Patience & Discipline
I would now like to talk about patience and discipline when playing poker. Of course when I say this I am referring to non-turbo tournament games; I’ll talk about turbo poker strategy later.
When I first played online poker I played a lot of hands, just to see the flop. Well, that tactic lost me a lot of money, so I did a lot of reading and to my surprise I found that many poker professionals fold anywhere from 85 - 95% of the their starting hands when playing Texas Hold’em.
After reading that I thought to myself, “that sounds boring”. It is, if you don’t pay attention to the other players when you are not in a hand.
Waiting for the right hands to play based on your table position is probably one of the most critical elements to winning consistently. When you do find a hand to play there is a good chance that you will win with that hand, or more importantly, you will win more often than you loose over many hands.
So to combat the boredom of waiting for those lucrative hands you can pay attention to your table. Watch the players and make notes. These notes WILL help you make critical calls or lay downs later on and in tournament poker they are gold!
I currently have about 7,000 real-money poker player notes on PokerStars. Many times when I first sit down at a poker table I’ll see my notes on several players that I made notes on from previous games. This alone gives me a huge advantage over other players.
Patience is a virtue and to keep your virtue alive you will need discipline. This is something that you will have to harness, and the more experience you get the easier it will be.
So remember patience and discipline will add to your bankroll!
Next, I’ll talk about bankroll management.
Good luck and stop playing those rags in early position!
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