Patience Poker
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In Hold'em Poker, patience is a virtue. Wait for good starting hands and then play them aggressively. But avoid getting trapped because you played a troublesome hand from early position, and then are forced to call a raise with a hand you suspect might not be the best hand even if the flop hits it. Patience Poker Player Profile, Patience Online Poker Rankings and Internet Poker Player Stats on partypoker. To illustrate the connection between patience and success, let’s leave the world of poker for a moment and look at the famous “marshmallow experiment” performed at Stanford University in the 1960s. Psychologist Walter Mischel took a group of four-year-old children and, one by one, offered them a marshmallow. Poker Strategy With Greg Raymer: Patience Vs. Aggression In Tournaments Raymer Explains What It Takes To Make A Deep Run In A Tournament: by Greg Raymer Published: Jun 15, 2020. Phil Hellmuth White Belt Poker: Lesson 6 - Patience Is A Weapon - YouTube - Learn which poker hands will assure steady profits - Begin to read your poker opponents using Animal Typologies - Master.
Playing Patience Poker
Please let me encourage you to reach out to me with article ideas and questions for future columns. You can tweet to me at @FossilMan, or send me a message at info@fossilmanpoker.com.
I received this email recently, and thought this was a topic that many readers would relate to.
Hi Greg,
I just finished your book. I liked it! Well written. I liked the examples provided to clarify/emphasize your point. Is it better to be patient or to be aggressive to make it deep into a tournament? Which strategy will take your further?
Thanks, John
I’m pleased you liked my book, and thank you for the kind words. Now to dig into your question. My answer, in its simplest form, is you are asking the wrong question.
You pose the question as if we are talking about a greyscale, with pure white at one end, pure black at the other, and shades of grey in-between. For your question, it presupposes that being more aggressive means being less patient, and vice versa. It is kind of like asking me if I like my Thai curry to be creamier, or spicier? You can change one without affecting the other. In poker, you can be both more patient and more aggressive, at the same time.
The real trick is figuring out when it is a good time to be more patient, in the sense of folding the current hand and waiting for something better. And figuring out when it is a good time to play the hand you are dealt, and take some risk in doing so.
Patience Poker Card Game
Overall, whenever you choose to play a hand, it is almost always better to play the hand aggressively. One of my favorite training exercises I teach my students is the “No-Call” game. When doing this, you enter a low buy-in game, preferably a tournament, and the rule for this training exercise is you are never allowed to call. Even though there are many situations where calling is the better choice, for training purposes, you never call. The only exception is when raising is not an option.
For example, if you are heads-up and the opponent goes all-in, you are allowed to call, since raising is not an option. However, if there is a third player in the pot who also has more chips than the all-in player, raising is an option, and you must raise or fold.
This exercise teaches the student to be more aggressive, as they no longer have the passive option of calling. They can still check, fold, bet or raise. They just can’t call. Most players are surprised at the numerous times they normally would have called, now raise instead, and take down the pot immediately.
Another big factor in this exercise is that many players are much too loose, and should be playing fewer hands. This exercise forces them to fold all those mediocre and weak hands. And if not, then they must raise with those hands, and try to bluff with them!
As for patience, all the best players have it in abundance. Those who don’t are not really as good as their reputation would suggest. The only exceptions I can think of are some great short-handed players who play way too many hands in a full-ring game, but know they do so. Their solution is to only play in short-handed games. In truth, they ought to be able to become good players at a full table, but for some reason don’t have it in them to fold so often.
For the rest of us, we do need to learn to wait and only play starting hands that are going to be +EV (positive expected value) for us to play. Another factor here is that this is not a fixed and rigid range of hands. You can correctly play many more hands from late position than early position. You can play many more hands in certain situations, such as being a big stack near the bubble. Learn all you can to recognize all the +EV spots you are dealt, play most of those aggressively, and just fold all the rest. ♠
Greg Raymer is the 2004 World Series of Poker main event champion, winner of numerous major titles, and has more than $7 million in earnings. He recently authored FossilMan’s Winning Tournament Strategies, available from D&B Publishing, Amazon, and other retailers. He is sponsored by Blue Shark Optics, YouStake, and ShareMyPair. To contact Greg please tweet @FossilMan or visit his website.
