It sounds like you are very green. Most of this depends on what you mean by "the basics."

Basics as in, blinds and positions/order of play? What it means to check, or fold, or bet, or raise? How to deal and what is considered etiquette?

Or basics as in, how to balance your range, shortcut probability in your head, bet-sizing, knowing who to exploit and who to deny action?

In other words, do you want to learn how to play, or are you ready to begin learning how to play?

There are many youtube videos and courses where you can learn poker basics for free. I combined free tutorials and some ebook named 74 rules of poker, so when I learned the basics I downloaded zynga pokjer app and wsop app and I practiced there.

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Play freerolls on real money sites. They are free to enter tournaments where a large amount of people typically compete for a small $50 prize pool or whatever. They run them for promotional reasons to bring in new players, no deposit is needed usually. ACR has them and usually other sites

Play a lot

I've heard that Sklansky and Malmuth called their book "Hold 'em poker for advanced players" because everybody thinks of themselves as an advanced player. Occasionally when I see posts like this, that anecdote comes back to mind.

10 rule thingies?

Many, many basic guides can be found online whether you prefer books or training sites. Start there or even on the many, many pinned links and threads on this subreddit.

One is even called the "2025 Beginner Guide."

Jeez Louise.

Where's the pub?

Just having a face card doesn’t make your hand playable. Something random and middling like Q5 actually has worse qualities than low cards in a multi-way pot (which is what you’ll be playing in a pub game) because you’ll run into many situations where you put extra money in after hitting your Q only to find out you are out kicked by something like Q9.

depending on how much time you want to put in, I think reading the books Biggest Bluff by Konnekova and Poker Math by Alton Hardin are two good starting reads, enjoyable and not too difficult

Learn and grind pre flop strategy for the most part in the beginning. This will elevate your game the fastest IMHO.

As far as YouTube videos for beginners: Jonathan Little, CrushLivePoker, CarrotCorner, 2CardConfidence, and hungryhorsepoker are some good starting point channels.

Practice mentally calculating outs vs pot odds to understand your relative hand strength. Then think about there’s really only ever two reasons to bet/raise: to make an opponents better hand fold, or their worse hand call.

Pay for some BBZ videos and embrace his methodology. Study is hard work, but if you want to improve it’s the only way to get better- put more time in than your opponents- like a lot of sports.

Welcome to poker! I love it.

You may find my post on poker bankroll management useful if you want to take poker more seriously: https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/s/u4mH6JEHEO

I hope it helps. 🙂

All I gotta say is strap in for the ride man. Keep your wagers low, don't ever spend more than 10% of your bankroll in one sit.

As a long time player of 20+yrs in Vegas, myself and other vets laugh at analytical players from the statistics perspective. It took me many yrs of losing to good players before I could hold my own. The more repetition the better you'll be. Never mistake it, this game is playing the player never just the cards and percentages. When you're live anything can happen and instinct and reads are far more valuable than any percentage or mathematical theory in any situation.

Good luck

Hi there!
I'll list a few topics that you can search online for free and work on them as you go. When you have a good understanding of a topic, move to the next one. Remember that this is the very basics, the more you study, the more you'll find topics of interest to improve your game.

1 - GTO (game theory optimum) preflop charts. Try searching for Jonathan Little's GTO charts (You'll find them for free)
2 - Ranges, villain ranges, perceived ranges. (ALWAYS play poker thinking about ranges and not hands, the earlier you start, the better you'll be at poker). A great tool to study ranges is flopzilla. It's not expensive and you have so much to gain by using it, I bought it like 5 years ago and still use it.
3 - Board textures.
4 - Equity and pot odds.
5 - Balanced, polarized and merged ranges.

For great material (some of them are paid, though), search for these names:
Jonathan Little
Alex Assassinato Fitzgerald

Good luck out there!

Welcome to the best game on the planet! Here’s a goofy video in which I attempt to explain the rules of poker in 60 seconds.

Once you’ve learned the basic rules of poker, your first area of study should be preflop. If you’ve got what cards you want to play down pat, you can start postflop work with cbetting. It’s a good idea to start getting familiar with pot odds and equity.

Here's a general overview of how to study poker. At some point you've got to dip your toe into the world of reviewing your hand histories and sharing them with a trusted circle of poker friends who know what they're doing when they play.

Let me know if you have any questions and good luck at the tables!

♠️❤️♣️👑

Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo. It’s the best book to get started in my opinion. Good luck in your upcoming poker games! 🤠

I recently finished Applications of No Limit Hold ‘em by Matthew Janda. Best poker book I’ve read so far. Very math-focused.

The best charts you can get for NL2-NL10 play is from https://www.pokercoaching.online/poker-range-charts and it's FREE. So you just use them and you will know that you play perfect preflop so you can make all your focus only on how to play postlop making as little mistakes as you could.

This is the link which gives you free 3 days access to ALL premium content at pokercoaching without needing your credit card or other BS, so you can watch all videos of all coachers includingcourses of Cash Game Masterclass, which is very nice:
https://pages.pokercoaching.com/premiumpass?ref=youtube

Find good players in your local poker room. Best place to approach them is when they follow you to the bathroom to check your sit/stand while urinating %.

