How to win at poker?

To win at poker, two possibilities are available to us:

• Have a better combination of cards than your opponent.
• Make your opponent believe that you have a better combination of cards than him.

Given that there are a multitude of more or less strong combinations, the objective will be to try to guess the cards of our opponents. This way, we can estimate the relative strength of our combination and adapt our game.

A poker player's main weapons for successfully guessing other people's cards are intuition, calculation of probabilities and observation .

Obviously, you can combine these 3 weapons.

Thus, if we consider that our combination is stronger than that of our opponent, we can:

• Either encourage him to bluff by making him believe that our hand is not strong enough to withstand his bets
• Either encourage him to bet in order to value his hand even though his hand is less good than ours (we say that he value cut )
• Or encourage him to pay our bets with a worse hand than ours. Here it is the size of the bet that will give our opponent the impression that his hand is better.

If we believe that our opponent's combination is better than ours, we can try to make him believe that we have a better combination than him. This is called bluffing. For example, some players will fold a better hand than ours when we bet high, because they will feel that their hand is not strong enough to withstand the aggression.

Be careful, experienced players rely on a lot of information to make their decision, and could call your bets even with a weak hand, if they believe that yours is not better. You must therefore bluff intelligently and subtly in order not to be unmasked.

This is also the reason why the experience, character and habits of your opponents are complementary to the cards you estimate they have in their hands, to determine your strategy.

There are a multitude of strategies depending on your opponents, their hand strength, your hand strength and how you are perceived by your opponents. It's up to you to find the one that will make your opponents make the most mistakes, and change it regularly so that your game cannot be predicted.