Video Poker and more

Online casinos, physical casinos and online poker rooms all require specific strategies. What they have in common though is that you should play tight and loose at random. In the beginning you should be very tight. Otherwise you cannot hope to win in the long term. That is hard pressed in any casino, but with poker you really have a chance. It is a skill game and not based on luck. If you like the exitement of real life poker than go to a casino, no not an online one but a nice physical real non-virtual one.

Sadly poker hardly rewards second and third place, in a cash game it is never. The best hand wins, and that is it. If you want a excellent shot at winning some money in online poker, start with fixed limit and play only the best starting hands. That concept is the tightness or alternatively looseness of a player. To play tight requires patience and discipline.

In the beginning a lot of people make mistakes by being too loose. This means that they will play hands that have a negative expected value and hope to hit something on the flop.  Expected value is something that will be clarified later on in the article.

The way to get around this, is to really play the hands that are strong. In the long term this will be profitable, small term you can lose some pots. This should be accepted without tilting. If you start playing and hoping to hit some hands, you will lose in the end.

The term Expected Value that is also key to poker
This Expected Value or just EV for small, is what you (on average) win or lose playing those hands.
The internet has resources enough and now you can find a couple of million hands to caculate the expected value of the starting hands.

Not as a suprise to many people but Ace Ace is the best starting hand with the highest EV, namely 2,32 BB. This means that on avarage the player will get 2,32 times the Huge Blind profit. You can calculate this for every hand.

For the unpaired hands the highest EV is reserved for Ace King suited and is 0,77. Ace Jack offsuit is 0,19 times the blinds and Ten Nine suited has a EV 0,05. An Ace Two suited has a EV of 0, meaning it is break even. All hands below this one, the last 129 are all losing hands. You can play 40 hands with long term gain.