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Poker tournaments articles

Online Poker Tournament Beginners Mistakes

Online Poker is everywhere. Online Poker tournaments and online poker competitions are all over the television. Besides that, online poker rooms advertise themselves on buses, are advertised in every magazine and newspaper and you can not enter any kind of website without seeing some sort of online poker ads. Major poker tournaments such as the WSOP or the WPT are aired on primetime television next to shows such as the Late Night Poker and professional poker players are becoming as famous as big league athletes. Naturally this mass advertising and accordingly mass popularity attracted millions of brand new players to the tables.

Many among these new found online poker lovers are playing the game for pure entertainment and they are not even really expecting to win any money. There are also many online poker beginners that stick to the low-to-very-low limits, where there is very little to learn. These players tend to make the same beginners mistakes over and over again, without even realizing that these very mistakes suck out most of their money. In this article we will review some of the most common online poker beginners mistakes and how to avoid them. Remember that this article will review only technical in-game mistakes and not the tournament rules.

The most common beginners mistake most online poker make is playing way too many hands. These players have no idea which are good poker starting hands and which are not, they just play any face card, any ace or any two suited cards. These type of cards have very low chances of firming a winning hand a good starting hand. This beginners mistake will cause you to lose a whole lot of money on the long run and any online poker beginner should learn what the good starting hands are before playing a single game.

Another common online poker beginners mistake is playing games you simply can not afford. Many online poker beginners try to play at limits that their bankroll can not support. They also do not realize that the competition at the $10-5 limit is much harder than the competition at the $2-1 limits. To avoid doing this mistake read our poker tournament money management article.

Going on tilt is yet another common poker beginners mistake that happens to experienced players as well. After losing several hands in a row or suffering a very bad bead many players lose balance and start making bets they would usually never consider. A good player should understand that this kind of thing will always happen and you should never allow them to cloud your judgment at the table.

A mistake that many of today's poker beginners tend to make is copying other player's moves that happened to succeed in a specific game. This is mistake for more than one reason. First of all, keep in mind that the majority of online poker players are bad and essentially make bad decisions. Copying them will cause you to form bad habits that will be very hard to lose. A more destructive mistake many online poker players repeat is copying moves they have seen pro's perform on television. They do not understand that the motivation for those moves is extremely situational and depends on things that they most likely can not even understand. Poker skills come not from imitation but from learning the theory of the game and implementing it at the tables.

There are many other beginners mistakes that poker players keep doing among them are - not following proper table etiquette and being superstitious regarding their lucky seat or shoes, but the mistakes noted above are the most common and most destructive to your bankroll. Learn to avoid those mistakes using our online poker tournament guides and you will be on the right trail to becoming a good poker player.

Jonathan Staples, Editor

2006–01–10

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