A big welcome to Justin (Gloves), NoPayPOKER’s newest poker writer. He is a full time online poker pro and also enjoys the free online poker games at NoPay. He has generously offered to write online poker training lessons for us in order to help any all of you (who want to be helped play better, more successful poker online. See his About Me section below for more info.

So, Gloves, over to you:

Let’s be honest. There are some players here on NPP who just enjoy pressing the allin button and having their fingers crossed while the board runs out. There are some who are here to sit in chat and make friends without playing a serious game of poker.

There are some who really don’t care about improving, about playing solidly, who just want a casual game – and while they may not be here just to gamble they think “This feels right, so I’m gonna do it! I don’t care if it’s wrong, it’s good enough for me!”. There are plenty of guys just like this – NPP is a free online poker site after all – and while I hold nothing against these people and wish them all the best, if you’re one of them, this series really won’t be for you.

However, if you are:

> A beginning player who doesn’t know where to go next to improve.
> A casual player with some interest in becoming better at poker, making more profit each month, and maybe eventually dipping into real money poker.
> Or a serious recreational player looking to plug leaks and learn to beat NPP and microstakes real money games solidly.

Then hopefully this series will motivate you to work hard and improve your game while giving you the tools to do it.

I will assume that you guys know the basic structure and rules of a NLHE game – if you don’t, I believe DM Vadnais has written an excellent series for true poker beginners which goes over the rules, hand rankings, and various odds and ends you need to know to understand the mechanics of what’s “going on” at the tables (even if you don’t understand why!).

About Me
I suppose since this is my first article, I should give a bit of background on myself. My name’s Justin; I’ve been playing poker of various formats for a few years now. I started out grinding low stakes SNGs (18 man turbos, to be exact) on stars, did some dabbling in MTTs (successful) and cash games (not so much…) before I finally found my niche in  husngs (1vs1 games). I currently am a poker pro – playing poker is my sole source of income – and I hope to continue this throughout college (yes, I’m that young) and maybe beyond.

I’m currently grinding $60 hyperturbo HUSnGs with plans to move up to $100′s soon (and maybe eventually beyond). Basically I’m the prototypical “young internet grinder” who can make a decent hourly at midstakes HU games and is excited to write about poker to an audience interested in learning and improving their games.

While I’ve written a few strategy pieces on my NPP blog (and will continue to cover more advanced concepts and musings there), I’ve never had the opportunity to really write poker articles to a larger audience – so please bear with me especially for the first few of these!

If there are any questions, comments, or suggestions, don’t hesitate to post either on the article or on my blog, to send me a NPP message, or email me at duncelanas@hotmail.com . I’ll address every comment I get to the best of my ability (and the ones I receive privately will remain that way), so fire away! I know asking questions of players better than myself helped me when I was a beginner (and even more so now that I’m more advanced), so you guys shouldn’t be afraid to ask ANYTHING! There really are no bad questions. 

With all that out of the way, let’s get on to some poker talk. 

What is the key to being a good poker player? Stop and consider this for a moment. If you’re up for the exercise, grab a pad and jot down some thoughts as to what the answer might be.

This “golden question”, if you will, may seem like the end all be all in poker. I can hear some thoughts drifting through your minds: “I bet it’s “soulreading” our opponent’s hand!”;“Is there some secret strategy which makes players successful?”;”It’s pulling off that huge bluff, isn’t it?”.

The answer is none of these. The key to becoming a solid poker player is to make reasoned, logical decisions at every opportunity. In other words, to “use common sense at all times”. I know, seems like a real copout, doesn’t it? Common sense? “Psh!” you say…”I have plenty of common sense and I’m not winning much at all!”. But common sense, you’ll come to realize, just isn’t that common when it comes to poker. 

The failing most people have in this area is how they view poker.

> Many think of poker like some sort of slot machine, something along the lines of “I’m feeling lucky! Let’s gamble!”.
> Another common misstep is the “Oh, it’s just playmoney!” view.
> In reality, poker is a skill based game where making good decisions directly correlates to long term profits.

While the result of each hand, tournament, and session is heavily influenced by luck, in the long run skill wins out and the players playing a profitable style will…well…profit!

