Hold Em Authority - Texas Hold Em Strategy and advice for all levels of players

Good luck turning on the television these days and flipping through your whole list of channels and not finding poker on one of your channels.  The World Series of Poker 2007 is starting extremely soon, and after it is played, the taped broadcasts will start playing repeatedly eight times a day for the next eight months.  Televised poker is really everywhere, and a person can get hooked on it quite easily.  For some, it’s all about watching to see who wins the tournament, but for others, it can be used as a learning tool.

Or can it?

I’m at a point in my poker career where I’m not 100% sure I’m learning the right things when watching poker.  However, I do think I’ve figured out what I should be taking from these broadcasts, and it is more of a general idea of how to play the game rather than specific hands.  For example, you can see Phil Ivey put his tournament on the line with bottom pair and win the hand against someone holding top pair simply because the other person gives Ivey too much credit.  Obviously, Ivey knows his opponent as well which helps a great deal.  The amount of thinking that goes on in the highest level of poker is so much more than what goes on in most internet games - a lot of the plays these professionals make just don’t make sense at our lower levels.

That being said, my focus is on the general strategy that it takes to be successful in large poker tournaments.  Many players have many different styles, but the one commonality that they all have are that they are willing to put it all on the line when they have to, and they can make a big laydown when they need to.  Sounds simple, but if you don’t have the stones to go all in with what you think might be the best hand because the bet is too big, you will not succeed in high-level poker tournaments.

I plan on tuning in to the WSOP 2007 partly because I want to see how many players there will be this year, and partly to see whether my theory holds up in this large field.  Will the winner have to make some monster laydowns and some ballsy calls in order to win it?  Since the main event will be played over the course of at least seven days, my guess would be yes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Beginner Holdem Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.