No Limit Texas Holdem Basic Strategy
As an introduction to No Limit Texas Holdem Poker strategy here are 3 tips which should form the foundation of your poker strategy. Tip 1 – Play Tight. This is one of the most basic no limit Texas Holdem tips and the first advice that we give to all new poker players. Texas Hold 'Em Poker is a game that rewards good play. There's some luck involved, but a good player will beat bad players the vast majority of the time. Make sure you know the rules to increase your chances of winning.
- No Limit Texas Holdem Betting Strategy
- No Limit Texas Holdem Tournament Strategy
- No Limit Texas Holdem Strategy
- Before moving onto the next stage of your poker development let’s review some of the typical mistakes that beginners make when playing Texas hold’em. Although one or two of the mistakes we’re going to mention are relevant to no-limit hold’em, the majority are applicable to all forms of hold’em, in addition to other poker formats.
- In this episode of Everything Poker we cover the fundamentals of No Limit Texas Hold'em Poker. Featuring advice from a range of professional poker players.
Hopefully you’ve already absorbed a wealth of knowledge from our poker lessons. There’s still much to learn – in fact you’ll never stop learning about poker. Before moving onto the next stage of your poker development let’s review some of the typical mistakes that beginners make when playing Texas hold’em.
Although one or two of the mistakes we’re going to mention are relevant to no-limit hold’em, the majority are applicable to all forms of hold’em, in addition to other poker formats. Please use this lesson as a guide, so that you don’t fall into the same traps.
The Top 10 Typical Beginner Mistakes
In no particular order, here are our top ten typical beginner mistakes:
#1 – Playing Too Many Hands
One of the main mistakes new players make is feeling like they have to play every hand. They may become impatient, feel left out of the action or don’t want to look weak in front of their friends. It could also be that they just don’t know any better. Any Jack, Queen, King or Ace looks good if you don’t understand good starting hand selection.
The problem with playing too many hands is that you are actually only going to hit the flop a small percentage of the time and even if you do hit the flop; it’s hard to know if your hand is the best. Until you understand how to play beyond the cards, you will mostly be playing based on what you are dealt and if you are involved in too many pots, the next thing you know all of your chips will be gone.
#2 – Playing Scared
While some beginners play with reckless abandon, many play with fear. Having not played many hands, new poker players are often afraid to make a mistake or they simply are afraid to lose. Because of this they will fold until they know they have an unbeatable hand. Fear can also manifest itself into paranoia, where a player assumes that anyone betting aggressively must have a monster hand (often referred to as “monsters under the bed”) and they will fold all but the best possible hands. The only way to get over this is to log in time at the poker tables and practice trusting your instincts.
#3 – Getting Committed to a Hand
Because of the competitive nature of poker, beginners think that poker is like other sports where “giving up” is considered a bad thing. While you shouldn’t play passively, poker is not like other sports and it is often the correct play to fold. When you first start playing poker, it’s easy to get emotionally attached to a hand. This might be a pre-flop hand like a pocket pair or making a pair on the flop. You stay in a hand because you don’t want to get bluffed out of a pot or look weak – or because the competitor in you says there is no way to win if you fold. Unfortunately, by continuously calling bets you never really know where you stand in the hand until it’s too late.
#4 – Improper Bet Sizes
This one is primarily related to no limit and pot limit games. Understanding how to correctly size your bets in these games to manipulate the action comes with experience of playing poker. However, such common betting mistakes that beginners tend to make are easy to fix. New players often raise or bet at the extremes – meaning too little or too much. Some common examples of this are raising the minimum pre-flop in no limit games when there are several players who have already entered the pot or raising 5x-6x the size of the blinds when you are first to enter a hand.
Miss-sizing of bets also occurs after the flop. Beginners will bet the minimum with big hands (two pair or a set) when there are lots of players in the hand allowing them to draw cheaply to a better hand. Conversely, they may also over bet to “protect” their hand. In most cases, these are both incorrect. Ideally, in poker you want to bet an amount that maximizes how much you can win and minimizes how much you can lose.
#5 – Chasing
Similar to #3, a beginner will often stay in a hand hoping other cards will appear that could improve their hand. This could include straight and flush draws, but also calling bets in order to pair an Ace or a second card for two pair. Calling on a draw isn’t necessarily a wrong, but the mistake that beginners often make is chase getting improper pot odds to do so. While you might hit the card(s) you need in one particular hand, if you are chasing without the right odds you will lose money in the long run.
