Poker Secret: What the Poker Pros Don't Share In Their Books

If you are just getting into poker I am sorry to say that you just missed a wave. The game became hugely popular a few years ago with the internet poker boom and huge television coverage. The game is still very popular but it has kind of cooled down a little bit. If you have been playing in your home games and doing well, that's great. If you are thinking of venturing out to the casinos and trying your luck, there is something that you should know.

Most people when they start to get excited about playing poker in the casinos are doing it for fun. That means, a lot of the players you will encounter are recreational players. They are not much different than people in the casino who are playing slot machines and roulette. They have played poker before, they have a general understanding of the game and they want to throw their cards into the mix and see how things go.

Some of the people you will encounter at a poker game in casinos will be more like you. They have researched the game, they have played for a little while and they are looking to broaden their gaming experience. They will not necessarily be as free wheeling as the first group but they will still be willing to get in there and gamble from time to time but they will also be implementing some strategy.

The final group you will encounter are the pros. These people are in there playing all the time. They have a pretty good understanding of what they are doing and they rely on their winnings from the game as their primary source of income. These groups make up varying combinations of people that you will encounter at any given table on any given day. The more you play, the better you will get at spotting them.

The main thing I wanted to mention in this article was in regards to reading books about poker written by the "pros". There are a ton of books out there claiming to help you out with your poker game. For the most part, what they are good at is giving you a basic understanding of strategy in conjunction to the basic principles of the game. What the books don't really discuss are the dynamics of opponents and how they relate to the information in the books.

Here it is. The pros give you all kinds of pointers in these books. Then you watch them on television. You see them at the final tables in tournaments. You might even get to see a brief biography about one player that you admire and you see that they have a big house a nice car and a huge bankroll. You start to figure that if you follow the information they shared in their books, you too have a chance to follow in those footsteps. There are several more things you need to know.

A lot of these pros, while they were developing their bankrolls, did so when poker was more a "back room" game. This is to say that gambling was illegal and you had to go hunting to find a decent game. As a result of this, many of these players tended to play with the same small group of opponents over an extended period of time. This is very important to keep in mind. Since they played with the same group most of the time, they really got to know each other and their games very well. This is extremely important in poker strategy. They also were not sitting in cash games with nine or ten people. Their games were made up of five or six people. This of course is also very important to keep in mind because it would make it easier for you to protect your hand with less opponents to worry about.

Remember at the beginning of this article when I mentioned all the different types of players you will encounter? The pros didn't have to worry about this when they were starting out because they had a much smaller community to focus on. Regardless, of what they say, that smaller community made it easier for them to implement strategy and luck became less of an element. What is interesting is that the big pros still today play in games with a concentrated circle of opponents because most people can't afford to play at their level.

Essentially, the message of this article is that while you are developing your game, don't get frustrated. It takes time and you have a much bigger challenge in front of you than most pros did when they started simply due to the fact that you have larger games that you have to sit in on with so many different types of opponents. Keep your eyes open and play smart.