New, NEED HELP!

Hi,

Firstly, apologies if this is in the wrong section, I'm new to this forum and poker in general.

I've been playing on 888.com poker for about 3 weeks now, I've never played for money before this time, I saw a good offer and thought, "Hey, I'll try that".

I play the tournaments on there, and have been doing ok so far. I've been placed in about 10/15 tournaments each having anywhere between 20/800 participants. The trouble is, the majority of these tournaments are qualifiers for larger tournaments. I get into these larger tournaments, but seem to lose out quite often in the next stage. Is there a specific tactic I could use? or Am I not good enough? I have terrible trouble in guessing what my opponent is holding, so I can't use that to my advantage.

I'm basically looking for some tips on how to improve or for someone to help me, maybe mentor me?

Any advice, would be gratefully appreciated.

Thank you.

Quote:

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I have terrible trouble in guessing what my opponent is holding, so I can't use that to my advantage.

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I think the first thing you need to do is stop trying to "guess" what your opponent is holding, and instead assign him a range of hands that he can have based on the action you've seen.

For example, a solid tight aggressive villain with 100bb raises under the gun in a 9 seater game. He probably has one of ATs AJs AQo AQs AKo AKs KQs 99 TT JJ QQ KK AA. That's 13 hands. However, he's much more likely to have some hands over others, which is why we think in terms of combos. A combo is a combintation of cards that make a hand... for example, AKs has four combos... AsKs, AdKd, AhKh, and AcKc... while AKo has twelve (AsKc, AcKh etc)... we can therefore know that villain is three times more likely to have AKo than AKs. That's not hugely helpful in its own right, but when we start to understand combos and ranges, we can start to calculate how much equity we have at any given time, which is a much more useful tool than "guessing".

Study ranges, combos, and equity, and your game will improve immensely.

Hey, welcome to FTR!

The unfortunate truth is that poker is a vastly complicated game. In order to best help you, we need to know what you're struggling with now and what you're already good at. This will help us to give you the advice you most need right now.

The #1 best way for this to happen is for you to post some hands and give us your best analysis of the hand and where your interesting or difficult decision was.

Don't ever post the final results of the hand. It's sad, but true that you will get much better advice when we don't KNOW the outcome. It keeps us honest as far as assessing the many possible outcomes and their likelihoods.

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Don't be too hard on yourself about knowing your opponents' hands. It's a skill that you will always be practicing and learning.

It all starts with understanding your own ranges, which is easy enough.

Take it from the beginning and do your opening ranges for the beginning of the tournament. All stacks are roughly equal, you don't know much about your opponents yet, all you know is position and the betting history of this hand. What are your ranges and why?

What would you open with if your UTG in the first hand of the tournament? How much would you open?
Then move on to the next seat. If UTG folds to you, same questions. If UTG opens, then what?

This kind of thinking about your game is going to be something you get used to. The more you think about things, the more basic they become. Then you achieve an understanding and you can move on the the next step.