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.

Many believe that to win money or online poker free tournaments you must chip up as quickly as possible.

On the other hand there is a school of thought that maintains it is best to be passive for the first few rounds so as to allow the maniacs and donks to eliminate themselves in the initial blinds.

I am not sure that either of these strategies are correct or incorrect but neither works well for me. In this article I will outline what does work for me and hope it helps you win more at the poker tournament tables.

Where both the fast chip out and passive strategies are 100% correct is that the early hands in a poker tournament are critical to the overall result. Where I disagree is that neither of these strategies will work all of the time.

Both early chip out and passive start approaches can be seriously affected by local conditions such as the player mix and the simple fall of the cards. I try and play a more measure pace somewhere in the middle of the 2 schools of thought.

I feel that early on you need to play quite tight, top 10-15 hands and pocket pairs only, but you need to play them aggressively. Aim to build your pot early on so that you can take it down later you know you have the edge.

You should muck all other hands preflop and forget about them. Yes, forget them, that’s because say you fold a marginal hand like 6h 7h that you’d normally play in a tournament and the flop gives 345 rainbow you’ll go tilt really quickly and be in danger of losing chips badly.

Later in a tournament it is advisable to play these hands as throughout a long tournament suited connectors will probably be your biggest money makers. For now, however, you need to play safe and stay in the game while other people are throwing chips away and being eliminated.

Make sure that you try and maintain a decent size stack relative to the other players and never get too far behind or our final table hopes will be dashed ahead of the bubble.

How you maintain this optimum stack size is actually straight-forward, particularly in online play. We will play tight-aggressive-aggressive and monitor the biggest stack, smallest stack, number of players in the tournament and the average stack size.

What we need to do before the first bubble is merely stay alive to make it into the cash. The way to do this is to watch these things rather closely and, by playing your hands properly, maintain your stack at or a little above the average.

I’ve had people tell me that this won’t work as you can’t make the final table this way. Untrue! If you’re stack is always at the average you are forever in the top 50% of the remaining player in the tournament, this means that when the final table begins you are sitting in 4th or 5th place and poised to take the larger stacks. I play this plan in both live and online play and it works rather well for me.

Play after the bubble is slightly different as you still want to maintain that average+ stack but by now the average class of players you’re facing will have gone up too.

Now it’s time to open up your hand selection a little bit. If you can get in cheap, say 1-2 BBs, you now want to play any top 20-25 hands as well as any suited connectors from any position, off suit connectors can now be played from late position as well.

Keep in mind that when I say connectors I mean cards that really connect, i.e., 6h,7c are connectors while 6h,8c would not be, lots of people get confused by this saying that these cards do connect and while they are able to connect to create a straight you’re now drawing inside and hurting your chances. You’ve much better odds of making that straight with 6,7 than you do of making it with 6,8.

I really hope this helps you with your poker tourney play, if you’re a new comer to poker tournaments then I advise you to learn to play free poker and at no risk of cash loss at a free online poker tournaments games site first before moving onto cash play.

Despite the fact that I started playing free poker tournaments on NoPayPOKER my early days were not much fun. I assumed that the other players knew what they were doing and followed their all-in-all-the-time ways, as a result I lost all my chips very quickly.

Not a financial disaster it is true, after all it was poker online free play stuff but for me it felt nearly as bad as my goal was to make cash from poker after doing the play free poker to learn thing, now I was faced with not even being able to cut it in the free poker game, my ambition seemed destined for failure from the start. And my pride was pretty bruised too!

In this article I will tell you what I did to get past the early blues and win first in the free poker games and then on cash games.

Firstly, when you join a free poker site, hang out there for a while but don’t play yet, familiarise yourself with it, how it works, the poker games on offer and the players and how they interact. Watch a few games, and get a feel for the general speed of the games and players.

Don’t start off big and if someone goes all-in, don’t follow because you feel you have to. Assess your cards and play the hand you have not the one you wish you had! Make a decision and stand by it.

If you have what you feel is a good hand, don’t be pushed out of the game by the All In crew. These are mainly new players like your-self or just people messing about.

A little tip that hasn’t failed me yet:
Value your cards. Give the pocket cards (the first cards you get) a value according to your chips. For example, say you have 1000 chips, lets call an Ace as value 300, King 290, Queen 280 and so on, set your own values. If they Pair up, the value becomes one card value plus half. So 2 kings will be 435 (290 + 145). Once the first round of the hand is done and you get to the stage where 3 new cards are laid on the table (called the Flop), you revalue your cards.

If you’re not confident, then click check and do not raise your bet. Only call if the cards are worth the risk.

On the turn of the forth card, known as the TURN, check the cards and if they are worth it start to raise your bet. The turn of the final card (known as the River Card) is the most important card of the game.

