Making your first steps into the poker world can be both exciting and daunting. As a beginner, there is this huge world of strategy and opportunities to explore, but at the same time, you know you’ll be competing against players who have years and even decades of experience. What is the best way to catch up with the competition, and is poker training an answer?
In today’s poker environment, the competition is tough, even at the lowest stakes. Long gone are the days when you could expect to be a winning player by reading a book and learning a starting hands chart. This may help you get off the ground, but it certainly won’t be enough to make it in the long run.
This is not to say that you have to be an absolute crusher to beat NL10 or make a profit in tournaments under $10, but you do need a certain level of understanding of the game beyond basic rules, so some learning is required. That said, the question is how do you pick from so many different poker training sites, and, perhaps more importantly, how much should you be willing to pay?
Small Investment Can Get You a Long Way
In many things in life, bigger (read: more expensive) is usually better. This doesn’t necessarily apply to poker training when you are just starting out.
Spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars as a beginner is not just unnecessary; it could potentially have an adverse effect on your passion for the game. Expensive courses are targeted at more experienced players, and many concepts and ideas covered in them will go right over your head and confuse you.
Instead, you are much better off with a course or program designed specifically for beginners, and you can find quite a few of these in the $10 range.
Some of these sites, such as PokerCoaching.com, will even give you a free subscription for a few days so you can check out the content and the community and see what they have to offer. This will give you an idea of how the content is presented and if it works for you.
Be Patient & Don’t Expect Miracles
Poker training sites offer great tools to get you off the ground with all the information you need in one place and presented in a structured way. For a small investment, this will save you a ton of time that you’d have to spend gathering this information from different places on the internet and minimize the risk of learning mistakes early on in your career.
However, even with all that, you need to be patient and give yourself enough time to absorb the knowledge and grow as a player.
When you first start watching poker training videos, you’ll feel motivated and inspired by all the different ideas and concepts. That said, it will take time to fully grasp these ideas and start applying them correctly at the tables.
You’ll be making some mistakes, variance won’t always be on your side, and your results right off the bat probably won’t be stellar.
This is a natural learning path. Poker training will help you a lot, but you need to put in the proper work and keep your confidence. People you’ll be learning from know what they’re talking about and have results to back it up, so trust the process and don’t give up after the first couple of bumps — there will be many more on your journey, no matter how good you become.
So, do you need poker training as a beginner? While it’s not absolutely necessary, a small investment in one of the best poker training sites out there will certainly help you move along much quicker!
