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Some Poker players are happy to play casually, without any desire to use strict strategy. However, for many Poker players today the main goal is to develop their game and build a successful winning strategy to help them move up the limits and continue to win greater amounts of money.
Developing a solid strategy sounds like a straightforward enough plan, but what is the best approach for helping you mature as a player? Furthermore, where should you look if you want to move up the to the higher stakes and play against more experienced competition?
In a nutshell, the more skill you have at the table, the greater chance you will have at winning money at the highest stakes of Poker. From my experience over the years of learning how to play winning poker, the following have been the most important for sculpting a successful strategy.
Of course, none of this is going to work unless you have the correct mindset and determination to strengthen your game. However, as long as this drive is there, it's only a matter of time before you move up those limits.
You can find many strategy articles and guides on the Internet, but Poker books will never fail to be superb all-in-one resources that will stand the test of time. Poker strategy books written by winning Poker players are the perfect foundation for any aspiring winning Poker player.
Here is a small selection of my top recommended Poker books.
There are certainly other useful Poker books out there to choose from, but this is my recommended selection to start with. However, anything written by Sklansky, Malmuth, Harrington or Ciaffone is going to be nothing short of brilliant.
Many players will recommend Doyle Brunson's "Super System" as the Bible of Poker, however, the strategy contained in this book is a little dated when compared to the style of today's game. Nonetheless, it is a still a great book, but I wouldn't recommend it to newer players to the game.
Poker strategy forums are nothing short of amazing when it comes to refining your skills at the table.
As soon as you have been playing for a few months, read a few strategy books and pushed a strong fundamental strategy under your belt, you should head toward forums for tweaking and continued development of your game.
One of the single most useful ways to improve your game is read other players' hand histories and the strategy analysis on them in forum threads. Better yet, try posting hand histories of your own up for discussion and take on board the advice that more experienced players have to offer.
Other strategical question threads are also very useful, as these will help you to think about areas of the game that you may not have ever considered before. Poker strategy forums are one big melting pot for theories, questions, ideas and solid strategy, and you should try and surround yourself with all this information as much as you can.
So where you can find great Poker strategy forums?
As you may well be aware, there is a fair amount of online Poker software out there to help you improve your game. Each piece of software serves its own purpose with it's own unique functions, but the only type of software that you should be interested in as a serious player is the one that will track your play.
The most popular pieces of tracking software for online poker players are currently:
What these pieces of software will do is run in the background whilst you play, collecting data on every aspect of the hand and storing it in a database. This information is then presented in tables and graphs to help you plug leaks in your game and highlight areas that you need to work on.
Poker tracking software is not essential in your quest for improving your game, but I personally would not play without it. It's as close as you can get to being essential though in my opinion, as you are leaving a lot of exceptionally useful information and help on the table if you decide not use it.
It's all well and good learning about the strategy from books and picking up all the handy software kit, but unless you've got the focus to practice and put your skills to the test you're not going to improve.
Practice, practice and more practice supplemented with strategy discussion and game analysis is the ultimate recipe for a developing game. The more you play, the better you will get, and the better you get the more money you can win. The sky is the limit, and the good thing is that you are in control of where you end up.
Put the effort in over time and you will see results. It's as simple as that.
Best of luck.
The author of this article runs a high stakes Casinos website, which also contains information on the top high limit online Poker rooms. You can also find recommendations for other high stakes Casino card games such high limit Blackjack and Baccarat.