As a beginner, your first objective should be to shake off your sucker status as soon as possible and to begin to sharpen your skills right away. No, you’re not the next Doyle Brunson, regardless of the lucky streak you hit as soon as you begin to play and quite frankly, the odds are that you shall never become anything close to poker legend status. Don’t let that get you down though, the good news is, it doesn’t really take that much to catch up with the overwhelming majority of online poker players out there.

If you read, that is you find the time to study poker and online poker on several levels, you’ll become a reasonably good player soon enough. Don’t expect to pick up everything on the go. Take rakeback for instance: if you don’t read around or if someone doesn’t tell you about it, you’ll never find out about its existence. Rakeback deals make it easier for you to cope with the adversities of the real money online poker environment. Such rakeback deals offer you a nice rebate on the rake you generate saving you money and thus increasing your success odds.

Strategy-wise, all you need to do is to hammer a few basic concepts into your head. First of all: learn to fold and play fewer hands. Exercising proper starting hand selection is a must for a beginner. Starting hand selection will make your later-street decisions a hell of a lot easier too.

Play from position. Learn the importance of position and make use of the edges it offers you.

Get your mathematical odds right. That’s the third step. To do that, you need to learn to calculate pot odds and to count your outs.

Calculating your pot odds is relatively simple. You need to consider the amount of money already in the pot and the amount of money you have to call to stay in the hand. If there is $100 in the pot and you need to call $20 to stay in it, you have 5-1 odds.

Determining the odds of making the best hand at the table is a little trickier. First of all, you need to know your number of outs.

The best way to explain this is through an example, so here goes: you have a four card-flush on the flop. You need another suited card to make a hand that will probably win the pot for you. You have 4 of the total of 13 same-suited cards in possession already. That leaves 9 cards in the deck that will help you, which means that you have 9 outs to make your flush. In order to find the odds of making your hand, you need to create a relation between your number of outs and the total number of cards that are left in the deck.

Given that 2 cards are in your possession and 3 are on the table. That leaves 52-5=47 cards. Out of those 47 cards, 9 will help you and 38 won’t. This means you have 38-9 odds against making your flush. That’s basically 4.22 – 1 against. This means your 5-1 pot odds justify a call in this situation, given that your odds against making your hand are smaller than the pot odds you get.

The mistake that most beginners commit when counting their outs is that they overlook certain outs and thus end up making the wrong decision. If you have a hand that hides a flush draw as well a set one for instance, don’t disregard the cards that can help you fill your set. Make sure that the number of outs you use to calculate your odds is indeed as accurate as possible.

While the above theory shows you where the EV+ is, often taking a different action than what the mathematical odds suggest is correct. If you’re looking to exploit your implied odds for instance or if you just get a really accurate read on your opponent, you may want to go down a different road than where your odds direct you.
At any rate, knowing your odds is one of the basic concepts that will help you ditch your rookie-ways and catch up with your opponents.