Beginners' Guide

Everybody hates losing. Everyone who has ever put in serious hours at the poker table knows the pain of running bad and losing when you should be winning, and dealing with the losses that poker throws at you is arguably the hardest aspect of poker.

Full Tilt Poker recently released a revolutionary new form of online poker: Rush Poker*. If you’re not familiar with the game, I encourage you to give it a try. Instead of the players sitting in a 6 or 9-handed game, they are seated in a game that has up to 2,000 players in it.

Fresh off a win at the World Series of Poker in '98, I had a newfound confidence in my own abilities. I went on a tear right after that, winning a tournament in four consecutive events from L.A. to Vegas. I was running well, playing well, and extremely confident that "my way" was the right way. After all, it seemed as though everything I did worked, so I assumed it would be easy to teach people to do the same.

Despite what you see on TV, there's much more to poker than just Hold 'em. The great players are judged by how they play all the games. In the big cash games at the Bellagio, we play an assortment of games every night and at the World Series of Poker*, they've introduced a $50,000 buy-in HORSE tournament that attracts many of the world's top professionals.

In an earlier tip, I gave advice for playing Stud-8 or Better. For this article, I'll look at the other popular hi/lo split game, Omaha-8 or Better. In my article on Stud-8, I encouraged players to look for hands that have the possibility of scooping entire pots. The same goes for Omaha-8: whenever possible, you need to position yourself to take every chip from a big pot.

Nearly all the money you will ever make from playing poker comes from folding.