At pokerlistings.com, there are a number of very useful articles for the up and coming poker player, to assist him in honing his poker strategy. One of the most important Hold’em strategies that is taught is one of the most simplest, and yet most easily ignored: play fewer poker hands. Every time a player chooses to play his poker hand, he is risking some of his money on the bet that he will be able to earn it back with his winnings, but too often in Hold’em, the poker hand a player is likely to have simply isn’t good enough to justify any bet. Part of learning poker involves learning which poker hands to let go, and which poker hands to play through to conclusion. In Texas Hold’em, this becomes something of a simpler prospect, if only because you have only two cards in your hand. This means that there are a total of 169 poker hands in Texas Hold’em, and out of those there are relatively few that are genuinely, consistently good and worth betting on. Pokerlistings.com describes fifteen hands that a player should consider playing, and goes on to suggest that all other poker hands should be abandoned. Obviously, situational elements do play a role, as there might be other hands that are worth playing, or other players could have folded or raised, which would change which poker hands are worth the risk of playing, but in general, the number of poker hands worth playing would remain fairly small; a player should fold poker hands much more often than he or she plays them.
In a new and upcoming form of poker, however, the problem is not so simple. While it is still vital that a player learns which poker hands are worth folding, and which are worth playing, in Omaha Hold’em, a form of poker that has had popularity in Europe for years and is now growing in popularity in America, the problem is significantly more complicated than in Texas Hold’em. In Omaha, a player has a poker hand of four cards, instead of the standard Texas two. Furthermore, at the end of each round of play, the player must assemble the best possible poker hand using exactly two of the cards in his hand, and three of the cards on the board. This actually limits some of the combinations that would normally be available in Texas, and it means that, for all that a player is getting four cards in his poker hand, he is also only ever going to use two of them. The other two are always going to be wasted, no matter what they are. So, for instance, getting four 9’s in your initial poker hand in a game of Omaha would actually not be a terribly good thing, as you are now actually depriving yourself of the opportunity to get four 9’s in your final poker hand.
Learning which poker hands to play and which poker hands to fold is one of the most fundamental aspects of learning to play poker well, and because every game has different rules, it requires a different set of judgments to be able to determine which poker hands are which for each different version of poker. But if you can reach a place where you feel comfortable folding exactly the right number of poker hands, where you don’t feel pressed to keep playing by some irrational urge, then you are on your way to becoming a better poker player.