If you want to be a successful poker player, you must be able to stay committed and overcome the variance. The basics of the game are fairly easy to learn, but it takes time and effort to build a good poker strategy and stick with it over time.
To do this, you must play a lot of hands and make a lot of mistakes. The key is to analyze your mistakes and take the lessons learned from them. Over time, this becomes a brick in the foundation of your poker knowledge, which will help you to win more hands than you lose.
You must also learn to read your opponents. For example, if you see that an opponent often folds with a certain bet size, you can know what to expect from them in this situation. You can then adjust your own betting pattern accordingly.
Another skill that will improve your poker game is understanding ranges. While new players will try to put an opponent on a specific hand, experienced players will work out the range of hands that their opponent could have and make decisions based on this information.
When playing poker, you should always look at the way other players react to situations. This can be done by watching the games on television, using poker software, or reviewing hands that went well or poorly for you. It is important to be able to analyze these hands in detail so that you can learn from the mistakes of other players and improve your own game.