What do you wish you'd known when you first started playing poker?

If you could go back in time, what’s the most sage advice you’ve learned about poker that could give your “younger self”?

If I could go back in time and give my “younger self” advice about what I’ve learned about Poker it’s that to be successful in Poker you have to study the game and your aren’t gonna become a great player overnight.

To be successful at Poker you have to put in hours of studying (reading , watching strategy videos online and watching Poker itself to learn the fundamentals of Poker. After that you have to put in hours of playing to gain experience and try the strategies that you’ve studied to see which strategy works best for you. There will be downswings , you’ll bust your bankroll a few times and there may even be times when you wanna quit playing Poker but if you truly love the game you’ll keep studying and developing yourself as a player.

The most important piece of advice I’d give my “younger self” is to keep your emotions in check. Poker is a game that has a lot of emotion. If you’ve suffered a bad beat you might be frustrated and mad which will likely result in you making bad plays at the table that you wouldn’t normally make. You just gotta take a deep breath , evaluate the situation and try to forget about the bad beat moving forward.

-Marc

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To be honest, if I could go back in time, the last thing on my mind would be how to play poker :joy:
There’s a huge list of things that I would want to tell my younger self other than how to play poker lol.

But if I had to talk about poker, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s a learning curve and no matter how much advice you give/get, nothing replaces practice. The only thing I would advise my younger self would be to sign up to Replay sooner :wink:

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This is pretty minor, but it was a a big aha moment for me when I read Annie Duke’s “Decide to Play Great Poker” and learned from her not to be seduced by suited hole cards. Just because I get suited hole cards doesn’t mean I should get too excited, even if they’re high cards (but not pairs). I fold more suited hole cards now than I used to, even though they look awfully tempting sitting there in their matching outfits! lol

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Suited preflop, you will flush by the river just under 7% of the time. Yeah, most people over-value suited cards.

If I could tell my starting self something, it would be to play fewer hands, but play those I do play more aggressively.

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Pocket rockets can and do crash and burn. Think every player goes through the golden ace stage where you think any ace is a guaranteed win.

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I wish I had known the internet was going to come along, so I could have been light years ahead of everyone by having all the numbers first.

I wish I had known (sooner than I did) that lending money was effectively giving it away. Funding my own International Playboy lifestyle in the casinos of 1990’s north of UK was volatile enough, without funding other peoples various habits too.

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I wish I had known that I needed to fold to really big bets a lot of the time…

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Besides the fact that Stu Ungar was ridiculously good. My advice to me is : to be more patiently aggressive or aggressively patient. Also, Min bets to the river will drown your tookus.

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Never try to fill an inside straight.

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what beats what :slight_smile:

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That “Aces, Deuces, Suicide King, One eyed King” and all other sorts of home card games doesn’t teach you good poker.

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how to use forum reply ?

That I’d be smoking more cigarettes and drinking more coffee. :slight_smile:

That no matter how sad I was that the Fantasy Blackjack site quit being free, Poker Replay would become even more addicting. Also, that you don’t have to bet the first time you get a pair, wait until the other cards are dealt. In addition, that there would be so many mucking bluffers in these games and that when a hand ends with two full houses and someone getting four of the same card…that’s probably not real life. It is fun, but with my only experience with poker being on here…would be scared to sit down to a real money situation.

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That live poker and online poker are two different worlds.

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Spend more time studying potential hands from community cards and less time hoping that you will improve your own hand. Fold early to big bets. Poker is like flying–hours and hours of tedium with moments of great excitement.

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i would stop that 3rd beer and quit smoking crack. also no more midget porn during games!! just saying.

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