Despite the fact that I started playing poker online free my early days were not much fun. I copied these guys who were forever going all-in and lost all my play money chips really quickly. Not a financial disaster it is true, after all it was poker online free play stuff but for me it felt nearly as bad as my goal was to make cash from poker after doing the play free poker to learn thing, now I was faced with not even being able to cut it in the free poker game, my ambition seemed destined for failure from the start. Not good for my pride either.

In this article I will tell you what I did to get past the early blues and win first in the free poker games and then on cash games.

Firstly, when you join a free poker site, hang out there for a while but don’t play yet, familiarise yourself with it, how it works, the poker games on offer and the players and how they interact. Watch a few games, and get a feel for the general speed of the games and players.

Don’t start off big and if someone goes all-in, don’t follow because you feel you have to. Assess your cards and play the hand you have not the one you wish you had! Make a decision and stand by it.

If you have what you feel is a good hand, don’t be pushed out of the game by the All In crew. These are mainly new players like your-self or just people messing about.

A little tip that hasn’t failed me yet:
Value your cards. When you get your first 2 cards (pocket cards) give them a value that relates to your chips. For example, say you have 1000 chips, lets call an Ace as value 300, King 290, Queen 280 and so on, set your own values. If you get a Pair then the combined value is 1 one card value plus half. So 2 kings will be 435 (290 + 145). Once the first round of the hand is done and you get to the stage where 3 new cards are laid on the table (called the Flop), you revalue your cards.

If you’re not confident, then click check and do not raise your bet. Only call if the cards are worth the risk.

On the turn of the forth card, known as the TURN, check the cards and if they are worth it start to raise your bet. The turn of the final card (known as the River Card) is the most important card of the game.

Unless you’re all-in at this time, your bet could decide the outcome. A sharp rise could force the less confident players out of the game. After you’ve been playing a while you will know by now how confident they are by their bets.

But remember; don’t over value your cards. Obviously Three of a kind is good, along with a flush or straight. But 4 of a kind is normally a winner.

A good poker player reads the cards and players well; a bad one goes all-in straight away. Only bet what you can afford whether they free chips or paid for chips.

You will find that free poker tournaments players tend to be more reckless with their chips yet this in itself is good practice for playing against reckless players and you will learn how to play free poker with no risk to your finances.

Unless you only want to play free online poker games for simple fun then a major objective will be making money. Or to put it another way, you want extra income, maybe even full time income replacement.

But just how can you start playing free poker with very little or nothing and develop a real cash bank roll and become profitable to the point where your poker play supply you with an extra of even full-time income.

If you start poker as a beginner with no money then I won’t lie to you, it is very hard. However it is possible, people do it and in this free poker guide I am going to go through the basics that you need to know in order to begin your mission.

Working out your poker profit – The Formulas
The most profitable poker is that which generates the most money in the shortest time and lowest cost. You can use some simple calculations to work out the profitability of your poker.

Profit is basically the difference between your start-up bankroll and your end bankroll over the period of time in question, be it a day, week, month, year etc. So End bankroll minus Initial bankroll = Basic profit.

It’s also important to know what your salary is. For this divide the profit by the hours dedicated to play poker. So salary = Profit/Hours.

How to play for your profit
You can play two types of poker game. There are tournaments and ring games.

In order to make ring game poker profitable right away and never lose cash you’ll need a sponsor for the initial bankroll. Most cash poker sites will match a deposit but of course this means you need to put your personal money down too.

If you have some cash you are willing to risk then it might be worth the small risk, but if not then check out free poker sites to find one offering an initial play money bankroll. The better free poker sites offer options to cash your free money in for actual cash bankrolls on partner cash poker sites once you have won enough. Make sure the free site you join has this sort of deal in place with cash win poker sites and that the partner sites accept players from your country.

Tournaments are similar. Start free and build from there losing only money that is already profit.

First you start out with free poker freerolls. Free poker tournament sites offer many and as with ring games you can earn play money credits you can convert to real cash on cash poker online sites. As you get better and win more you step up entry cost and risk-reward levels and build your online poker income.

Critical – Keep your risk in line with your bankroll and winning consistency

Only step-up levels when you are certain your poker skill is good enough to win at the next level up on a regular basis. A straightforward formula you can use is to say once you’ve played 30 tournaments at $0.10 and have won at least $10 then you can step up to say $0.20.

And if of course you get a losing streak then you are losing money that is profit not your own money. Not fun but you get to keep going. Back down to the level below if you need to and keep going – “2 steps forward, one step back” is the name of the game. Your profit will not be a linear straight line and if you can accept that you will be able to keep going and progress steadily and absorb those corrections.

