Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Repeat steps 2–5 for your entire poker career
Repeat steps 2–5 for your entire poker career Never stop reviewing and analyzing. Approaching poker in this manner and providing an outline for a lesson plan will help you stay on task and reach small attainable goals consistently. Understanding hand ranges, equity, math, and why opponents take particular lines will take some time to master. However, if you don't have a plan set with goals, they will never be mastered unless you're able to read minds or see through the backs of cards.
Parts of point #4
Parts of point #4 bear repeating because it's an important point. Learning to reason about opponent lines and hand ranges has very little to do with how you would play a particular situation, and everything to do with how that particular person thinks and reasons through a situation. I mention this again because I can't tell you how many times in my poker career I've heard good winning players say something to the effect of, "I can't believe he'd play his hand this way, he lost so much value against my perceived range," or "He can't possibly have this or that hand, I'd never play those in that spot." Yes, we agree you never would, or it may not even be the best way to play a situation, but it's irrelevant. It's all about how our opponents are reasoning, and you become better at that by understanding personalities and the psychology involved in poker.