What Does Poker Teach You?

Poker isn’t just a game of chance; it also involves a good bit of strategy and psychology. While luck plays a large role in poker, skilled players can minimize the amount of luck they face and increase their winning percentages significantly over time. The most common way to do this is by learning how to read other players’ behavior and watching for tells. Tells are little things that a player does that give away their secret strength or weakness. These can include fiddling with their chips, rubbing their nose or forehead, playing conservatively, acting a little sloppy, and more. The reliability of poker tells varies, so it’s important to learn to recognize them.

Another thing that poker teaches is how to calculate odds in your head. This is an invaluable skill that can be applied to all sorts of situations in life. Many break-even beginner players are able to turn their game around simply by starting to view poker in a more cold, calculated and mathematically accurate manner.

Finally, poker teaches you that your fortunes can change dramatically in a single hand. No one racks up victories all night long and even on your best nights, you’ll still lose a lot of hands. But that’s OK; the game teaches you to treat those losses like bruises and not tattoos and to remember that your next victory is just around the corner.