If you are new to online poker then learn first and play poker for free at one of the best free online poker sites. Here you can learn how to play poker absolutely free with no risk to your own money and start building a bankroll to cash in for real money when you are ready to go bigtime and play poker online to win money.

When I started playing free online poker games I learned the hard way. I copied these guys who were forever going all-in and lost all my play money chips really quickly. OK so it was free poker online so it wasn’t a money loss disaster but as my ambition was to make money not even being able to cut it in what you could call demo mode was bad news. Not good for my pride either.

In this article I will tell you what I did to get past the early blues and win first in the free poker games and then on cash games.

First of all, when you’re new to a site, take a little time to familiarise yourself with the site and its members. Check out some games and try to get a feeling for how they work, the speed and the players.

Don’t start off big and if someone goes all-in, don’t follow because you feel you have to. Assess your cards and play the hand you have not the one you wish you had! Make a decision and stand by it.

If you think you have a strong hand, don’t let yourself be pushed out by the All In gang. These are mainly new players like your-self or just people messing about.

A little tip that hasn’t failed me yet:
Assign values to your cards. When you get your first 2 cards (pocket cards) give them a value that relates to your chips. If you have 1000 chips, an Ace Card is worth 300 (a value you set) chips, King is worth 290 and so on. If they Pair up, the value becomes one card value plus half. So 2 kings will be 435 (290 + 145). Once the first round of the hand is done and you get to the stage where 3 new cards are laid on the table (called the Flop), you revalue your cards.

If you’re not confident, then click check and do not raise your bet. Only call if the cards are worth the risk.

On the turn of the forth card, known as the TURN, check the cards and if they are worth it start to raise your bet. The turn of the final card (known as the River Card) is the most important card of the game.

Unless you’re all-in at this time, your bet could decide the outcome. A sharp rise could force the less confident players out of the game. After you’ve been playing a while you will know by now how confident they are by their bets.

But remember; don’t over value your cards. Obviously Three of a kind is good, along with a flush or straight. But 4 of a kind is normally a winner.

A good poker player reads the cards and players well; a bad one goes all-in straight away. Only bet what you can afford whether they free chips or paid for chips.

You will find that poker online free players tend to be more reckless with their chips yet this in itself is good practice for playing against reckless players and you will learn how to play poker for free with no risk to your finances.

For many of us that happen to be in the mood to play a game, a typical video game is not really what we consider to be all that fun. If you happen to be a person that has a stronger preference for casino type games then you would certainly do well to check those out if they sound like more of a good time to you because there are many to choose from. There are more games than you might think that you can actually play online and have a really good time at because you are only betting with virtual currency instead of real money. Not only can this be a really fun way to play, you can actually use it as a way to get better at games you might eventually want to play for real money.

Plenty of us have decided that this is a great way to be able to play roulette since it lets us play without having to worry about risking cash in the mean time and that can be handy. So many people really love a good free roulette game and the reason is because they can have a great time without needing to lay out cash. When you do things this way you can end up having a blast and not losing a single cent along the way.

You really can use one of these free games to be able to get a much lower price for the time you spend in a casino and that is definitely going to end up being helpful. For those of us who are looking to get the best value, this is definitely a great way to go in learning roulette. It is so much easier to be able to learn the game this way since you do not have to worry about the amount you are spending.

You can find plenty of places to be able to enjoy roulette like this these days. You will discover that lots of casinos offer play money roulette. You can get a sense of how the game operates when you play this way so that you will be better equipped to make good decisions about it which is always a very good thing.

The nice thing is that when you take the time to get your skills up at roulette you open the door to some fabulous winnings. Due to the payouts roulette offers, you’d be smart to study like this. You should definitely check out your options to see how much fun you can have. A great many folks say roulette is where you can win the most.

If you get a bonus then you can usually play for free, too. This is a good way to get a free game in. No matter what anyone else says, playing roulette without money these days really is possible.

Many players, especially us free online poker players shy away from the “technical” side of the game, the working out of odds and such. I mean doing that means doing math and lets face it math without a calculator or Excel is bad for many of us!

Sadly the fact is that to succeed in poker this is a key part of the game that you need to master, especially if you have any aspirations to play live money games.

The biggest problem is that the formula for doing odds is pretty complex and to do it in your head on the fly under pressure you do need to be pretty hot at math.

As an example:

Lets say you hold 8-7 and the Flop is 5-6-A. You want to know your odds on hitting a Straight later.

