Poker Smarts
April 6, 2008
To win at a poker table, you have to be smart. I’m not just talking about smart play, such as aggressiveness, I’m talking about you, yourself. You have to be smart, you have to have a certain amount of intelligence. Poker is a difficult game to play well, you have to be sharp and stay sharp the whole time you are at the table.
Just one missed tell or one missed sign from another player all could be lost, especially with No-Limit Texas Holdem, but also in the limit games as well.
Lose your smarts in a No-Limit game and you can lose your chips, lose your smarts in a limit game and it could take you and extremely long time to get back and dig yourself out of a hole.
What Does it Takes to have Poker Smarts
It’s way more than just knowing what hands beat what or what the odds are of making a hand. It requires super fast decision making involving multiple variables and no on at the table is going to wait around for you to make your decision. You have to be able to call up past experiences, read body language factored against playing style, and calculate pot odds all within a matter of seconds.
Poker is way more than odds, as you can see. You have to be able to tell what kind of person your opponent is by how he/she reacts in certain situations to calculate their possible hand based on their current reaction. Basically, you have to be a card player, a risk taker, mathematician, and a psychologist at the same time. You have to learn from every hand and to do this, you need a solid memory.
You need poker smarts.