Beware of Poker Advice

by tke1600

Poker is one the most popular strategy games played today. Poker combines the art of skill with the thrill of luck, and the more time you put in to improve the skill aspect, the better you will be off.  Some of the best poker resources on the internet are at PokerPages.com and CardPlayer.com, but you have to beware of how “useful” poker advice is from the top pros.

When searching for advice on cash games and tournaments, it seems easy to think that using the top pro’s strategy is best. Super System by Doyle Brunson and The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky are two of the best poker strategy books today.  You can get a lot of great tournament and cash game advice, but when applying this strategy, you need to make sure how relevant it is to your game.

Some of the best poker abilities that top pros have are reading opponents, being aggressive, and outplaying people after the flop.  Pro's can give great advice how to use these abilities, but a lot of the time the advice has little or nothing to do with online poker tournaments.  The tournaments that the top pros play are the WPT and WSOP tournaments.  Theses tournaments have 1-2 hour blind levels, massive starting chips, and a lot of play after the flop in later rounds.  Besides decent starting chips, online tournaments have a super fast blind structures and almost no pre-flop play in the later rounds. 

Some of the advice you get for tournament play from the top pros will not help your game, but actually only hurt you when applying it at the wrong time.  A great example is how top pros get players to lay down hands late in a tournament.  They can do this because a lot is at stake and most players still have a lot of chips in front of them.  This simply won’t happen late in an online tournament.  Players do not have enough chips to fold after they make an initial raise, and there is simply not a big enough edge to get players to lay down hands in low buy-in tournaments.  The edge that top pros have in the “big” tournaments simply cannot be found in most of the online tournaments. 

The best advice you can get is from online-tournament-players who play in buy-ins similar to yourself. Search for a website to find what is working for $30 MTT's on Poker Stars or the $200 buy-in on Party Poker, if that is your favorite tournament to play. Poker strategy comes in many different forms, and you just need to find what applies to your style of play the most. So next time you read strategy from a top pro, make sure that it is relevant to the games you play.  If not, you could only be hurting yourself more than helping.

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