Practice, Psychology, Patience and Position in Poker
f there is one thing that I know about poker, it is going to be how you can tell a professional poker from just an avid poker player. Are you an avid poker player that is looking to up their skills to be defined as a professional poker player? To be honest, there is a lot that you need to do in order to gain Professional Poker Player Skills, however, if you are willing do it – it can absolutely be worth it in the end and hell, you might even be able to enter yourself in a few tournaments and win them!
One of the first things that you need to learn is math. In poker, you truly do need to be really good at poker and that is something that not everyone in the world can master. You need to learn to master the odds of certain combinations that have come out on the table already and you need to make sure that you can compute the number of outs because that is very important.
Outs are basically the number of cards that will improve your hand. You are basically going to be by multiplying by two and adding one and that is going to be the percentage of hitting the pot. It is all about math in the game of poker!
Psychology of Poker
Many people think that poker is just a game that you can learn and with practice slowly but surely become good at it – while some of that is true, there is a lot of psychology that goes behind the game of poker that you need to learn. To be quite frank, poker is all about psychology and you truly need to make sure that you know who you are playing with – after all, poker is a game that people play with cards, not a card game that plays with people right?
You really must always make sure that your eyes are on the prize and that you know the players that you are playing with. How do they play? Have they played in the past? How long have they been playing? Do they know what I have in my hand? Are they bluffing? All of these are questions that you need to ask yourself about every player that you play with – after all, you need to get inside their head to truly win.
Poker is a fun game but when money is involved, you truly need to think about yourself and make sure that you are thinking about the other players at the table!
Practicing Poker
Now that we have talked about the psychology of poker, the next step you will need to take in order to improve your game is going to be practicing! Now – it is a known fact that poker players are cocky … most of them anyway and they think as soon as they learn enough about the game they do not have toe practice any longer. That information is false and you can trust me on this subject – practice is something that you need to do and do it a lot.
Knowing how the game works and runs is only going to work to your advantage and the more you practice and more you put yourself in every poker situation possible, the better off you will be. Another tip or trick you should take me up on is reading … a lot. There are a ton of different poker books out there and you should take advantage of them too – developing your own strategy is hard and having some knowledge about poker will help you.
In the next blog, we are going to talk about your position and just how much you need to be aware of that in order to improve your game overall!
Poker Position
Now that you know a little bit about how to fully play the game of poker, you now need to make sure that you understand your position at the table. To be perfectly honest, when I first started playing poker, I truly had no idea that I needed to be aware of where I was sitting at the table – the reason? Because in the game of poker, you have to be aware of everything in the world and you want to make sure that you are playing your very best hands.
Now, I know that being aware of your position is something that can be easy, but being aware of the other people’s positions at the table? That can be something that you might have a little trouble with – however, you want to make sure that you are paying attention to pretty much everyone at the table, including yourself.
In the next blog, we are going to talk about how you need to be patient and how you need to make sure that you wait for the right hand – it can be difficult!
Patience in Poker
Poker is a game of strategy – those of you that have ever played the game know that, however, did you know that having patience in poker is actually something that is only going to benefit you in the end? Poker is a game of waiting – you have to wait for your turn, wait to raise, wait to ensure you have the best hand and hell, even wait for the best hand to come about.
That is why patience is something that you need to have – if you are constantly on edge, not relaxed and are certainly not patient, you are not only going to be someone that no one wants to play with, but you are not going to be the best poker player, which is truly what these tips and tricks are all about.
So make sure that you hype up your patience level and ensure that you have enough patience in order to play this particular card game!