If you just start to think of poker in this way – if all you ever take from this entire series is that poker is a skill game and playing better will lead to direct profits – I will be happy (although not satisfied, cause I hope you get a lot more out of it than that!).

When you view poker in this way, you see that “common sense” really is the key to winning at poker.

Those big bluffs you see top pros make on tv? They all have incredibly solid (and often somewhat complex) reasoning behind them. The internet pros making tens to hundreds of thousands per year? They make their money by grinding out a high volume of hands playing a style more solid than their opponents’.

Even on NoPayPoker, it stands to reason that better poker players profit more than the worse ones. This is seemingly obvious, and yet is missed by so many people.

So how do you win at poker? By structuring your game around sound fundamentals and a solid foundation of poker knowledge (hence the title, From the Ground Up). 

DM Vadnais starts off his “Building a Bankroll” series (which targets the same audience as this does) with an article about how “patience” is the most important skill a poker player could have. While I disagree with him on a great deal of things in his writing (which is part of the reason I asked to write this series), I think he was really on the mark there.

My “key”, to use “common sense”, is really just a more general way to say that (although it expands much further than just “patience”).

How does “use common sense” equate to “be patient” in a poker game?

> Well in a standard NLHE (no-limit Hold’em) hand, each player gets 2 cards facedown before any betting (excluding the posting of blinds) takes place.
> Applying the “be patient” reasoning, we wind up with something like “We should wait for hands we can play profitably and then play those because we’ll profit.
> Since relatively few hands can be played profitably, we’ll be tight preflop.”
> Applying the “use common sense” reasoning, we wind up with “Well, poker is a game where we make money from our opponents.
> If we invest money with stronger hands than them, we’ll profit against them.

Therefore, we should only play stronger hands preflop so we can profit, and as such should generally play tight.”.

Where I feel the “common sense” concept outstrips the “patience” concept is in the fact that the “common sense” line of thought is much more logical in the reasoning it lends to your decisions.

It’s the difference between “this hand is profitable so we play it” and “this hand is profitable because…so we play it”, which I feel is ultimately quite significant when trying to build a game on solid foundations.

We want to know what we’re doing at all times – but more importantly WHY we’re doing it beyond just thinking “oh, I read this in an article”.

My blog posts on poker decision making goes into this in quite some detail, although they might be well over the head of some readers of this article (that’s fine, though, this series and my writings as a whole will hopefully help take your game from its current point to the point where you can understand my blog posts with ease). 

So we’ve established that the way to win at poker is to make profitable decisions based on our knowledge of poker.

The easiest application of this is playing tight (no trash hands!) preflop.

It’s logical to think that starting out with stronger hands than our opponents preflop will lead to us having better hands postflop and making money off our opponents, and the way to start with stronger hands than our opponents preflop is to play tight and fold our trash.

This extends to many other basic poker concepts, such as value-betting “we should bet when we’re ahead of our opponents to make money”, bluffing “we should bluff when we can’t win the pot unless our opponent folds and our opponent is likely to fold”, and beyond. But those are concepts which will be explored more in depth in future articles in this series. 

So that pretty much brings my first ever article to its conclusion! Feel free to: leave a comment here, leave a comment on my blog, send me a PM, talk to me in NPP chat, or send me an email at duncelanas@hotmail.com with any questions, comments, concerns, and suggestions.

Plan right now is to have at least 1 new article per week (possibly 2 on some weeks) somewhat indefinitely, so be sure to check back often! Hope you’ve enjoyed – I know I’ve enjoyed writing this – and see you all soon in my next article! Til then, good luck at the tables! 

-Gloves

More resources:

NoPayPOKER Lesson Series List Page – All our “formal” lessons, the DM Vadnais series and Gloves lessons as they come on.

Gloves NoPay Blog for more complex poker training and theory.

Related posts:

1. How To Play Poker For Beginners Ultra Basics Guide
2. Article 4: Premium Pockets Dictate Your Game Play – Part 1
3. ARTICLE 5: PREMIUM POCKETS DICTATE YOUR GAME PLAY – Part 2
4. Free Online Poker Lesson Series Master Directory Links Page
5. Poker Free Online Instruction Guide To Aggressive Versus Passive Play Demonstrated By A Real Life Professional Game Hand