The two most popular games in America are football and poker. In a certain sense, I suppose we could say that each of them is a preparation for life and then a model of life. Football is the ultimate team effort game whose aim is to score a goal by kicking the ball through the opponent’s goalposts.

Football highlights teamwork, joint effort, role specialization and the striving to reach a common goal. It is no accident that football jargon pervades the business world vocabulary.

Poker, on the other hand, is the game in which individuals strive against each other. It emphasizes the internal dynamics of a person, the choices that make him a winner or a loser, and his understanding of his competitors. It also is no accident that poker jargon pervades the stories and legends of the conquest of new territories and the frontier and myths of groundbreaking stories.

Is there any sure fire way to get started on the right foot at winning at the poker table? Well, there are a few things that you must know and remember. Firstly, you have to understand the game sufficiently to be able to realistically evaluate the chances of the hand you are holding winning. Most players learn pretty quickly what the odds are, what constitutes a good hand, and are able to make a reasonable evaluation of what the other players are doing.

Most of the books deal a lot with these mechanics. They are all relevant but won’t give you the ‘killer’ edge. Some players meticulously keep a book on their opponents, noting each little gesture and evaluating the body language. This will give you a little edge and is a pretty useful thing to do. But it’s no big deal - you can probably rely on your instinct for what people are doing and what their intentions are. But the mechanics are not so relevant when you have already grasped them.

There are, however, two really relevant issues to understand. First of all, poker is a money game. The books tell you about card odds. They are only the first step. The important thing is pot odds, how much will it cost you to play compared to how much you stand to win. You can’t change the card odds, but the pot odds can be changed.

The deep secret of poker is to make people put as much money into the pots you win and not put very much into the pots that the others win. Some people are of the opinion that the secret of winning is to play tight, to only play the very best hands. Wrong.

When your opponents see you playing tight they don’t stay with you unless they have very good hands. So you end up winning small pots. Some players play wild in order to win, to get a lot of action going so that there are big pots. Wrong again. In that way you win more pots but you put a lot of money into other people’s pots as well. What you are trying to do is to make people put money into your pots.

You must manipulate them to get them to stay in. When you have them on the hook you push the betting aggressively. When the odds are on their side the losers call and the winners raise.
If you want to win, another important issue is to choose to be a winner rather than a loser. There are two types of losers - the passive callers and the wild men.

The passive caller stays in too long, hoping against hope, knowing that he’s bucking the odds. He doesn’t raise when he should and calls when he shouldn’t. He knows he’s playing like a loser but continues playing in the same way.

The wild man prefers action and excitement. He plays hands when he shouldn’t and raises when he shouldn’t. He seeks any excuse to stay in the action. He knows he plays too many hands and pushes them too hard but he keeps on doing it. If an individual is a loser, it’s because he has chosen to keep his losing habits and being a loser is acceptable to him.

You probably want to ask happens when the other players are better than you? The answer is simple - don’t play in games where the other players are a lot better than you are.

And in the end, that’s the winner’s answer - play in games where you can win!