You’ve seen some poker on TV and it looks easy. You shove your chips in the middle, then wait for Mike Sexton or Norman Chad to hand you a million dollars in cash. After that extensive preparation, you sit down at your computer to play some online poker for the first time and, surprise surprise, the game isn’t quite as easy as it looks on TV. Instead of winning the million dollars, you lose your ass. Welcome to online poker. With very few exceptions, novice online poker players are losing online poker players.

Texas Hold’em is a deceptively complex game and only experience can familiarize you with those complexities. The first time you click your way to the table, you’ll be the least experienced player there, and you will make some mistakes. The thing to remember is not to make the biggest mistake of all. Many first-time players will join a game, lose and never play again. At least, they never take the idea of playing seriously again. They sit pissed off at their ignorance, convinced themselves they were just unlucky, shrug their shoulders and move on with life.

The thing is, over the long term, it’s not luck. Online poker is about making enough correct decisions to overcome the immediate effects of luck. Can pocket aces lose to a worse hand? You bet, but in the long run I promise they’ll make you more money than they lose as long as you give them the chance to. Don’t make the same mistake as those quitters; be patient, take your lumps and learn from your mistakes. “I played perfect poker” is an impossible statement to make, a perfect hand maybe but if you approach the Texas Hold’em with that understanding, you’ll win more, faster.

There is good news; the majority of those players never become winning players because they never arm themselves with knowledge.

Read a lot and more importantly play a lot.

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Rory Gold