Confidence can Kill in Poker

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Today’s poker tips are about confidence and what it can do for poker players during hands of Texas Holdem. To be completely honest, while confidence is a wonderful thing, whether you are playing live poker or online poker, confidence can kill you. To be more specific, misplaced confidence can whittle a poker players bankroll down to nothing extremely fast.

There is nothing wrong with poker players having a healthy sense of self worth, but Texas Holdem is not like football, or most physical sports. These sports are muscle against muscle, speed against speed, agility against agility, etc. Confidence in one’s self is mandatory in these cases. Poker players playing live poker, online poker, or Texas holdem under just about any condition will find themselves facing many more x-factors than the aforementioned athletes. If you are a linebacker, you are going to care whether or not the running back to run a 4.3 forty, if you are in an online poker room or playing live poker at a casino, the deck won’t care about a poker players pedigree, their accomplishments, or what they think they can do during a Texas Holdem game. It will still stubbornly deal you bad hole cards. This is where, from a poker tips perspective, confidence can get you in trouble. Too many poker players get dealt bad cards and believe by the sheer power of their personal awesomeness, they can thread the needle and still win. This may work occasionally, but an over confident player who tries to play too often with bad cards eventually gets figured out by their opponents, and winds up losing money.

Where confidence for the Texas Holdem player should be is in their ability to read other players. This is obviously easier in live poker then it is when playing online poker, but the ability to read folks in cyberspace is something that can be learned, but those are poker tips for another day. While confidence can help the live poker and online poker player when it comes down to a decision about whether or not you perceive an opponent is bluffing, poker players who are more introspective about their game and constantly evaluate and re-evaluate their game will be more successful in the long run. A player who thinks they have reached their top form, and stop developing are headed for a fall.

This is just drive-by poker tips that have no real world examples, anyone who has watched the decline of Phil Hellmuth over the past few years will see what can happen to a player who thinks too much of themselves. He is a name in the sport because of his past, but he is no longer truly relevant as a competitor, and is not considered a threat to win any major titles. If Phil Hellmuth’s ego and over confidence can take a champion of his caliber to the land of mediocrity, it can happen to anyone.

That is the poker tips for today.