Never Underestimate the Iniquity of Your Opponents
One thing that you'll want to learn about how to play poker is that you can't underestimate the kinds of pigs and devils you may be playing with when you play this game of poker. You'll meet a lot of very cool people, too, but you will run into many people who want to shark you.
You can see this even in some of the recent scandals about online poker rooms rigging tables, not protecting players' privacy enough, and other misdeeds.
How to learn poker? Very carefully.
Be Careful About Getting Outright Robbed
Many people who are in the process of learning poker may be surprised by how intense this game can get. Poker is all about escalation and a fair amount of it happens quickly.
Thus you may find yourself, at some point, in a situation where you are physically scared of what another player might do. It might even be something completely unrelated to you, but you see that another player appears desperate and may have criminal behavior in mind.
This is when people sometimes get robbed. You don't have to be in the "ghetto" to get robbed, either. Upscale or swanky locations get robbed, too, and so can you in them.
When you're learning how to play poker, you absolutely must monitor how vulnerable you are to getting outright robbed by unscrupulous individuals or groups. Don't ever assume that you are surrounded by trusted friends who have your best interests at heart.
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Be Careful About Paying Too Much for Poker Lessons
There's an expression in the poker world that the first few (dozen?) times you play poker, you can expect to be paying for poker lessons. This means, of course, that other players are going to be taking your money and teaching you stuff about how to play poker.
First of all, you must be committed to learning poker if this arrangement is to work to any purpose other than your pockets getting dramatically lighter. You must be committed to studying hand values, reviewing past hands, and so on and so forth--you must be, in a word, committed.
Secondly, be careful about getting into higher stakes games when you're just learning. Even if you're getting into $10/20 games, but you're playing five of them per night, you're looking to lose $80 to $100 per night learning how to play poker.
Can you afford that? If not, find a smaller game that fits better into your just learning budget. If you play with the bigger boys, they may slap you in the back and joke around with you, but they may also be fully intent of taking you for all you're worth.
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Be Careful About Getting Set Up
In poker, as in life, there's getting robbed and then there's getting set up. Typically, a robbery entails force or major fraud, whereas a set up is more like a "caveat emptor" situation.
You see, there is an unspoken rule about playing poker that if you are a shitty player, it is the duty of everyone else to make some money off you because if they don't get your money, you're just going to shit it out your ass at another location.
This unspoken rule gives rise to the correlative that if two or three guys (or better yet three women) get together and set up a game, and happen to invite you, and happen to get you all gassed up that you're a great poker player, and then suddenly a couple big pots come down and you lose both, then you go to your pocket and lose another big pot--
You may have been set up (and if not, you'll never know).
You've got to be careful about getting set up when you're learning how to play poker. It happens every day and in a variety of ways so if you've really got to keep your eyes open.
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