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 Anticipating the next move your opponents will make.
Anticipating your opponent?s next move is a very important skill to acquire to becoming a successful poker player. Knowing what is going to happen next will help you maximize your winnings while minimizing your losses. Minimizing your losses is probably even more important then maximizing your gains. It may take you hours to build a chip stack, but you can loose it in just one hand. There fore I think the more important part is to minimize your losses.
Anticipating your opponents next move requires you to somewhat have a read on the poker players you are up against. You will need to know if they are tight aggressive or loose poker players. This will let you know what will happen next. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Lets say you have A10 and a guy that you know is a tight player that would not raise with anything less then AK, AQ or better. You have position so you call the bet.
The flop comes A 5 2. He comes out firing at you. Know you have top pair with a medium kicker you should probably fold the hand. You should have folded it before the flop just knowing that this player is tight. Even if it is the best hand you have seen in a while. Its about playing the player. Knowing he is tight and even if he has JJ you are still not favored in the hand. So you should anticipate the fact that the guy has a good hand and also that he will be firing a big bet after the flop as well. So instead of even calling the best thing to do is to just muck the A10 and don?t invest any more money in the hand.
Now at the same time if you are dealing with someone that is so tight they will not bet until they hit something you might want to call if they check to you make a strong bet. If they don?t fold just ck it because they probably have you beat. If they fold you just stole the pot.
They key is to anticipate what the player is going to do before it happens. If they bet preflop you can just about grantee that any poker player that knows just a little bit will make a bet after the flop no matter what. So you have to decide if you are going to be willing to call another bet after the flop or what you will do. If you are not prepared to call another bet after the preflop bet then you need to be prepared to loose what ever you put in if you do not hit.
So anticipation is the key to minimizing your looses.
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