One of the greatest debates that has stemmed from the online poker era is of course whether or not winning at poker requires skill or just lots of luck. Many people feel online poker rooms are actually rigged to set up hands that encourage large pots so that they can take a larger rake, meaning that neither skill nor luck comes into play. However for this article we will put this thought process aside, as I have personally never seen any evidence of it and I have been playing online poker for nearly ten years and at close to twenty game operators.

Now that we got that out of the way, what exactly does it take to win at poker; skill or luck? Well I can personally say I have been in the midst of this heated debate at several online poker rooms, and no matter how much I try to convince people, they just do not believe my point of view. If you run out of luck, the only thing you can rely on is rakeback. All winners and losers for example will receive 30 % Absolute rakeback paid to their poker account at the end of each month. So, I have written this article in hopes of reaching out to these people and explaining that luck truly has little to do with being a good poker player, and a whole lot to do with being a skillful poker player.

Believe it or not there is actually a lot to know in order to be a good poker player. Call what you want, theory, science, genius, it doesn’t really matter, but being a good poker player requires it. While anyone can play a game of poker and win some money, or enter a poker tournament and win a million dollars, unless they know that strategies involved with being a good poker player they relying on old lady luck to bring them their winnings. Of course knowing these strategies does not mean you will always come out on top, or even always win money, it does mean that in the long run you will be able to make playing poker a profitable endeavour.

Unlike most sports (yes, poker is now considered a sport by many), the skills required to be a professional poker player do have to be supernatural, they can in fact be learned by anybody willing to put the leg work in and actually learn and practice them. So what exactly are these skills and strategies I speak of? There have actually been many, and I mean many, books and DVD series created to try and teach people these theories. That being said it would impossible to give you that much information in such a brief article, however I will gladly give you a very useful pointer so that you will no longer have to depend wholly on luck to win money at poker.

The largest, most important, and hardest to master skill of being a good poker player is patience. If learned and used patience can your absolute best friend at the poker table, if ignored patience will be your worst enemy at the poker table. What exactly does that mean? Well, a lot of people who play poker today have learned how to play from watching poker on TV. Here we see hand after hand of massive pots being played one right after the other. In reality, there are likely ten to fifteen poker hands played in between the ones we see where everyone folded to the person in the big blind position of to the person who raised the pot. We do not see these because they are quite boring and would make for terrible television. The result however, is viewers watching and thinking they are seeing every hand.

In reality, a good and skilled poker player folds 80-90% of their hands even before seeing the flop. They do this knowing that they could luck out and make a hand with the cards from the flop, turn, and river, but also knowing that for the most part if they play the hand they will lose money on it. Instead, skilled poker players usually will only play pocket pairs, ace-king, ace-queen, or an ace that is with another card from its suit giving them the opportunity to make an ace high flush.

There are of course exceptions to every rule, and this one is no different. When you are down only two or three players at a table then you can expand the amount of starting hands you are willing to play. The same is true if you are in positioned in one of the blinds locations and can simply check your way into seeing the flop, or continue into the hand by upping your small blind to the amount of the big blind. But for the most part, a skilled poker player will stick to playing these hands, and if they do waiver, you can rest assured they have a very good reason to be doing so.