Yes, you can and real money online poker is very popular in Australia! Juicy Stakes Poker Australia provides Aussies—and players from all over the world as well—an excellent online poker venue! We offer many games and tournaments. Juicy Stakes Poker also offers games in a great many stakes levels so every poker player can find the game, the tournament, and the stakes level that fits them best.
Well over two million Aussies play poker online with some regularity. So, you can easily see that online poker has tens of millions or more players all over the world!
Poker Can be Sublime
Poker is one of the few games that can truly be called grand. It is a game that combines great skill and just the right dollop of luck to keep every player on his or her toes at all times!
There are other grand games but they all have one characteristic that poker does not have and it is that characteristic that makes poker so….sublime! The aspect that makes poker so unique is that there is information that is permanently hidden from the other players. These are the hole cards in Texas Holdem, the three hidden cards in seven card stud, and all five cards in five card draw poker!
The grand challenge for poker players is to cause their opponents to misread the hand, thereby folding a winning hand or putting more money into the pot with a losing hand! Misdirection is the name of the game in poker.
This is not the case in the most famous games of skill such as chess, GO, SET and many others. No one ever says that a player needs to be lucky to win at these games. Instead of luck, they need to be good—very good!
In poker, players need to be both good and lucky. Luck basically means getting cards that help your hand. Being good is a very deep and complex idea. So, without further ado, let’s list a few tips that poker players can use to become “more good”.
Develop an Aggressive Approach
Most people are not naturally aggressive. A lot of people who are aggressive by nature end up in jail! This is not the best way to become better at poker! Still, the nature of poker is that it is necessary to become more aggressive than our natural tendencies are in order to win regularly at poker.
Aggressive Poker Leads to the Mother of All Misdirections
Bluffing is one of the most aggressive tactics in poker. It is designed to intimidate opponents. The big problem with bluffing is that a lot of players are too timid to use it or are too transparent when they do try to bluff.
Bluffing is an art form! All forms of art need to be cultivated. For every Mozart who was a musical genius at the tender age of four, there are millions of people who become good to great at music after years of practice. By the same token, studying the art of bluffing is an indispensable way to master this art!
Since we have to study bluffing, it follows that we should be using it sparingly and with good timing until we have the knowledge and confidence to bluff more often!
A Limp Handshake is a Sign of Weakness
When we meet people for the first time, the custom in Western countries is to shake hands. A firm handshake is a sign of self-confidence while a weak handshake telegraphs a lack of confidence.
The poker term “to limp in” refers to a player in early position who calls the big blind in order to see the flop. While YouTube is replete with clips of monstrous flops, the most common experience in poker is that a player who started out with a weak hand misses the flop.
Even if you have two connected and suited cards in the hole, the likelihood is that either you will miss the flop altogether, which means that an opponent hit the flop and you need to fold, or you pair one of your low cards which is also a sign that it is time to get out while the getting is good!
If you feel that the time is right to bet in early position with a weak hand, you should raise the big blind! This is a bluff. As we said above, bluffing is an art form and it may take a very long time playing poker to be able to pull off an early position bluff like this.
Until you reach that level of skill, it is best to fold a bad hand in early position even if it means folding more than 80% of the timer!
Learn the Basics of Poker Math
Very few poker players are math geniuses. Still, all good poker players know how many outs they have and what the odds are of getting one of those outs. Similarly, we need to be able to combine the tactic of putting our opponents on a hand and calculating their odds of hitting one of their outs. Then we compare the two calculations and decide whether we should stay in the hand or fold.
This is a basic math concept in poker. Pot odds is another basic concept. Understanding pot odds is so important that new poker players absolutely must learn how to calculate and use pot odds to their favor.
There are a lot of hands where the flop does not indicate the strength of a player’s hand. There is a famous Daniel Negreanu You Tube clip in which he “saw” that the opponent had either a pair of fours or a pair of sixes in the hole. That is because the opponent overbet his full house and Negreanu folded even though he knew that he was getting good pot odds to call that hand.
In other words, pot odds is just one of many tools good poker players use to determine their next course of action. We need to be fluent in basic poker math in order to use pot odds and odds in general.
Online Poker is Best for New Players
Online poker at Juicy Stakes Poker gives players the chance to play as often as they wish given their other interests and responsibilities. Most new platers have not yet developed the ability to play for hours at a time. Given that, why spend money getting to a land based poker room? At Juicy Strakes, you can play for 30-60 minutes and then you’ll have tine to analyze every hand since you have been taking notes all along!
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