If you want to move onto the big leagues of poker, you’ll probably need all the high stakes poker tips that you can get. Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. Here, you’ll learn every soft and hard skill needed to play with the best and feel at ease doing it. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
What You Should Know About High Stakes Poker
First, let’s go over a few things every player should know before joining a high stakes poker game. For starters, it’s a cash or crypto game, which can be played both in live and online casinos and in different variations.Also, the exact stakes of the game will vary from one poker room to the next, as there’s no standard preset minimum or maximum (usually). Depending on where you’re playing, the buy-in can start at around $1,000 all the way up to the nosebleeds, where it can be $300,000.
In order to become a high stakes player and get your seat at the big table, you’ll first need a sizable bankroll. You should also always only bet money you’re prepared to lose.
Another prerequisite for playing in the big leagues is being disciplined, but creative. The ever-changing game of poker requires you to think on your feet and be confident, while always trying to improve.
High Stakes Poker Tips to Open Your Mind and Improve Your Game
Be Open-Minded and Inquisitive
Poker is not a stationary, static thing. It changes and moves, and you should always move with it. If you’re too fixed on your hand, you’ll miss out on the new information and changes happening at a table during each game.
That’s why one of the best high stakes poker tips is always practicing and doing exercises. Some exercises to help practice your game could include trying to focus more on listening rather than speaking. You should also try to balance opinions opposite to your own while remaining calm and collected. What’s more, attempt to look at every situation from different angles to ensure you’re not missing out on key details or information.
Practice Your Decision-Making
Good decision-making might sound like a no-brainer, but when the stakes are high, even the best players might doubt themselves. Given that luck is out of your control, all you have left when you sit at a poker table is your wit and your skills.
You’ll see many players, sometimes even the good ones, holding on to a bad hand simply because they feel that they’ve invested too much time, energy, and money into it. Don’t fall into this pitfall and try to avoid having the pressure get to you.
Consider the Outcomes
One of the best high stakes poker tips is if you haven’t considered all the possible outcomes of your next move, don’t make it. Never enter a poker room without having a pre-planned exit strategy. One thing that can help with that is knowing in advance which hands you’ll keep pursuing, and which ones you’ll let go of.
Be Comfortable with Uncertainty
As people, we tend to cling only to the things we know and avoid anything that’s uncertain. But as we’ve said before, poker is always changing, and you have to change with it.
You have to accept that, often, the end result is out of your hands, and that, despite trying your best, things didn’t go your way. Once you find comfort in that, the high stakes and nosebleeds games won’t seem so daunting anymore.
Don’t Change Strategies Just Because the Stakes Are High
Once you start betting hundreds and thousands of dollars, you might feel a bit unsure of yourself. But even when the stakes are high and everything isn’t going your way, you need to stay focused.
Live casinos tend to have a lot of distractions in them, from other players to the noise, there are plenty of things to make you lose focus. Luckily, if you’re playing in online casinos like CoinPoker most, if not all, of these distractions are removed. So before you choose your next game, think about where you’ll actually be able to play best.
Tells Are a Last Resort
“Show me your eyes, and you may as well show me your cards.” – Doyle Brunson
If Hollywood movies are to be believed, every poker player has a distinct tell that gives away their hand. But tells should be the absolute last place you look because they’re often very unreliable. What’s more, picking up on someone’s tell means knowing their baseline behavior and all the little things outside of it that form a pattern.
Even in live casinos, unless you’ve played with someone many times before, you probably won’t pick up on their tells. At least, not right away. Of course, if you’re playing online, the chance of reading someone’s tell goes straight to zero. So don’t rely on them too much, and instead, focus on your hand.
Play More Tables and Higher Stakes
Most pros like Tony G didn’t just one day decide to sit down at a high-stakes table and begin their poker career. Instead, they worked their way up from the micro, small and mid-stakes game, picking up the skills and nerves of steel on the way.
It also goes without saying that, the more games you play, the better your chances of winning are. So by keeping your skills sharp and taking advantage of the fast-paced world of online casinos, you can do more than just break even at these tables.
Consider Your Strategies
Now that we’ve covered the best high stakes poker tips, it’s time to discuss specific strategies that can help your win rate. Of course, you should take all of these with a grain of salt because not every game nor hand will be the same.
