Poker Rooms!
Here's the low-down!
Playing poker is such a popular pastime these days that it can be a bit of a chore to find a good poker room in which to play. This can definitely be a problem if you're looking for a live game and you live in a city where this type of thing is frowned upon. You'd just have to know the right person to find one of those, but I won't get into that here, because well, we're online, and this site is mostly geared towards online poker, and therefore online poker rooms. Finding a poker room online is not that hard to do. Finding the right one for you is a bit more work. One of the things that you want to look for is a poker room with players in it that aren't quite as good as you. I'm not trying to be nasty here, just realistic. You want to win, right? Even the pros know that your skill is almost worthless when you're playing against others that are evenly matched to your level. In that situation, luck is going to be your best friend, not skill. If you're out to win at poker, guilt cannot influence you in your choice of a poker room; guile should be your guide here.
One thing is for sure about online poker rooms; they all tell you they're the best one to play at. You can find sites all over the internet that give you poker room rankings, but how do you really know that they're just not promoting a certain casino as a favor of some kind. What I'd recommend is that you try out some online casinos, and see what their poker rooms are like. Most of the better online casinos will let you play for free so as to entice you to stick around, and this is a great bonus that you just can't get at a land-based casino or a back-room game. If you can find the online casino you really like, and you have a good experience playing for free, that should be the casino you play at for money. The best ones will have their free and real money versions of the games be identical as far as odds and payouts etc, so it's a good way to find the right poker room online.
One of the best ways to improve your game, skills and strategy is to just get out there, and find a free online poker room to play in. If you look around, you can probably find some that are more for rookies just starting out. I'd suggest hanging out in some poker forums for a while and listening to what others have to say. There's always someone in those forums who's more than happy to help out someone with a question. And don't be afraid to sound dumb; remember: "the only dumb question is the one that you don't ask". How else can you learn? And when you find one of these free poker rooms, it'll likely include a chat feature too (most of them do these days), so you can chat with the other players and learn the ropes together. What could be better? I suppose that sitting down in your own home or your friend's place for a friendly game could help you out too, but who's to say that the levels of skill of your friends will be fairly similar? If there's just one player that's way better than the rest, they'll end up winning all the time (you know how poker players hate to lose), or if you're the weakest player, you'll just end up losing all the time. Neither of these is a situation where you'd learn that much, except what NOT to do. So find some poker "peers" and get learning together.
