Become a Regular in Strategy Forums
If you want to excel at poker you must go through the strategy forums and evaluate how better players are thinking. It would be a good idea to jot down specific difficult situations you came up against while playing and post them in the appropriate forum for others to evaluate. The number one most common concern from players who do not usually post in the forums is that they don’t know who is correct and who is not. To solve this problem, you can look to see how many total posts a specific poster has, and use this as a vague indicator of their reputability – if they have a lot of posts, it is probably safe to assume that they have also read a lot of strategy themselves. Make sure to get the opinion of a few of these reputable posters on the subject that you are discussing. Remember, there is not always a clear correct answer for every situation in poker – but there are definitely wrong answers and wrong ways to play in a specific situation.
Join a Skype Group
If you search the forums you will find plenty of players willing to join Skype study groups. By creating or joining these groups, you will hear the thoughts or players who are better and worse than yourself – you will quickly find out who has the most knowledge and you should strive to pick that person’s brain. Continually ask questions – even if you think they will make you look stupid. Remember, even Phil Ivey had to ask the simple questions at the beginning of his poker career, no one is born with this knowledge.
Get a Coach
Getting a coach is a great way to excel in any sport or game – poker is no different. Just like other sports, private coaching can be costly, and in the poker world you will see rates that range from forty-dollars per hour, to one-thousand dollars per hour. Obviously the coaches that are charging astronomical rates are coaching higher stakes and need to make their hourly rate high enough to cover their expected value of playing for that hour online. Find a coach that is suitable for your stake, and make sure that he/she proves their adeptness by showing you their graphs, win rate, etc. Make sure you come prepared with questions to every coaching session in order to get the most out of your time. If you are tight on cash you may find that you only need a few coaching sessions to have an eye opening experience. You will be amazed at how small adjustments will positively impact your hourly rate online.
Avoid Enduring an Expensive Learning Curve
Try to avoid having to go through an expensive learning curve. There are plenty of people out there that had to lose a lot of money online in order to come to the realization that they need to learn more in order to beat the games. Don’t be the guy that blows copious amounts of money before he figures out that he needs to get better.
Could Virtual Reality for Poker Be the Next Big Thing?
Monday, April 21st, 2014Virtual reality gaming has been the dream for first person shooter (FPS) game and massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) for ages, but it hasn’t been thought of as an addition to poker until now. Talks of incorporating the Oculus Rift with online poker have recently surfaced and are getting players excited.
Introducing the Oculus Rift
Image via Flickr by Sergey Galyonkin
If you haven’t seen the Oculus Rift before, it’s a sight to behold. The product is essentially a pair of “goggles” that work seamlessly with certain games to provide an incredible virtual reality experience.
Just recently, the company was acquired by Facebook for $2 Billion, a major investment into the future potential of online gaming. Your eyes see a 1080p resolution on a 7-inch OLED screen. It keeps track of your head movements and relays them to the game, introducing some amazing possibilities. For the most part this technology is still in the testing phase of its development, only being released to game developers to work with, but should be coming out for consumer use in late 2014 or 2015.
How Does it Work for Poker
As noted initially, poker and traditional gaming doesn’t really go together, but virtual reality might just make it feasible. Not only would it be fairly simple to build a realistic poker game (compared to other video games), it would be able to add some of the environment that online players often miss.
Some players are unable to play live due to disabilities or sickness, while others are simply too far away or have no way of getting to a nearby casino or game. A virtual reality headset would allow you to immediately be immersed in a live poker situation.
Another way to think of this type of gaming is as a hybrid between live and online poker. You can combine the best aspects of online poker, with the look and feel of live poker, essentially getting the best of both worlds.
A likely setup would be to combine a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift (or any of its competitors) with a gaming system with motion-sensing capability like the Xbox One’s Kinect. This would allow you to not only look around and sense the environment, but to interact with real chips and hand movements. Until the holodeck from Star Trek is invented, this will be the closest you will get to immersive poker in your own home.
While all this could still be a year or two off before it comes a reality, the fact that pieces are in motion means that this is a very real and exciting possibility for poker players around the world.
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