hands, and then dealing. That's the order in which I teach new players how to play poker.
I have never known anyone who couldn't eventually figure out the ranking of the hands in poker. It is not hard even for the slowest among us. But I have known many poker players — even relatively smart ones — who get stuck on thinking far too much about the absolute value of their cards and fail to recognize the essential betting truth that winning at poker depends more on how you bet your hand than what that hand actually is.
That lesson — the absolute importance of the betting that surrounds the cards — is much more easily grasped, I have found, when teaching new players first about the betting of poker rather than the hand rankings.
Maybe you disagree. Now you have a different method to try out so you can see for yourself.
Ashley Adams has been playing poker for 50 years and writing about it since 2000. He is the author of hundreds of articles and two books, Winning 7-Card Stud (Kensington 2003) and Winning No-Limit Hold'em (Lighthouse 2012). He is also the host of poker radio show House of Cards. See www.houseofcardsradio.com for broadcast times, stations, and podcasts.
Photo: Not Merely Living.
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Tags
beginner strategyno-limit hold’emhand rankingsvalue bettingbluffing