General poker advice

Before you can even begin to learn Holdem strategy, you need to understand a few basic things about the nature of the game. Texas Holdem features a much higher short-term variance than other poker variants like Omaha and Stud. This means you have to think long-term. Winning isn’t about taking down one big pot or two, it’s about putting a few small edges to work over and over again.

According to Sklansky, successful poker can be summed up like this: every time you make a decision which is the same one you’d make if you could see your opponent’s hole-cards, you gain value. Every time you make a different decision, you give value up.

While it is humanly impossible to play every hand according to that law, it is certainly within every player’s abilities to take advantage of the next best thing, and act on positive EV situations.

This way, the above theorem can be reformulated like so: Every time you play EV+ you gain a little value, every time you get stuck on the EV- you lose some. This is valid regardless of the outcome of any particular bet. Sure, sometimes you’ll lose on EV+, because a bunch of fish decide to school up on you and outdraw you on some runner-runner hand. If you stick to EV+ though, those losses shall be made up for in the long-run.

Let’s see an example of the Expected Value or Mathematical Expectation in action. You walk into a casino and start playing roulette. On average, there’s about a 5.5% house edge on any bet (except the 5 numbers one which is slightly bigger). This means the house has a 5.5% positive Expected Value on your every bet. This is exactly why it is in their interest to make you place as many bets /hour as possible. The interesting thing is, because of repeated bets, something called the house drop will also seep into the deal, and thus you’ll end up struggling against an edge of 21-30% which is a great EV for the house.

Poker works in similar fashion, only it befalls to you to decide whether you want to play the role of the house in the above example or that of the player.