One thing i notice a lot is that there are some good players out there online or even just in my local home games,but one significant point about them i find is that they value success in poker terms a little to much and let themselves get affected by variance to much.They start to get to negative and it drags there poker game down,the trick is to start every session,every new hand in a positive frame of mind.
A good way i find is to talk to your mind as those negative thoughts creep in and just accept them and with practice i found myself just shrugging my shoulders and moving on to the next hand or game and still kept a good frame of mind.Losing at anything is tough but it is a fact of life in poker that all of us will lose,the trick is finding your own way with dealing with it and your poker will improve along with your new positive mindset.
The next improvement anyone can make is getting into that good habit of studying other players and how they approach certain hands,to do this though i find some people are a little to judgemental and it affects how they view the game,every player in poker is wired differently and the skill levels can differ a lot and i found once i got away from being judgement free and threw away any preconceived ideas on how the game should be played my reading of the online tables improved vastly.
Anyone can read a persons hand based on his actions and seeing common tendencies, ie., a beginning player will commonly bet small when on a draw, and bet big when he has a made hand. What about more experienced players? What does it mean when they bet 2/3s of the pot one time, and than bet pot the next? They are certainly experienced enough to know not to bet the same pattern for the same types of hands. So how can you figure out what they have? Well, get to know him, watch him play. Try and figure out what he is thinking, he has to be thinking something. Put yourself in his spot, what kind of hand would you have if you were betting like that?
In every home or online game i applied this and would instantly bring up the hand history and try to get a feel for the way they approached there top pairs,draws etc etc and with time i found i could read post-flop actions quite well and began to play poker,i started to play the players and not there cards.I really tried through trial and error to see if i could bet people off there hands based on my reads and found that with certain type bets i could gain a lot of info on how strong other players hands were,even if it costs me my tournament life i try to trust my reads %100 everytime.I got it wrong quite a few times when i approached the game like this but i didnt give up and eventually the pieces of the jigsaw started falling into place and now i am more right than wrong which is"nt bad
but alas this is not the end of my learning curve as the vast array of styles and type of players means i have to concentrate on every hand every game played to keep in touch with how the dynamics of the table change and how others approach Tilt,ever increasing blinds or the table maniac etc etc.
So as long as you can forget any ideas or predetermined thoughts on how hands should be played/approached or how people should act i find that anyones reading ability improves and playing post-flop poker becomes so much more fun.
