The Simple the plan, the better. Simple plans are easy to remember and easy to implement. There will be time when you will want to diverge from your simple plan. The key is, when you decide to diverge from your plan you must have a good reason for doing so.
Basic low limit holdem poker strategy; Until the river, you either have the best or you have a drawing hand. Bet when you are the best, call when you have a good draw and folr everything else. On the river, bet with the best hand and call when you have a reasonable chance of winning.
That's a good and VERY BASIC step, we are not even talking about bluffing here. You just play with your showdown equity becouse you don't know how to bluff. If you know how to bluff then you know more than the basics and you shouldn't be reading this holdem poker strategy article, which is made for the newcomers.
Make up a Plan
You are always covered if you have a plan, we call it a plan but it's truly a holdem poker strategy, pretty basic but enough to get ahead from those that haven't have a one. The plan itself must suit you style of play, you can't have a plan that is totally different compared to the way you normally play, unless of course you are doing everything wrong. My advice is that you should analize your play, think about what's wrong and tell to yourself before sitting to play; "I've done mistakes on the past, but this time I will play better becouse I know what mistakes I made". And yeah you also need to find out what's wrong about your poker strategy in order to make a good one, it's like optimizing your game skills.
A well known phrase is: Bet with the best, call good draws and fold everything else.
So that will leave you with the following logic:
- If you have a good hand on the preflop you must raise.
- If you have a good draw (suited connectors) on the preflop you must call.
- If you have everything else, you must fold.
- If you happend to hit the flop and have the top single pair, you must raise.
- If you happend to ALMOST have a flush or an straight on the flop you prolly must call (not huge bets)
- If you totally missed the flop you must fold if someone bets.
- If you happend to get called and still have a good hand, keep trying to make the pot bigger and bigger, make smart bets so they don't fold automatically (yeah don't push allin)
- If you are in the turn and have a chance to get a flush on the river, you wanna call low bets (real low).
- If you are in the flop and have a flush draw, you want to call all bets that are near to half of the pot value, or even 2/3 if u your cards are higher than what's shown on the table. (example u have JTs and the table shows 9-8-2)
I'm sure you'll get better following this simple and basic strategy, that actually make you think a little more deep into the real poker, which is very complex.
When you are done with this holdem strategy you should go ahead and learn how to bluff, there's only two ways to win a poker hand, one is winning the showdown with the best hand, the other one is bluffing, so yeah you need to learn how to bluff someday if you wanna be a winner poker player
