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| Poker Articles - Learning from poker on TV |
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Watching Televised Professional Poker Tournaments - Good for your Game?
In the 21st century Texas hold’em poker and televised poker tournaments go hand in hand. From the World Series of Poker (WSOP) to the World Poker Tour (WPT) to more lighthearted affairs like the Celebrity Poker Showdown, it’s not hard to find some televised poker to watch, with hole card cameras showing you all the cards, and professional poker commentators detailing all the action. You can often get free online poker tournament updates from poker websites on the Internet, and there was even a pay-per-view web cast of Jamie Gold’s victory in the 2007 WSOP main event. Casino games on the other hand have also grown in popularity due to the fact that games such as video poker, blackjack
and slots
now are readily available on the Internet, and can be found at any online casino.
There’s no doubt that for the poker fan, watching tournaments can be a lot of fun. But are they educational? How much can you really learn from watching professionals play in tournaments on television? When the World Poker Tour first arrived on the scene, the answer was: not much. The show only featured the final table of the event, and it was heavily edited, so that most of the play, which usually featured players folding marginal hands, was not shown. In fact, you could not always even be sure if the expressions on the players’ faces were related to the hands they were playing, if you were watching for purposes of picking up tells or mannerisms. If you by any chance haven’t yet learned the rules of Texas hold’em you can do so by reading here.
As a result, many new players got the wrong impression about no-limit hold’em poker. Watching Gus Hansen take down millions by playing a large number of hands in a wild and unpredictable fashion made many players believe that all they had to do was keep pushing their chips in the middle to win a fortune. They never got an opportunity to see all the tough lay downs and difficult decisions required to get to that final table.
Today, many tournaments have much more educational value. The Professional Poker Tour shows tournaments made up entirely of professionals from the first round of blinds all the way to the end. This allows viewers to see how strong players handle the early rounds of a tournament and how they play at a full table. Some televised invitational tournaments try to show as many hands as possible, even when the pot is uncontested, just to give players a feel for how the overall tournament experience is for the players.
In the end, while you can learn more from watching televised poker than ever before, there is no substitute for playing yourself, and for watching others like yourself play. While observing a poker tournament full of amateurs at an online poker site is not nearly as exciting as watching a World Poker Tour final table, it is those amateurs that you will need to beat as you move up the ranks. You’ll need to learn the weaknesses of the average player and how to exploit those weaknesses before you move up to tackle the big guys. And you’ll need to put what you learn into play, learning more through trial and error, before you are good enough to appear at one of those televised final tables yourself.
Televised Texas hold’em is a great boon to the game. Enjoy watching televised tournament poker and learn what you can, but remember, like anything worth being successful at, you can only go so far just watching it on television.
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