Keys to Becoming a Better Poker Player Part 1

Lou Krieger provides some pointers on how to improve your game. Lou is the host of Royal Vegas Poker and author of numerous books on poker including The Poker Player's Bible and Hold'em Excellence.

Do you want to become a better poker player? Read on. Here are six things you can take to heart, and every one of them will improve your game.
Know Your Numbers:
If you don’t learn, understand, and use poker’s mathematical parameters, you can’t expect to be a consistent winner in the long run. For example, if you’re playing hold’em and flop a four flush but don’t know what your chances are of making a flush, what will you do when it’s your turn to act? How will you ever know whether calling, raising, or folding is a play with a positive expectation? Finding positive expectations is the essence of winning poker, and it’s no more complex than recognizing those situations that will show a profit if they could be replayed time and again.

Since poker has a large element of short-term luck, it doesn’t matter whether any one effort is successful. What does matter is knowing when a positive expectation is associated with a given play, then making it. Imagine you’re faced with a $20 call into a $100 pot, but the odds against making your hand are only 3:1. That’s a positive expectation. Repeated 100 times, you’d expect to lose $20 on 75 of those occasions, for a loss of $1500, but on 25 occasions, you’ll win $100, for a total of $2500. Your net win of $1000 ($2500 - $1500) is what’s important — not whether you won or lost on any particular hand. Divide your $1000 win by the 100 times this situation occurred, and you’ll see that in the long run, each correct decision was worth $10 to you.
Applying mathematics, statistics, and probability to poker can be an incredibly involving subject, one that cannot be covered adequately in any one article. But if this article is able to merely raise your awareness about its importance, it will be successful.

Source: Internet Texas Hold Em