First Tips 1: Play at Fewer Hands but Aggressively
There is a limit as to how many starting hands you can play before the flop in IDN Poker. Even for the world best players, if you try to play with too many hands, you will bleed away your chip stacks.
Developing a solid pre-flop poker strategy is by far the easiest and fastest way to improve your bottom line. However, the best way to approach this is to play a tight range of strong or playable hands and you need to play those hands aggressively.
Playing all of your hands aggressively, including the more speculative ones like 7♠ 6♠ or 5♥ 5♣, allows you to disguise the strength of your actual hand. When you raise, your opponents won’t know whether you have A-A, A-K, or 7-6, which makes you super tough to play against. Tight and aggressive wins the game!
Poker Tips 2: Don’t Be The First Player to Limp
Limping otherwise being called the big blind pre-flop is an absolute no-no as to the first player to enter the pot. There are two reasons why you shouldn’t do this:
- You can’t win the pot before the flop like you could if you raised.
- You give the players behind a very enticing pot odds, making it more likely you face multiple players and thus less likely you will win the pot.
The only acceptable situation in which to limp is when at least one other player has already limped. This is called over-limping and it can be a good play.
Poker Tips 3: Semi-Bluff Aggressively
If you want to truly win that poker round, you will need to bluff effectively. The most effective way to bluff is to let the cards you have dictate if you are going to bluff or not. This means bluffing with hands that have outs to improve to the best hand on a later street, such as straight draws, flush draws, or even just an over card or two to the board.
Poker Tips 4: Fast-Play Your Strong Hands to Build The Pot and Make Money
It’s a sad sight to see when a player checks their flopped nut flush three times, and then has to awkwardly table their monster of a poker hand when their opponent checks back the river. Slow-playing is often a mistake among players who are afraid of chasing their opponents out of the pot when they have strong poker hands.
In most cases, its best to bet your strong hands in order to build the pot and protect your equity. You can check your strong hands if:
- it’s unlikely that you will be outdrawn
- There aren’t many scare cards to prevent you from getting paid on later streets.
- Your opponent’s range is heavily weighted towards hands with no showdown value.
However, when you feel uncertain, just bet or check-raise if you weren’t the preflop aggressor.
Poker Tips 5: Attack Whenever You See Your Opponent Project Weakness
When your opponent’s show a lot of weakness in a heads-up pot (like if they check on the flop and the turn), take advantage of it with an aggressive bluffing strategy. Not only should you bet with your usual semi-bluffs, you should also bet as a pure bluff with some nothing hands, ideally ones with a good blocker effect.
Final Tips: Only Play Poker If You Feel Like It
Poker should only be a fun experience, regardless if you are going to play it as a hobby or as a professional player. You will only perform your best when you are happy, so it will only make sense that you should only play this when you are mentally feeling like it. If you feel frustrated or anger, you should just quit the session right then and there. You will be saving yourself a bunch of money by doing such.
