Everyone wants to be better at online poker, but unless you’ve got time to crunch around twenty essential poker strategy books, overdose on YouTube training videos, or take up expensive lessons with GTO coaches, it’s not necessarily the easiest undertaking.
What if you have already spent a considerable amount of time in a casino playing other games? Surely these could help you adapt some gambling skills from table games to online poker, couldn’t they? Well, yes, they could.
Let’s look at the best five games for poker players and how your experience in each game could add something to your strategy for games like 5 card draw online, stud poker, and more, before you’ve even seen the first flop.
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Blackjack
The classic casino game may look nothing like poker, but it’s more than just playing cards that the game otherwise known as ‘21’ has in common with poker. For a start, the value of cards and those cards that match is an obvious commonality. But it’s not just that.
In online blackjack, we make a judgment on the strength of our hand early, and although it’s in a much more basic form of trying to get the cards to add up to 21, this helps our pre-flop poker game a bundle.
Poker has become more of a pre-flop game than post-flop in recent years, especially when playing poker online. Choosing which cards to play and which ones to let go of is absolutely vital to your success, and playing blackjack regularly improves this key skill immensely.
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Roulette
On the face of it, placing your chips on a number, color, or section of the 36-number board and hoping a little silver ball makes your roulette dreams come true could seem like nothing to do with poker. In reality, however, online roulette helps one particular element of your poker-playing personality a lot.
In poker, it is often said that tilt is the biggest adversary you can ever face. Battling your own frustrations can keep your mind clear if you’re able to do so calmly, so getting used to bad beats and how to deal with them in a manner that allows you to play your A-Game is everything.
Roulette is great training for beating tilt because almost the entire game is full of bad luck. While you can win a huge amount of return on your investment if you pick the right number, multiplying your stake by 35, the chances of it happening are obviously slightly worse.
Failure is ingrained into every roulette player’s routine to such an extent that getting unlucky in a hand of poker much less often – unless you’re permanently playing rags! – can only be of benefit.
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Three-Card Poker
Winning at three-card poker is easier than winning texas holdem poker online, which is played with five cards. That’s obvious. But it’s also a really great game for improving your ability at pre and post-flop decision-making. We’re not talking about tanking or the turn or rampaging on the river.
In three-card poker, making key decisions on the strength of your hand and what cards would then help you beat the dealer is crucial. When you receive an extra card, how it improves your hand is then vital to how you should place your bets and win at three-card poker.
In three card poker, you’re only against the dealer rather than other players, but in poker, you’re often heads up against one other player only. This helps you get better at a common situation in poker.
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Craps
Playing online craps well isn’t easy and requires a vastly different skillset to poker, but there are marginal decisions that heighten a part of the brain we rely on a lot in key moments in poker.
Whether you’re playing pass bet, come bet, don’t pass, or don’t come at the craps table, knowing which situations give the house a greater edge is key for the profitable player.
This is equally true in poker, where there are a lot of coinflip situations, such as being all-in with two overcards against a smaller pair, where the odds are close to 50/50 depending on the value and suits of those cards.
Playing poker is about making the right decision over time, and if you do so, you’re going to win money in the long run. It’s essentially one long game. One area many players lose money in, however, is making the right decisions in marginal spots. Making the right call at craps can be hard but it gives you a greater edge to do so. It can help you improve your edge in poker, too.
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Baccarat
Baccarat is a classic casino game and could easily summon up images of Hollywood superstars such as Sean Connery’s James Bond playing at Casino Royale. But how can baccarat help you play better poker?
The game of baccarat has plenty in common with poker, especially video poker and stud versions of poker. As in other casino games, making choices about whether to place a bet based on the strength of your hand is important but in baccarat, you’ll improve your live-reading skills too as what other players hold counts for a lot.
Knowing whether to keep betting and working out when you’re ahead of others or behind them is key in Baccarat and the same can be said for poker.
Play these five online casino games and you might improve your chances of winning the next time you sit down with your poker buddies.
