Additional Resources - Free Poker
InternetPokerDownloads.com offers a valuable free poker game which can be played directly in your browser. The game is a great tool for learning poker and starts you off as a poker beginner in the Texas West. You get to play poker games with local town residents as your opponents, and buy homes and buildings in the town as you win your way through the game. When you own all of the town buildings you're crowned as the number 1 player. You can then challenge the previous number 1 to win a horse with which you'll then travel to other towns and win more poker games and buildings. Once you've conquered all of your opponents throughout all of the Texas towns, you're named the Governor Of Poker.
PlayWinningPoker.com has a section dedicated to learning how to play poker that covers everything you'll need in an easy to read set of articles.
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This page of PokerStrategyBonus.com is dedicated to providing useful information for anyone that wants to learn poker and play successfully. In fact, the whole site is dedicated to that aim, and I've tried to do that by building a resource that covers each element of poker that certainly a beginner is going to need, and also more advanced players.
With such a huge subject, we need to start at the most logical place. I'm going to assume that you're aware of poker rules, and basics such as hand rankings. These are the elements that anyone wishing to learn poker needs to understand first, and they're covered in the online poker hub of this site. This online poker hub also covers items such as poker bonuses, games, and tournaments - along with some advice on which poker rooms are available to play in.
Once you're clear on the basics, you can move on to looking at poker strategy. This involves studying how to play the best poker in specific situations, recognising the different player types you're up against, and how to calculate odds and use mathematics to work out your best approach during poker hands. Studying strategy is a great way to learn poker the right way.
Now there are a number of different ways we can tackle how to learn poker as a subject - and I'm going to try and cover them all here - but first I think it's good to consider the different learning mediums....
The printed word obviously has it's benefits, and searching throughout this website or many of the other hundreds of poker websites will give you plenty of reading material. It's a well known fact though that information you get when studying any subject becomes more permanently imprinted on your memory when it's presented in multiple forms. That's where the value of watching poker on video or TV, or perhaps taking part in live poker tuition sessions comes in, and it's a good idea to use a mixture of learning mediums when you're learning how to play poker just as it is in any subject.
Actually playing is of course a great way to learn poker too. They say there's no subsitute for experience, and that is definitely true in this game. There are so many different game types and options for how, what, and where to play, allied to the different strategic options while you're playing, that you'll be constantly learning from your first step into what is widely recognised as one of the truly great games.
Here I'm going to start covering the different options open to any player starting out on the road to learning poker. Each of them will have benefits whatever your skill level.
1. PokerStrategyBonus.com
I've got to say this of course, there's a lot you can learn about poker by using this website. I believe we have a good resource here, and starting out at either of the hub pages - online poker or poker strategy - will lead you deeper into the different areas you'll want to cover. Virtually all of the info is in written format, so at some point you'll want to expand and take in some alternative learning mediums.
2. Poker Schools and Tuition
There are a number of dedicated poker schools which are either run by the poker rooms themselves, or are standalone schools which tend to have agreements with those poker rooms. Either will offer you strong resources for learning, with probably the best among them being the PokerStrategy.com school which I feature heavily throughout this site.
3. Poker Academies
I've listed academies as a separate example here because I'm classing them differently from poker schools, in that a poker academy can be seen as offering live tuition, normally as a kind of camp which you attend over a period of a few days or more.
The WSOP Academy is a great starting point particularly focussed on US players.
4. Experience
I'm going to recommend you spend significant time studying before you move on to live games. Certainly you'll lose nothing - and potentially gain a lot - by working your way through poker websites and signing up with a poker school before you get involved with real money games. That said, playing free poker as a method of practice is an option at any point. Just be careful to recognise that playing free poker has a major drawback in that when there's no real money at stake, players (including you, probably) can make decisions they wouldn't in a game where there's real money at stake. As a method of learning poker then, free games can be viewed as a good way to get the rules understood and the basics of poker strategy firmly fixed in your mind.
4. Poker Books & Magazines
You can find pretty much any information you need on poker by searching online, or by using any of the schools or other resources I've listed on this site. The major benefit of poker books (and other printed material such as magazines) is of course the ease of use when travelling or when you have no access to a PC or laptop. There have been hundreds of books published which cover poker from every angle imagineable, and there's no doubt that anyone wanting to learn pojker is going to find a number of them highly valuable.
There's a great selection of titles available at OnlinePoker.net with well written subjective reviews, or of course you can go straight to the poker books section at Amazon and research the different poker titles there.
As always, we finish up with some quick links to 'learn poker' searches at the major search engines, with Google, Yahoo, and MSN all returning extensive listings of valuable websites.