#6 – Overvaluing Marginal Hands
A very common mistake among beginners is playing hands that look good on the surface, but in reality hold little value or are easily dominated by other hands. In hold’em, examples include suited cards or face cards with bad kickers (K3, Q5, etc.). Additionally, this includes high hand combinations like QT, KJ or A9. While these hands are not unplayable, knowing how to play them comes with experience. The challenge with these face cards is that there aren’t many flops that you can be confident that you have the best hand. Even if you do make a pair, you can easily be out-kicked or beaten by a higher pocket pair.
#7 – Letting Emotions Affect Your Play
Whether it is from a bad day at work or a bad beat at the table, emotions can affect how you make decisions. This can result in unprofitable poker actions like chasing losses, making desperate moves or allowing your ego to take over. Beginners will often make rash, emotional decisions that can act like blinders, preventing them from taking in all the information they need to make a smart decision. Stuff happens. So if you feel like you are starting to make emotional decisions in a poker game, just take a step back and reset your mind.
#8 – Playing Out of Position
There are many other factors that weigh into a poker decision beyond just the cards. Your position in relation to the order in which the action occur is one of them. Being able to act last in a hand allows you to see how everyone else is going to act before making your decision. This is a very powerful concept. The mistake beginner poker players make is entering a pot or calling a raise out of position without a plan. They get lost in the hand because they don’t have enough information about where they stand.
#9 – Bluffing Too Much
Some players who are new to the game think poker is all about bluffing. While it is satisfying to bluff someone out of a pot, you should develop an optimal percentage of bluffing in order to not become predictable. For a bluff to work, your opponents need to think you have a real poker hand. If you are always bluffing, your bluffs will not be believable and people will start to look you up. Another component to bluffing is that your bets need to tell a believable story and you should be representing a particular hand instead of just random aggression.
#10 – Playing Above Your Bankroll
Even if you are only playing poker recreationally, it is still important to manage a poker bankroll. Most beginners do not understand the role that variance plays in poker. You can be playing great, but still go through a long losing streak. If you don’t manage your poker money properly and play within your limits, you will burn through your money. Even if you develop the skills to play at a higher level, if you don’t have the bankroll to withstand the inevitable variance that comes with poker, you will go broke.
Mistakes Are an Opportunity to Learn
Mistakes at the poker table can prove costly but as a beginner you should see them as an opportunity to learn. Don’t worry if you’re guilty of making any of the mistakes listed in this lesson. Everyone who plays poker makes mistakes all the time. Skilled poker players just make fewer mistakes. Hopefully now you know what needs improving and what parts of your game you should consider working on.
Related Lessons
By Donovan Panone
Donovan started playing poker in 2004 and is an experienced tournament and cash game player who has a passion for teaching and helping others improve their game.
No Limit Texas Holdem Betting Strategy
Related Lessons
In this article we are going to take a look at an introduction to No Limit Holdem Strategy.
Texas Holdem has quickly become the most played game all over the world.
Even more so, No Limit Texas Holdem has become the game of choice by the majority of poker players and is the game that you will most likely be seen being played in any casino poker room.
Since the game has become so popular knowing some basic Holdem Poker tips will help you to really stand above a lot of other players and help you to win on a more regular basis.
As an introduction to No Limit Texas Holdem Poker strategy here are 3 tips which should form the foundation of your poker strategy.
Tip 1 – Play Tight
This is one of the most basic no limit Texas Holdem tips and the first advice that we give to all new poker players.
Texas Holdem has become popular rather quickly and since all of the big tournaments have recently been televised there is a whole generation of poker players who watch poker on TV and think that they know how to play correctly when in fact they couldn’t be more wrong.
All that these players see on TV are the big “all in” hands and big bluffs – basically they see all the hands with drama in which are good for TV. The TV stations don’t show all of the hands that each player folds because they are focusing on all of the big hands around the tournament, all the “normal” hands get cut and left on the editing room floor.
New players see this and have the perception that every hand they play in should be played in the manner that they have seen on TV, not realising that in between these hands are many hands that are uneventful and just folded without any drama.
So what this leads to at the lower stakes tables, which are full of new players, is a tendency to overplay their hands, place big bets, attempt many bluffs and call bets when they shouldn’t.
The first rule of good strategy then has got to be one that takes advantage of these bad plays… so how do we do that?
We do this by adapting our style to play a tight Texas Holdem strategy, only playing good hands and making sure that when we enter a pot and play a hand then we are in a strong position and ready to punish the bad plays of the beginners.