Don’t Play Every Flush Draw the Same Way
Strictly speaking, a flush draw is just a draw, but that still doesn’t mean you should be playing it the same every time. Here are a few flush draw variations to consider:
- A one-card flush draw on a monotone board
- A flush draw and a pair
- The nut flush draw
- A six-high flush draw
On the face of it, these flush draws might seem similar, but in reality, they require different strategies. Let’s take a look at two different scenarios to show you exactly what that means.
Say that the button open-raises, you call from the big blind with A♥2♥, and then the flop comes K♥7♥3♠. In this case, it might be a better idea to do a check-call with the nut flush draw since your hand has some showdown value.
In the second scenario, let’s say that instead of the A♥2♥, you’re holding 6♥5♥. Since your six-high has no showdown value, you can check-raise as a semi-bluff. You’re doing that because you have a solid amount of equity compared to your opponent’s range. Also, your combo draw will allow you to continue bluffing on almost all turn cards.
You should also consider that by bluffing with your weaker flush draws and calling with the stronger ones, you’re essentially pushing fold-equity with your hands.
Decrease the Size of Your Continuation Bets in Multiway Pots
In both small and high stakes games, players will misplay their multi-way pots. A common mistake you can see across tables is c-betting too large on the flop when you’re playing against two or more players.
That’s why experts say that a small c-bet size is your best option in this case. It’ll do things:
- Allow you to extract value with made hands that you probably wouldn’t want to bet otherwise
- Allow you to force players out of the pot for a much smaller price
Use River Overbets on Favorable Board Textures
Over-betting on the river is potentially one of the most complex, as well as effective high stakes poker tips. It will allow you to get maximum value with your nutted hands, all the while generating a lot of fold-equity with your bluffs.
To make the most of your overbetting, you have to make sure that the board texture is favorable for your range, and less so for your opponents’. You can see this when the out-of-position player can’t have completes on the river because of a straight draw, while the in-position player is barreling.
If this strategy and the terms are going a bit over your head, make sure that you have your basics down pat. If you need some help, you can check out this guide to poker lingo.
Where to Play High Stakes Poker
If you feel empowered by the high stakes poker tips we’ve covered so far, you might be wondering where to play. Depending on your needs and wants, you can take your pick between live and online casinos.
Live vs. Online Casinos
Apart from the obvious, there’s not much difference between playing poker live and online. Because at the end of the day, poker is still poker, no matter how you look at it.
With that said, one of the biggest differences between the two is that online casinos offer accessibility in a way that live ones simply can’t. With online casinos, you can play no matter where you are without any distractions.
Where to Play Live
If you’re looking to play live with poker legends and high stakes players, you can try places like the Bellagio in Las Vegas at the Big Game. There’s also the Triton Cash Game Series, as well as the World Series of Poker tournaments.
Where to Play Online
If you’re looking for convenience to go along with your high stakes, you can try online casinos. CoinPoker is a good example of one of these places where you can play for eye-watering amounts of money.
What’s more, the site hosts many monthly and yearly tournaments where people have walked away with millions so far. In fact, only in February of 2022, did Tony G set a record for the largest pot in online poker with $7.75 million at CoinPoker. There have also been other players participating in CoinPoker tournaments, who have walked away with millions of dollars from the game.
Tony G’s Latest High Stakes Win
If you’re struggling to see the fruits of your labor and thinking that you’re never going to win big, don’t despair. If you work hard at it, take your time, and follow the right high stakes poker tips for yourself, you can follow in Tony G’s footsteps.
During the World Series of Poker Europe, hosted in King’s Casino, Czech Republic by Leon Tsoukernik, Tony won big. On November 13th, the poker legend tweeted that he had won over €1 million during an epic, all-night session.
The marathon game also included Elton Tsang and Tsoukernik himself, with Tony coming out victorious. The group had played high stakes PLO, which surely made for a thrilling game.
To Sum Up: High Stakes Poker Tips
One thing to remember is that Tony G didn’t just one day wake up and decided to be one of the best in the game. He has been in the poker industry and has had countless wins and losses under his belt – and a consolation prize of millions of dollars in prize money so far.
Tony says that he never played poker just for the money or relied only on the game as his source of financial well-being. However, he loves the game so much, which is in part why he started pokernews.com back in 2002, the same year he started playing professionally.
So if you want to win big like Tony G one day and make it into the poker hall of fame, you just have to have love and respect for the game. And slowly, by working hard, doing what you love, and following some high stakes poker tips, you can hope to have a career like Tony’s.
