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Beginner Poker Tips and Hacks to Impress Your Buddies

While you may have played for fun over beers a few times, the world of poker is a whole lot more than sunglasses to shield your eyes and the power of bluffing – becoming a genuinely good player, be it for fun or for something more serious, takes much more effort than simply knowing how to read your opponent's face.

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Whether you’re hosting a poker night with your buddies, you’re curious about how to get into the game online, or you’d like to dapple in a professional tournament, we met with Team PokerStars Pro and author Maria Konnikova – who was a beginner herself just a few short years ago – to get the low down on exactly how beginner poker players can learn to master the game. These tips and tricks go far behind example strategies to copy: follow these and you’ll be confidently building your own strategies and impressing your buddies in no time.

Start With the Fundamentals

“A lot of people, especially because of how poker is portrayed in the media, they immediately think they’re going to look for tells, or see if someone’s bluffing or if they can catch them,” Konnikova says. “I would definitely not recommend doing that. Instead, focus on the basics of the game. Ask yourself, ‘what are my odds?’ or ‘how many cards will move me to a better hand?’ Those types of questions are easy to learn and it’s not complicated strategy.”

Don’t Get Caught Up in the Mathematics

You don’t have to be a math whiz to excel at poker. In fact, Konnikova, a published author, TV writer, and journalist admits that the last math class she took was in high school – but she didn’t let that stop her from excelling in the game. “I’m not good at math, and, sure, there’s math involved, but it’s math that you can do,” Konnikova admits. “I seriously count on my fingers! You can still catch me sometimes tapping my fingers on the table during a game. It gets very simple, very quickly – it’s just addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, that’s it.”

Find Both Friends and a Mentor

Finding both a peer who is starting out at the same level as you, and someone who is better than you – even if it’s just a buddy who has been playing for years – is vitally important if you really want to improve your poker game. “I think one of the best things you can do to clarify your own thought process is to explain and talk through to other people, because sometimes you may think you understand something, but when you start explaining it to someone else, you realize that there are gaps in your understanding,” says Konnikova. “I think it’s really important to get into the habit of talking and discussing with those who are on the same level as you, and those who know more.”

Forget Your Ego

“Leave your ego at the door!” says Konnikova, “The thing I have seen kill so many poker players comes down to ego – either calling out their chips in a spot where they shouldn’t because they think they can’t be bluffed, or bluffing off their chips in a spot where they shouldn’t in an attempt to look more macho – and it just gets in the way of logic and understanding.”

Get Into Good Personal Habits

While it shouldn’t just come down to whether or not you pursue poker, taking good care of your body and mind is vital to excelling at just about anything you go after. “Get into good personal habits right away,” says Konnikova. “You should be exercising, eating well, and sleeping.”

Konnikova also adds that playing poker will actually help with your personal development and creating good habits: “poker improves your decision-making ability in almost everything, it helps you deal with uncertainty and helps you make fast decisions, while helping with emotional management and self control, because you leave that at the poker table if you want to play well and you discover a lot of leaks in your emotions that you didn’t know existed because you’re playing for hours and hours – and really everything comes out.”

Don’t Play Above Your Bankroll

According to Konnikova, playing too high can be both dangerous and the downfall of beginner players. “Poker is a game that can give you so much and be so fulfilling that I want people to get into it correctly, and for long term sustainability, I think it’s important to organically work your way up,” she says. “So start small! When I was starting out, I wanted to play in this $150 tournament and my coach wouldn’t let me – he said I hadn’t earned it yet and that I have to play lower. So I started out in Las Vegas playing these $30 tournaments, and when I started winning them, he said, ‘okay, you’ve won a few thousand dollars from these small tournaments, and now you can play in those $150 tournaments.”

Read, Read, Read

“I think something like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which is not about poker, can be really useful when applied to the poker world because it shows you how to think logically instead of reactively and reflexively. I still think that for beginners – and this is the first book I read – Dan Harrington’s Harrington on Hold 'em is the best thing just because it’s such a good primer on tournament play.”

Spend Some Time Online

“I lived in New York, and online poker is not legal in New York, so multiple days a week, I would cross the river, go to New Jersey, sit in a Starbucks all day and play on PokerStars New Jersey,” says Konnikova, “because there’s nothing like playing online for getting hand per volume and when you’re just starting out, it’s so important to just get the hands, it helps you look at a lot of different situations, to help recognize patterns, and to look at with your coaches – because you can record your games to go over at a later time. I definitely think that before you go into a casino, log on, and play online.”

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Kaitlyn McInnis, Khareem Sudlow