By doing this you are catching these players in their bluffs and having better hands than they do at showdown because you are playing a tighter and stronger range of hands.
These players are prone to thinking that big bets will win the pot very frequently and are not aware of their table image. By identifying these players and playing your strong hands against them you will soon emerge victorious and be collecting their chips in front of you at the table.
Tip 2 – Be Aggressive
Another type of player that you will commonly see a lot is the “loose passive” player. These players play a lot of hands (the “loose”) but are quite weak and easily pushed off the hand (the “passive”).
They don’t like to fold before the flop as they want to see if they can make a hand and when they do they want to get to showdown as cheap as possible to see if they have won.
It is simple maths and probability that by playing so many hands they can’t connect with the flop all the time, in fact we can go so far as to say that they will miss the flop and not make a hand the majority of the time.
By being aggressive against these players you punish them for playing so many hands and calling so lightly. These players are very good to build your bankroll against with a tight aggressive style.
You should be betting often against these types of players even if you have not made a hand to take advantage of the fact that they will most likely fold the majority of the times that they don’t make a hand either.
This leads us to a new poker term, fold equity, which is one of the most important reasons to be aggressive and is an essential addition to your no limit Texas Holdem strategy.
Fold Equity
When you are playing poker you do not have to have the best hand to win. You can also win the pot by making your opponent fold.
By being the aggressor, or the one who is betting and raising, you are giving yourself a second chance of winning the pot by making your opponent fold.
This additional value increases your chances of winning the pot when making a bet and is called the “fold equity”
For example, lets say you have a strong but easily beatable hand and you think it is 50/50 that your opponent holds a better hand. So your chances here are 50% to win the hand. If you make a bet then you think there is a 50% chance that your opponent will fold as his hand is not that strong either.
- You now have a 50% chance you opponent will fold and you win the pot +50%
- Even if he does call you will win 50% of the time with a better hand +25% (50%x50%)
- So your overall chance of winning the hand is 75% if you make a bet vs 50% if you do not bet.
By sticking to this tight aggressive style and paying attention to what types of players your opponents are you will be able to greatly improve your game by not only ensuring you are playing good poker, but also taking advantage of the style of play of you opponents and optimising your play to counter it.
Tip 3 – No Limit Holdem Bankroll
Another essential basis of any No Limit Holdem Strategy is to protect your bankroll. Just like any other finances you should monitor and manage your bankroll to ensure that you are playing at the correct stake levels.
Poker is a game of skill, but it is also based on probability like any card game, and you are always reliant on the draw of the cards.
Good poker players understand the probability and odds of the cards they need arriving but no matter how well you play and how much your strategy is designed to maximise the odds in your favour there is a chance that the smaller odds will hit and you will lose.
In the long term this is not a problem, because if you play correctly and with the odds in your favour then the laws of probability dictate that over the long term you will come out on top.
So as part of a good strategy we must protect ourselves against the short term fluctuations of the lessor odds hitting and beating us. This is often called “variance” in poker.
We also need to protect against us having an off day and playing badly in a poker session, making incorrect decisions – there are all sorts of reasons this may happen, tiredness, illness, distractions.
To provide this protection we establish bankroll management rules which say that we only sit down at a table with a small percentage of our total bankroll. This way if you have a losing session then you have plenty of further buy-ins with which to play another time and recover those losses.
The normal rule for No Limit bankroll management is to maintain 20 buy ins and only risk 5% of your total bankroll at any single table. A normal buy in for a table is 100 big blinds, so that would represent about 2,000 big blinds. As your bankroll grows, you can play higher stakes, if it shrinks then you may have to drop to lower stakes until it recovers.
This level of protection is required due to the volatile nature of No Limit and the potential to lose your whole buy in very quickly if it all goes wrong.
Making sure that you obey these strict set of rules is very important and the first rule of good strategy that you must learn. You can read more about bankroll management in our introduction article.
Summary
The above tips are by no means meant to be a complete strategy, they are just some introductory notes that you should understand before you start to develop a No Limit Texas Holdem Strategy.
If you would really like to improve your Texas Holdem strategy then we highly recommend the free Winning Poker Strategy Guide over on Poker Professor. This is a complete strategy course that will teach you multiple ways to improve your strategy. It will also walk you through turning $25 into $1,000 by the end of the course.
No Limit Texas Holdem Tournament Strategy
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