Unless you’re all-in at this time, your bet could decide the outcome. A sharp rise could force the less confident players out of the game. After you’ve been playing a while you will know by now how confident they are by their bets.

But remember; don’t over value your cards. Obviously Three of a kind is good, along with a flush or straight. But 4 of a kind is normally a winner.

A good poker player reads the cards and players well; a bad one goes all-in straight away. Only bet what you can afford whether they free chips or paid for chips.

Regardless of whether you play free online poker games for fun at NoPayPOKER.com or seriously for money you always get a buzz when you get a good starting hand such as a pair of kings. The perpetual question that follows a split seconds later though is how to make best use of this stroke of luck? After all, if you go All-In hoping to win big there is a big danger that the other players will think “hmm must have a real strong hand” and will fold.

This can happen a lot and is very frustrating, however, there are ways to cash-in on such opportunities and in this article I am going to look at such scenarios.

Sadly there is no magic bullet, very simply it is about experience; knowing about things such as playable pockets, implied and pot odds and how to play in such a way that the others think you’re bluffing and not fold.

At the start of a hand, in most cases having a pair is good news and you will definitely get chances to win based on the cards that follow on the flop, turn and river.

Lets look at an example: You get a nice pair to start: Ks, Kd. A great pair that should give you strong winning opportunities.

<b>Your options at this point are</b> to either go all-in or wait for the flop.

If you wait you must keep in mind that if an Ace opens on the flop then your winning chances will be greatly reduced.

If an Ace does fall then going on and betting more could be a waste and you would be advised to fold as if someone else is bets then it’s likely they have an Ace in their hand and will be able to beat you. Alternatively they could be bluffing or are playing crazy. Your experience helps here, once you learn to observe other players you can get a feel for if they are bluffing, playing crazy or if they really might have a better hand meaning it’s best to fold.

You might think that it would have been better to have gone all-in but you need to remember that in that case too the person having an Ace might have gone ahead and bet and you would have lost more money. Having folded you are just down a bit but very much not out.

Now lets look at your Ks,Kd again but where the flop cards are 6s,6h, Qh. Now you know that if anyone has a 6, you will be beaten.

But do not lose hope, a 6 is a lower value card and there is a good chance that a player holding a 6 might have already folded. So in this case you should raise the stakes and see how the others react. If someone goes all-in then, unless you’ve flagged them as a crazy player, there is a good chance they have a 6 so your best option is to fold and minimize damage.

Don’t be disheartened by the examples, they’re not meant to imply that you can’t play to win or have to reply on pure luck. Not at all! What I am trying to get across is that poker is a game that involves a lot of probability (also known as luck) to which is added psychology, and into this is mixed what cards open up as the hand progresses which in turn affects the power of your hand.

That’s how poker works and sometimes even the best cards will be rendered powerless by events, so keep this fact in kind and when you get a great hand that turns bad just accept it as part of the game and aim to lose as little as possible.

As long as you playing solid good poker then probability will come out on your side in the longer term and as you have minimised your losses during the bad patches you will have money to bet when probability smiles on you.

The best way to learn better poker online is in quality but low risk games,learning by your mistakes is very much the way of things in poker so it is a good idea to keep those mistakes cheap! Micro stakes and free poker games are the way to go in the early stages and be sure to read up on lots of free poker lessons too in order to learn about things like pot odds and playable pockets.

See the DM Vadnais learn how to play poker free lesson series for lot more details and ideas about these sorts of situations.

Sometimes navigating our free online poker instruction lessons can be a bit frustrating due to the way blogs arrange posts in the order of latest first – annoying when you want to go to part one of a free poker lessons series but go to the last part of it first!

So bookmark this page - It is a table of contents with links to all the lessons in the free online poker coaching learn how to play poker series from NoPayPOKER player and professional poker players and trainers D M Vadnais and Justin Skovholt.

Click on the underlined free online poker training chapter or article numbers below to go to them.

D M Vadnais Poker Lessons
D M Vadnais is a retired professional circuit player so he knows a thing or two about winning cash at poker so no matter what your level we are certain you can find plenty in here that will help you teach yourself poker free and improve your game and win you loads more chips.

And when you want to practice what you’ve learned and play free poker online practice games (as have fun and be able to win some real cash) check out the NoPay free poker games selection where you will find a great big mix of freeroll ring games, leagues and tournaments.

