If there is one thing that I know about poker, it is going to be how you can tell a professional poker from just an avid poker player.  Are you an avid poker player that is looking to up their skills to be defined as a professional poker player?  To be honest, there is a lot that you need to do in order to gain Professional Poker Player Skills, however, if you are willing do it – it can absolutely be worth it in the end and hell, you might even be able to enter yourself in a few tournaments and win them!

One of the first things that you need to learn is math.  In poker, you truly do need to be really good at poker and that is something that not everyone in the world can master.  You need to learn to master the odds of certain combinations that have come out on the table already and you need to make sure that you can compute the number of outs because that is very important.

Outs are basically the number of cards that will improve your hand.  You are basically going to be by multiplying by two and adding one and that is going to be the percentage of hitting the pot.  It is all about math in the game of poker!

Knowing how to raise is by far one of the most important aspects in the game of poker.  You want to make sure that you know when a good time to raise is and just how you can raise – that way you can win more money!  While most of the time, people think that they should raise whenever they have a really good hand, however, that is not always the case, there are a ton of different reasons why you should raise and that is exactly what we are going to talk about.

Firstly, you need to understand the five major reasons why you should be raising in the first place:

1. To get more money from your hand.
2. To eliminate players.
3. To get a “Free” card.
4. To gain information.
5. To bluff or semi-bluff.

These reasons are by far the best and you want to make sure that you know them in order to follow them.  Let’s explore number one.  Knowing when to raise is important and if you raise too early in the game, even if you have a really good hand, the pot will not get any bigger.  So play your hand out slowly to get the pot bigger!

Antonio Esfandiari is probably one of the most talented chip-trick guys in the world — and he has taken time out of his BUSY schedule to actually teach the community poker chip tricks. Now — this one is BAD-ASS, and you’re going to LOVE it. It’s the MUSCLE PASS, or as the Magician likes to call it, the Anti-Gravitational Pop-Up Move.

I tried it. I failed. Hopefully you are more successful!

The chip twirl is probably one of the easiest to master poker chip tricks, and it still looks extremely hip and professional because it’s just not that commonly used as some of the other (maybe even more difficult) ones…

This video gives you an excellent tutorial on how to handle the chips for the chip twirl — even I could do it after the vid! Enjoy!