There's a reason why only ten percent of poker players are long-term winners. Being successful at a game like Texas hold'em requires so much more than being able to make great laydowns and bluffs. In fact, some features of winning play occur before you even sit down at the table. To be a winning Texas hold'em player, you want to be skilled at choosing the right game.

Choosing the Right Poker Game: Betting Structures

You have a number of options when deciding to play Texas hold'em. You can play fixed-limit, pot-limit or no-limit. What you choose can have a strong effect on your winning potential. A great poker player is often well versed in all games. However, more and more these days you can find poker specialists, who play a single type of game and dominate it.

The most popular type of Texas hold'em is no-limit. It's a good choice for potential winning players as it has the most players (meaning the most losers) and many players find it to be the most fun. However, it also has the highest variance (biggest per/session swings) and requires a great deal of discipline to play. If you are more mathematically inclined, you may prefer a limit form of the game. Limit hold'em poker is much more about calculating how you can win or save one or two extra bets in each hand you play than it is about pulling off fantastic bluffs or making brilliant calls. However, the swings can be quite rough in fixed limit as well, especially when played short handed.

Choosing the Right Poker Game: Number of Players

These days, you even have options regarding how many opponents you want to face. While a normal Texas hold'em poker table features nine or ten players, you can go online and play six opponents, four opponents and even heads-up. The shorthanded poker game is a much faster game. The blinds come around faster and fewer cards are in play, so hand values go up and you'll need to play many more pots. You'll have to aggressively attack or defend blinds nearly every hand. If this kind of fast-paced action is conducive to successful play for you, you may choose a shorthanded game.

Choosing the Right Poker Game: Opponents

One of the best ways to become a winning player is to sit at a table full of losing players. While it's not always easy to see which game is the softest on first glance, online poker allows you to watch as many games as you need to for as long as you want. Instead of jumping into the first open seat, take 15 minutes to watch the games that are being played at your chosen stakes. See if you can pick up anything on the players and if their styles fit in with the type of player you like to play against. You need to maximize your edges to be a winning Texas hold'em player, and finding those soft games can be just the advantage you need to come out on top.

Honest Assessment

What does it take to be a winner at Texas hold'em? It certainly helps to understand the ins and outs of strategies like bluffing, trapping and check-raising. You need to be good at money management and game selection. You also need to be able to make an honest assessment of your play. In fact, making an honest assessment may be a key element in making the turnaround from losing player to winning player.

Why is Making an Honest Assessment so Important in Texas Hold'em?

Psychologically, people tend to externalize failure and internalize success. This means that we are naturally inclined to think of the good things that happen to us as being a result of our own efforts, whereas the bad things are attributed to forces of nature that we cannot control. While this tendency may be good for protecting or ego, it is not necessarily good for our poker results. In fact, this tendency allows professional poker players to be successful. It is very easy for a weak player to attribute a losing session to that unlucky suckout someone made against them on the river, forgetting that they made a similar suckout to build their stack an hour earlier. If losing players were not able to attribute their losses to bad luck and their wins to skill, they would probably quit playing, leaving the good players to fight it out among themselves.

How Can Making an Honest Assessment Help You Become a Winner at Texas Hold'em?

You can't identify leaks in your game if you don't know that you have any. It's certainly possible that you have been unluckier than most, but if you are in fact losing because of errors in play, you need to realize this before you can correct them. Even when you are winning, it is possible to recognize that you have been lucky and identify ways you could have played better.

What Are Some Ways to Make an Honest Assessment?

One way is through long-term results tracking. Instead of worrying about individual sessions, take note of your results for each session and see how you are faring over a number of months. Make sure to record every session, not just your winning ones, not leaving out ones that "didn't really count" because you weren't playing your best. You can also utilize what are called "Sklansky Dollars," after famed poker author David Sklansky. The way Sklansky Dollars work is that you earn money based on your odds of winning. For example, if you are a 75 percent favorite to win a $100 pot, you have earned 75 Sklansky Dollars regardless of the outcome. If you are playing online, there is software that can analyze your hand history in terms of Sklansky dollars. This will give you a clearer picture of whether you are playing a losing game or simply getting unlucky.