How to win money at poker

My name is Johan Sunnanängs and i have played poker professionally for over ten years. I have won more than 500.000$ in tournament winnings. In this post I'll share a basic winning poker strategy for beginners.

I'll use the most popular poker format Texas Holdem as the example in this post. But many of the tips will apply to other poker formats as well.

Let's dive right in!

1. Play tight poker

The biggest mistake most new poker players do is playing to many hands. In order to win at poker you should be really selective about that hands you enter a pot with. That will both increase your winrate and it will also make it more easier for you to take the right descisions during later during the poker hand.

2. Play in position

Another very common poker mistake is not thinking about your position at the table. By opening and playing fewer hands on the poor spots at the table (when you act early) you will face way easier decsions throughout your hand.)

The best spots to play more hands from are called cut off and the button. This is the two seats that acts just before the small and big blind on a regular Texas Holdem table.

By acting after your opponents throughout the hands you will get an informational advantage over your opponents.

3. Play agressive

If you play tight poker and enters the pot with few hands it is a good start. Though you won't become a winner if you don't also apply an agressive playing style. That means that when you do play a hand you should often be the agressor and do the betting. When entering a pot you most often raise. And when you face the flop you will do a continuation bet most of the time.

By be the aggressor you have to chanes to win the pot every time. They could call and you end up showing the best hand. But they could also be folding directly to your bets since they haven't made their hand.

If you instead usually are playing passive and call other players raises you can only win the hand in one way, and that is showing up with the best hand at showdown. That is a losing strategy.

4. Be patient

This advice is closely related to the first advice by playing tight poker. In order to be able to bide your time and wait for the right moments to play your hands and pick down some pots you need to be really patient. This is what many players lack and therefore they end up losing money most of the time.

5. Bankroll management

The tip about being patient also applies to bankroll management and how you handle the money you put a side for poker. In order to not playing to high stakes you need to be very patient in playing the right stakes in relation to your bankroll. For example a general advice is that you should always have at least 100 buy ins on the level you are playing at.

So if you play 10$ Sit and go's as an example, you should have at least 1.000$ on the poker sites you play on to merit that.

6. Table selection

The sixt and last tip applies to the games you are playing. Look for poker games where players are playing opposite to the tips I have stated above in this post. If you see opponents playing really passive poker and playing to many hands you know you are at juice games.

If you on the other hand see that your opponents are playing tight and solid poker. You are probably better of looking for other games to play.

If you want to learn more

If you want to learn more about how to play winning poker I will develop the tips in this post in this video below.

Please leave a comment if you find it interesting or if you want to learn more about poker.

Se you at the tables!

Best regards

Johan Sunnanangs, founder of PokerCoachO.com.