Jonathan little and blackrain have some great poker videos. You won't get far with range and betting without bluffing, but at nl2 blackrain has a chunk of videos, dude just bets big preflop with good hands and hits top pair and starts barreling into fish for the most part if he doesn't hit cbet and fold to any raises unless you got something on the board

Jonathan Little's master the fundamentals should be enough to let you beat atleast NL2-NL10, he sounds only basic, because he super simplifying strategy, but that could hurt too, because many thinks that they understand what he is trying to say and it's too basic for them, but they don't actually really understand. For beginner you should go for Core 2.0 by redchippoker, it's cost only 5dollars for 1 week and it gives almost same things like Jonathan Little's but only in other words. Then grinder's manual ebook would be great too to read for beginner but that book is too much outdated with preflop range and bet sizing, but you can get some good info for postflop play. Then ebook of Master Micro Stakes Poker Learn to Master - Alton Hardin is same level for basic understand. For video courses you could check too From the Ground Up Runitonce.
And from NL10 or NL25 you should be trying to play GTO style, so you could know exactly where players making mistakes and you would know how to exploit them, because hitting made hands and betting big multiple streets will not work easily like in lower limit, for that you will need to read first Applications of No-Limit Hold em: Matthew Janda, then GTO Gems Poker Book By Red Chip Poker, then Play Optimal Poker 1 and 2 and finally Modern Poker Theory: Building an unbeatable strategy based on GTO principles. For video courses you will need Elite Cash Game Exploits – UpswingPoker with Uri Peleg and Overnight Monster, that should let you beat up to NL400-NL600, because to get highter you will mostly would need to get help from private coachings.
BLUFFTHESPOT or https://cashgamehero.com/ would be ideal for NL-NL100, but the problem is that it cost money, which is too much for microstakes, so you could learn it only when you build bankroll already for small stakes.

You'll have a lot of fun when youre card dead for hours

May your hopes and dreams rest in peace.

A journey of a thousand bad beats begins with a single hand

Just wait.. 🔥💲😃🎉😐🙏🤔🙏⁉️🤢🤮💀

Okay.

The best way to learn is to just play.

Go on PokerStars and use play chips.

When it comes to playing at a casino, some rules vary slightly. Like some casinos are super strict on "string betting" while others don't care. Some casinos allow straddles and some don't. Some casinos allow you to run it multiple times, some don't. Some have a shot clock timer, but some you have to "call time" if someone is taking too long to act.

We don't know what you don't know. What are some questions you have about the rules? What are some situations you've encountered that you couldn't figure out because you were missing some rules?

There are plenty of good tutorials on YouTube! You can find super basic instructions on how the rules work, all the way up to advanced strategy advice from high-level pros.

Why not just play? PokerStars has a play money app you can use.

The "best" way tbh is to play with some friends who know the rules and are willing to teach you them

Not sure how that works atm though

"Thank you" is so often misused. I see new players immediately say "Thank you" to the player they just beat in a pot. Really boils my piss.

• pay attention when you're in the hand and take your action when it's your turn.
• Don't take an action out of turn. It's ok to take some time when you have a hard decision to make but don't take 30 seconds every action.
• Don't comment about a hand currently in progress, especially if you're not in the hand.
• Have fun. it's a game after all.

Never bluff the donkey

5-3 never loses

That’s about it

Don't play for money you can't afford to lose. That's it really.

Fold pre

Some of these responses are either trolling or just misinformed. It is hard to distill poker strategy down to a few golden rules, but here are some to get you started:

1. Tight is right. It is almost impossible to be a winning player if you play too many starting hands. This is true regardless of what variant of poker you are playing. It is possible to play too tight, but as a beginner, you are better off erring on the side of too tight than too loose.
2. Position is important. In flop games (i.e. hold 'em) you get to act after others throughout the hand and have more information. Preflop, you have fewer hands left to act behind you, so you can player looser in later positions.
3. You generally should not limp in hold 'em. If you play a hand, you should generally be raising, or in some cases in no limit hold 'em you might be calling another player's raise, but as the first player in, do not limp.
4. As a general rule, aggressive play is better than passive play. Modern poker strategy incorporates a bit more passivity than the old wisdom used to permit, but especially as a beginner, you often want to be either raising or folding. This is a very simplified, basic rule, so YMMV.
5. Your absolute hand strength matters some, but not nearly as much as your hand strength relative to the other players in the hand. You need to be thinking about what your opponents are likely to have given how they have acted so far and how your hand compares to that. Beginners often think things like, "I have a flush, so my hand is great!" but sometimes a flush is literally the nuts (the best possible hand), and sometimes it is nowhere close to the nuts (i.e. where the board in hold 'em has a pair on it, allowing for full houses and quads). Sometimes, given the action, a hand as weak as one pair or even ace high can be very strong, whereas in other situations those hands can be very weak. One of the hardest things to learn as a beginner in poker, or when learning a new variant, is understanding how strong your hand is in a given situation.
6. Over the past 5-10 years, poker strategy has evolved a lot due to mainstream access to solvers - software that can determine the optimal strategy in given situations. You should be VERY wary of any poker advice that is not solver-based. Most books published on poker do not fit this bill, and the advice is often outdated, and in some cases proactively bad. As a beginner, it is fine to rely on some basic, fundamental strategies in old publications that will help you get started but if you decide to take poker seriously, you have to ditch that stuff.
7. Finally, for this list, understand your goals. I do NOT recommend poker as a source of income in 2023. Some people will be successful at it, but the game is really tough for a beginner these days. If you are playing for fun, make sure you keep the game fun. Play within your means. Play games and in settings you enjoy.