If you’re brand new to poker, it can seem overwhelming at first. Although it’s a simple game to learn, you quickly get the sense that something else is going on, that some players know more than others.

The journey from being a beginner to becoming a more advanced player is a long and arduous one, but you have to start somewhere. Here are 7 things every beginner should know about Hold’em.

Poker is played against other people

Poker is different to other casino games because it’s played against other people. You’re not just playing the odds of the cards coming, you’re also competing against others and using skill to gain an edge (or not!).

The other players also want to win the game. This makes poker an incredibly competitive landscape. Especially as you move up in stakes and play for increasingly substantial prizes. In order to be good at poker, you’ll need to learn, study and practice to become better than the rest.

Because each person is an individual, you can also gain an edge by taking into account each player’s skill level, motivations and tendencies. Study how they act so you know how to play against them.

You don’t play a lot of hands

What a lot of beginners don’t expect, is just how often you should fold in poker. If you’re playing a typical frequency of hands, you’ll be folding around 80 percent of the time or more preflop. That’s a lot of folding!

It requires patience to wait for the right opportunities to profitably enter a pot. Losing this patience is a fatal mistake. Poker strategy starts with preflop hand selection and as a beginner you should be opening a particularly tight range.

The same goes post-flop. You won’t always hit and you’ll sometimes be forced to fold your hand.

Selective aggression is key

Although you’ll be folding a lot preflop, you can’t win a poker tournament by playing passively and hoping to hit your cards. You have to be selectively aggressive, picking your moments while looking to maximize your value by making bets and bluffs.

Beginners often want to get in as many pots as possible for cheap, calling or limping to see a flop. This is a losing strategy as it relies on chance to make hands.

It’s far better to utilize raises and reraises in order to inflate pots when you have the best of it. And give yourself more opportunities to win by getting opponents to fold.

Bluffing isn’t just about throwing chips in the middle

Beginners know that poker involves bluffing. They just don’t know how it works or how to effectively bluff. Bluffing is one of the most glamorized actions in the game and doing it wrong can be very costly.

You can’t just throw chips into the middle in a bid to get your opponent to fold. This might work some of the time, but other times you’ll get caught out by perceptive players or by those who simply have a great hand.

To bluff profitably, you need to represent a hand and do so in a way that is believable. You’ll also need to target the right opponents, those who are capably and willing to make a fold. Intelligent bluffing often involves having some equity in the hand, such as raising a flush draw as a semi-bluff.

Hand ranking and valuing your hand

Now it’s time to touch on basic poker strategy. As a beginner, you won’t get very far without learning the basics of the game, starting with hand rankings. These are easy enough to learn and there are charts available online.

What’s more difficult to get your head around as a beginner is how to value your hand relative to the strength of other player’s holdings. A pair can be strong or very weak, depending on the situation, the player and the betting action.

Working out where you are at by reading the hand strength of your opponents is one of the most important skills in poker.

Position is powerful

Another key strategy lesson for beginners is the power of position. It’s one of the most important factors in a given hand. Whoever is in position will act last during every round of post-flop betting. It gives them a huge advantage in terms of information and pot control.

The dealer button is the most powerful position because it guarantees that you’ll have this advantage post-flop. Being in early position, meanwhile, pretty much guarantees that you’ll be out of position with a disadvantage.

This is so important that you’ll actually change which hands you play depending on position. You’ll stick to mostly premium hands from early position and opening up your range to include more speculative hands in late position.

Poker is won and lost on solid fundamentals

At the lower stakes, at least, poker is won and lost on solid fundamentals. It’s not about playing really fancy and making the most unexpected, leftfield moves. It’s about keeping your cool and using your knowledge to play solid strategy that works.

As you gain experience, you can learn how and when to add more advanced moves into your repertoire. As a beginner though, aim to learn everything you can about hand ranges and basic strategy, apply it at the tables, and you should be able to gain an edge.