Poker, at its most basic level, is about making money. Therefore, every time you sit down at a poker table, both live and online, your focus should be to walk away with as much of it as possible.
Poker Is All About Profit
You can view any winning experience as positive but in order to really make a real and consistent profit you are going to need to take a hard look at the amount of effort you put into ensuring you are getting the most money per hand and per session.
Use Tactics To Increase Your Winnings
Many things can take place during a given hand that can and will change the amount of money that is put into the pot. If you play a premium hand timidly and check on every street, you have not done the required effort to build a juicy pot.
However, if you take those same circumstances and implement tactics, such as traps and value bets, you can be sure you did everything possible to maximise the potential profits from the hand. Do not let fear play a factor; if the cards, maths and timing are right, it is in your best interest to do what is necessary to grow the pot.
Pick On The Weak Players
One of the biggest mistakes we make as players is that we constantly allow weaker opponents off the hook. We will check the river, because we feel as though we are stealing chips from them, because they always make bad calls, or we ignore making a standard pre-flop raise for the same reason.
Get that nonsense out of your head right away; going after the fish in a game, is always going to be the best way for you to make the most money in a session, so it is time you focus on identifying who these players are.
You can also help yourself get the most profit from a session by tightening up any holes in your game that result in you giving away lots of chips unnecessarily. This includes not having a good grasp on hand selection, as it applies to positioning, which means that you are entering pots that you have no place being in.
Although you may view it as just one big blind call, here and there, that is the kind of stuff that adds up in the long run and can have a major impact on your total profits.
Key Points
• Understand that poker is about making money.
• Employ tactics, such as traps and value bets to extract chips from opponents.
• Focus on the weaker players at the table.
• Work on improving your own weaknesses.
Chris
- Chris Laquinta is a magazine editor, content specialist and poker fanatic with 10+ years writing experience and over 1,500 published articles. Chris is a naitive of Southern California, where he spent his entire life learning gaming concepts and theories from relatives that had been former professional gamblers. He currently resides in Torrance, CA where he works as a professional content writer and part-time SNG professional.
