For this reason, you may have played successfully many of the more familiar games for years, but find yourself confronting a version that demands sets of skills and rules that you know nothing about and have not experienced. At this point you would be wise to decide which of the versions you want to be expert in. But can such a decision be made?

Every poker player is there to win the game and the bank. But for a beginner, to decide which poker game is the most profitable is practically impossible. Every one of the games is complex, allowing plenty of possibilities. None are decidedly more profitable than others.

What decides the overall profit in any poker game is how well you combine your goals, your strategies, and the unique possibilities of the specific game. That is, one must simply decide which game one is best at (at least as far as earning money is concerned) and work to continually improve oneself. Other games may be played occasionally, but mostly as refreshment. Your best profits will usually be at the one or two poker types you have been specializing in for a long time.

This answer is not going to appeal to everyone. To the novice player, some games seem to offer more possibilities of high earnings than others and so stay with those games until luck finally strikes. You can hang around for that lucky streak if that is what you want from the game, but you will sacrifice the potential of regular earnings.

There is one belief usually held by newcomers that if they get to know the game of no-limit reasonably well they stand to gain greater profits than by playing a solid game of limit poker. It seems to them that by betting large sums even though losses are inevitable, those large bets will turn a net profit in the long run.

Now if you are after consistent profitability, you must delve more deeply into the question. Gain is a result of managing your cards well in the face of a constantly increasing bank. The size of the bank, though is not determinant of how you manage your cards. Good card management is determined by the rules of the game. Each hand needs particular skills to make that bank grow to its highest profitability before you collect it. As you are now aware, successful strategies differ greatly between the game versions.

To be just a mediocre player, pick a game that seems to you a winner, without any further contemplation. You may win an occasional hand, but you will lose the potential to learn how to raise your strategic skills above your opponents’ and thereby raise your earnings above theirs.

The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Rakeback at Ultimate Bet and Rakeback at Absolute Poker. Unique version for reprint here: Discovering Which Poker Game Will Make You The Most Profits.

You will, of course, continue your diligent play and book learning, and will continue to observe and analyze your opponents. This is just a start. Encyclopedic knowledge of the game does not a true player make.

What is missing here is intuition. You must make that stretch above the rules, words and concrete experience and become independent enough to let your intuition lead you. It is intuition separates the technical players from the expert players.

The intellectual likes to thoughts of others, but the poet prefers to think on his own. The poker player with a drive towards independent discovery enjoys making his own observations as much or more than reading about the experiences of others. He then does not merely compile them, but combine them into a unique method. The talented player uses his own independent imagination to invent a style of poker which will put him beyond the tricks of the average player and beyond the reach of most competent masters.

This is the reason why memorizing rules and playing many hands is simply not enough to make a true player, and why this ilk will forever remain shrouded in mystery. The true player’s strategy is impossible to uncover at its core because he or she formulated it alone. Even the most diligent of amateurs will never solve the puzzle.

The only solution to this conundrum is intuition: meaning that one must not only commit to the technical aspects of poker and practice, practice, practice, one must use their powers of intuition to re-imagine and re-invent all this mechanically acquired knowledge. True players develop their skills at observation and imagination to block the untrue player from predicting his moves. This independence and intuition of yours may appear as ignorance to those around you. In some ways they are right, but you have the power of intuition to ignore exactly what you choose to ignore and are very aware that you are working toward improvement in a well-thought out and specific direction.

No one has the time to read everyone’s insight into the game. The intuitive player will make his own choices on issues that he has specifically targeted. He knows when to stop reading and start playing. Scholars will boast that they have read every book written on the subject, and probably have. But the intuitive poker poet plays better.

The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Full Tilt Rakeback as well as Fortune Rakeback.

No matter what the street (how many cards have been dealt = street) a player makes any one of the following decisions: to fold, to answer a bet, and to call. If a player responds to an obligatory bet on a preflop, that bet is known as a limp or limp in, the player himself is referred to as the limper. A player who calls a raise having placed no bet himself, that bet is referred to as a cold call.

To check – to place no bet if no bets were placed before you; to make the first bet is “to bet” (in no-limit poker special terms refer to different types of bets: continuation bet – a standard bet approximately the size of the bank, pot-bet – a bet approximately the size of the bank, and overbet – a bet significantly larger than the bank); to raise another player’s bet (if the bet has already been raised, than your raise may be called a re-raise or a 3-bet; if you were preceded by a re-raise, than the fourth allowed bet is called a cap and player is said to “cap the betting”).

The bank is interchangeable with the pot and consists of chips which have been put in by the players and make up the major prize (and major purpose) of the game. The “stack” is each player’s pile of chips. The bankroll is the total sum of the money available to a player in any one game. A player goes “all-in” should he bet his whole stack. When a player does go all-in, he can usually be seen pushing his chips toward the table’s center. By the way, “push” itself implies an all-in bet. A game continuing on after an all-in requires the bank to be divided into two parts: the main pot and the side pot.

When at the river (end of the game) two players or more have placed equal bets, it is known as a showdown. The winner of the showdown is the player with the strongest 5-card combination (aka hand). Rating the hands from strongest to lowest goes like this: royal flush, straight flush, quad (four of a kind), full-house, flush, straight, three of a kind (a set when a third card is added to a pocket pair), two pairs (a doper), pair or overpair which is stronger than the strongest single card on the table; in the flop, the cards are ranked as top, middle, and small pairs, and winding up the rear is the high card which is the card higher than the highest card on the table and is referred to as the overcard.

Strong hands are monsters, generally ranging from full-house up. The nuts is the strongest current hand. So he who holds the strongest current hand has the nuts.

The highest card of the five best cards, in the situation of even hands, is the one which is not part of any of the combinations listed in the above paragraph. This is known as the kicker. When players have similar combinations, a split bank is the result. Now you know.

The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Poker Nordica Rakeback as well as Rakeback at Betfair Poker.