If you utilize a rigorous mathematical solution, you’ll come up with this horror:

You need certain cards to help you do this – Known as “outs” In this case for a straight you need 4 and 9. There are eight of them still remaining in the deck. The odds of your getting them later is P (1-P)Q, where P is the probability of hitting your hand on the Turn, and Q is the probability you will hit at the river. It is P (1-P)Q because (1-P)Q is the probability that you will hit on the river if you don’t complete your hand on the Turn.

Now here are the values for P and Q.

- P = 8 cards still on the deck to help you divided by 52-5 = 47 remaining cards = 8/47.
- Q = 8 cards still on the deck to help you, since you didn’t complete on the Turn divided by 52-6 (because there are six cards already out, your hole cards and the Board) = 8/46.

The complete answer is 8/47 (1 – 8/47)(8/46) = .170 (.829)(.174) = .170 .144 = .314 = 31%. You’ve got a 31% chance of hitting your Straight later.

Ouch, that’s fun and beyond most of us! However, in a table you usually do not have a calculator (and even if you do you still need to know what to input into it .

And many poker players just understand the outs, but not really much of basic probability theory. How’s this? An out by the way is any unseen card that, if drawn, will improve your hand win chances.

Here then is a much more basic, easy way to work out odds

Let us try an approximation formula:

- You divide 8 by 50, because 47 is near to 50, and get 16.

- Double it again and you get .32.

- It’s a reliable estimate.

- After all, poker players, in games, don’t require exact solutions; they want only a hint as to where they are standing.

- In this case “about 32%” is a nice enough answer.

So, in the Flop, here is the approximation:

- Get the amount of your outs, then multiply it by 4, then affix a percent sign.

- That is a reliable approximation percentage of your hitting the hand.

- In the Turn, if you still have outs, multiply it by 2, then affix a percent sign.

- Preflop, when you choose to push all-in, you typically don’t need to do this since you will rely mainly on pure hand strength.

To practice your odds calculations there can be no better way than to play poker online for free on http://www.NoPayPOKER.com, at least here you can get it wrong and not lose money as a result! Yes, you can always use odds calculators and many are available for online poker but if you want to play live you need to learn to do it the hard way, so get learning if you have any ambition to move beyond free online poker and win serious cash!

I’ve been playing no limit Texas Hold’em for roughly six years now and have gained a lot of knowledge of the game. I have managed to win quite a lot of money from playing both free online poker and also pay poker games. And, I have lost it all plenty of times by playing very aggressive poker. I am a pretty aggressive player most of the time so I have had some major upswings and some major downswings over the years..

Lately I have changed my poker play which have started to up my winnings. My new style of play is all about ‘aggressive hugger’, a style of play that I have named. Hopefully this article will explain my new ‘aggressive hugger’ strategy.

To win a poker tournament or game is to be conservative when playing. I believe this is the best way to play in most situations because there are a lot of players that don’t understand the game very well or aren’t very good players that you can easily win money from if you only play good cards.

When I talk about playing conservative I mean only calling a raise pre-flop with the top 10-15 starting hands. A better time to play a hand with the top 15-20 hands would be if there was no raise pre-flop at the time, otherwise you should mostly be playing the top 10-15 starting hands.

Winning consistently you shouldn’t really chase straight draws very often especially for medium to large bets. When you are playing low stakes or free online poker tournament games you shouldn’t be trying to steal the blinds even if you are the button, also known as the dealer position.

The reasoning for this is when you are playing a low stakes or play money game most of the time the players just call with anything decent or even very bad hands a lot of times. When you are playing for lows stakes or on free poker sites then winning a lot of times isn’t as important to the players as if they were playing for high stakes.

Poker is all about position. The position in poker is the place you are playing from. So, there is the dealer position, the big blind position and the first position after dealt cards. The position you are playing determines how you should play the hands you have. Conservative players tend to watch closely to positions and their poker play and what style of play they should adapt to their position.

Following the traditional, conservative strategies mentioned above explains the “hugger” part of my newly coined phrase. In the poker world, a “hugger” is referred to someone who plays very tight conservative poker. In order to bring in second word “aggressive”, I will explain how that is incorporated into my new found strategy.

Aggressive style of play usually entails large pre-flop raises with good cards and aggressive continuation bets. If an aggressive player has a rubbish hand, they will not let on that they are not in a strong position. An aggressive player usually believes and portrays that he/she has the best hand.

So the combined elements of a conservative or “hugger” and the aggressive style of play are combined to form the “hugger/ aggressive’ strategy. Observing a conservative style by playing premium hands in an aggressive manner is my new adopted strategy. While holding premium hole cards, I will then play them in an aggressive manner by raising large pre-flop bets in accordance with position techniques while utilizing aggressive betting strategies.

Give it a go, try being an aggressive hugger on free online poker sites and low stakes and as long as you’re an OK player I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how well it works.