Poker 101 Course – free online poker for beginners

Chapter 1: WELCOME TO NOPAY POKER – IT’S FREE!
Chapter 2: THE RULES OF THE GAME OF POKER – IN SIMPLE FORM – Part 1
Chapter 3: THE RULES OF THE GAME OF POKER- IN SIMPLE FORM – Part 2
Chapter 4: Poker Parlance, terminology and nicknames
Chapter 5:The hierarchy of hands and what beats what
Chapter 6: Move on to Building a bankroll

Building a Bankroll Series – More advanced free poker strategy lessons

This series aims to take you from a a player who knows the basics and can play poker to an advanced intermediate level. If you can master and apply the free poker experience within this course you will be able to make money consistently at places like PartyPoker and Feltstars.

Article 1 of 11: The Overwhelming Importance of Patience
Article 2 of 11: Playable Pockets and Table Position
Article 3 of 11: Winning Big With Low Pocket Pairs
Article 4 of 11: Pot Odds, Implied Odds, and Rounding
Article 5 of 11: Goals, Bets, Blunders, and Calamities – Part 1
Article 6 of 11: Goals, Bets, Blunders, and Calamities – Part 2
Article 7 of 11: Shades of Gray – Paint Pockets and Big Slick
Article 8 of 11: Management – Your Money, Your Bankroll, and Your Stack
Article 9 of 11: A Lesson from Russia – The Gambler’s Mindset
Article 10 of 11:The Nutz, Zutz, Gutz, Butz and Tutz equals 100% – Part 1
Article 11 of 11:The Nutz, Zutz, Gutz, Butz and Tutz equals 100% – Part 2

Advanced Poker Strategies – Top of the line free poker training for intermediates and above

Adding gloss to Building a Bankroll – If you master these free poker lessons then WSOP beckons!

Article 1 of 7 – Bluffing: Conditional Mandates for Success
Article 2 of 7 – Aggression: An Absence of Reckless Abandon
Article 3 of 7 – Slow Play: Make a Habit of Accepting Donations
Article 4 of 7 – Folding: Laying Down a Once Powerful Hand
Article 5 of 7: Interwoven with Other Poker Considerations
Article 6 of 7 – Lady Luck: True or False – FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION
Article 7 of 7: The Game is played on a six inch table
Article 8 of 7: Mistakes, The Fast Track To WAFABA Membership
Article 9 of 7: Money – Final table, Final 4 and Heads up

World of Bricks and Mortar Poker Play

Free poker education for when you want to expand from online poker to “real world” cards games with real poker faces and all the banter you see on poker TV and WSOP then this is the course for you.

Article 1 of 10: A Prerequisite For Poker Venues Involving Real Money
Article 2 of 10: The Biggest Differences Between Online Poker Play and B&M Play
Article 3 of 10: The Three Separate Components of Poker Deceit
Article 4 of 10: The Pocket Cards That Consistently Yield The Most Profits
Article 5 of 10: Quality of Play and Paint Pockets
Article 6 of 10: Implied Odds On Offense, Pot Odds On Defense
Article 7 of 10: Continuation Bets, Added Skills, and Folding Quads
Article 8 of 10: Player Notes – The Path to Consistent Winning Play
Article 9 of 10: Notebook Entries – Control, Maintenance, and Utilization
Article 10 of 10: “How” and “Why” – Player Notes, and “You Know You Best”

Graduating from Free Online Poker to Playing Cash Poker Games Online

A series of 9 articles to be released monthly from April 2011.

Article 1 – Hope For the Best; Expect The Worst

Article 2 – Use Time As A Weapon; Vision As A Safeguard

Article 3 – Bankroll, cash, emotions, sex and risk management

Article 4 – Premium pockets part 1

Article 5 – Premium pockets part 2

Article 6 - Bad Plays, pot odds, implied odds and D Codes.

Article 7 – Bringing it it together, the Texas Holdem bible of cash website play

Justin Skovholt Poker Lessons (plays on NoPayPOKER as Gloves)

Full time pro online poker player and NoPayPOKER free online poker site writer Justin Skovholt presents lessons designed for all levels from beginners who know the basic workings of the game, upto advanced.

His blog on NoPay - No holes barred, no apologies, more complex and straight from the heart content – Here.

His lessons – designed for mere mortal consumption

Poker  From the Ground Up Foundations Series

Part 1 – Patience on steroids “Common Sense Poker

Part 2 – Hand Ranges, Playable Pockets, Table Position and Limping

Part 3 – Postflop Play scenarios. Optimal play against different player styles.

Part 4 – Basic Poker Math and Odds (pot odds, implied odds and reverse implied odds)

Part 5 – Differences between cash games and poker tournaments

Part 6 – Poker tournament theory and example ranges

And there is even more free online poker coaching to come, keep an eye on this page which will be have more free online poker training, tips and education added to it and also keep an eye on the NoPay blog in general for ad hoc free poker tips articles from our members and staff.