Many players look for good hands...I don't want a good hand!

Yes good hands can increase your stack size....but they can also reduce it vastly and even deplete it completly....that one good hand can end your existance in a tournament, but it can never win that tournament.

When you have that good hand, you are willing to get in a raising war with another opponent that also has a good hand and then in the end, you find that his is a little better.

What I want is for my opponent to have a bad hand...AA can always be beat...I would much rather have J5 and my opponent have 62...I can overpower him and bet him out of the pot...it is much safer than having AA.

If I find that my opponent has a better hand than I thought....it is much easier to fold my not so good hand than it is my very good hand!

Play your opponents cards...not your cards!

One of these days I will have the NLHE game figured out in my concious and sub- concious mind and then I will be unbeatable!

Your right on. When doing well in any kind of poker games, its the so called "good" hands that will kill you. I don't know of many players that risk thier tournament life on bad hands unless its a desperated move when short stacked with a bluff. Its those trips that lose to straights, straights that lose to flushes and so on. You must pay close attention to your opponents betting pattern or it will cost you big time. Unless you have the absolute nuts on the river, be careful. If theres a hand that can beat your all-in bet and your called, the other guy will usually have that hand.

Yes PokerRef it is amazing to me to find the idiosyncrasies between the novice poker players and fools in general life:

I don’t want a solid deal, it's not big enough in my favor…give me the scam, hell I’ll take the scam in a heartbeat!

In poker its naw I am not interested in that solid win, the pot is too small…but, wow, if I catch that gutshot str8, I can take down that Hugh pot….I’m willing to risk my bankroll to catch that!...or yes I am willing to go to battle with those other 5 monster hands, because I also have a good hand and if I catch the right cards I can take the pot away from all of them. I am not going to let him push me out of the pot, I will call my total stack...I will have a nut flush if the river is my suit.

To many it’s win it all at once or lose it all at once, they don’t believe in a gradual stack build for a total win….give me the gamble, is their attitude…and if they hit their miracle draw, its for a short lasting large win…not an overall win! They do not believe in build for the future.

Wow, what can I say. You keep playing those J5's and I'll continue playing better hands then you and in the end what happens? Your reloading and I'm taking my next "poker" vacation.
Yes you can crack AA with rags. Happens all the time. Luck is a factor in poker but hold'em really is a game of high cards.

Give it a few years tru and you will come around lol

Know your opponents, use your cards against them. You can't win on luck alone, you will be settling for a thousand and 1 mediocre finishes.

You have to steal, ask any pro. You have to play a few bad hands if you have position for stealing. You can't let those chips slip away. The key is making more money stealing than what you lose when you are cought.

It takes a lot of practise and dicipline. Major dicipline for laying down hands. You will have at most 1 "poker vacation" paid by winnings if you play the way you propose. Even then that is extremly lucky for a player of that skill.

1st of all truushot, I am not promoting playing J5...I am promoting smart play and skill and that is so much more than playing cards...that includes laying down AA when needed and playing J5 when needed...or maybe we say when the opportunity of a for sure take down with J5 is presented we say - pass I'll stick with the for sure loss with AA when that situation pop's up!

If you know that you are going to win, you play...if you know that you are going to lose, you fold!...card values are secondary!...sometimes this means even folding the best hand when you are positive that it is the best hand and playing the worst hand, when you are positive that it is the worst hand!

The game is much more complicated than what you present it to be truushot and luck is only a small part of the game.

As I say "Holdem is about everything except the cards".

The winner in holdem is decided by who collected the most chips at the end of the night, not by who played the best hands!

While this is true Crapshoot, having cards to back up your bets helps a lot. I've done well in tournaments where I've gotten almost no playable cards. I'm able to do well in these tournaments because I am folding so many hands that when I do come into a pot people take notice and figure I've got a monster. But it's much easier to be successful with good cards. Because no matter how many hands in a row I've folded, half the table isn't even going to have a clue that I'm playing tight. So they are going to call with their ace rag and small suited connectors. These people will be eliminated from the tournament before me almost always, no matter who gets the better cards. But I prefer to have the cards to speed them along their way.

As an example, I was in a SNG today with a guy who was playing EVERY hand no matter what raise he was looking at. Push all in, he calls, limp in he calls, 6x the BB, he calls. Before the blinds even got to 30 he was over 3500 chips and back down to 200 and everything in between. He took a big chunk of my chips when he called with 86s when I raised 4x the BB. I hit my ace and he hit his six. He was at around 600 chips left and he pushed all in. I'd been playing super tight, had only seen the flop once and that was in the BB. He didn't notice this fact at all, just figured the flop hit him so that's good enough to play. Of course his 8 came on the river and he took home the pot which gave him another large stack of chips to spread out amongst the table.

But even though this guy took almost half my stack on a horrible call, I was still happy to be at the table with him. Because I knew he was going to keep doing bonehead plays like that and if I was lucky then I'd be on the receiving end of the chips he was handing out freely. It turned out I wasn't lucky enough and he busted out on other players. But I did take second in the SNG by waiting for the right cards at the right times.

Hold'em is about a lot of things, but cards are a part of the equation. You can't double up on J5 without hitting a miracle board. You can double up on AA 4 out 5 times. It's about knowing who you are playing against. In order to come back from that crippling hand I had to figure out who I could steal against to keep myself alive and build my pathetic stack back up. I had to know who I needed to have a solid hand to get in a pot with. Hold'em is about timing more then anything else in my opinion. One hand your J5 might actually be the best hand preflop. Next hand your KK might be a huge underdog.

I was in a SNG just a bit ago that I took a bad hit trying to knock someone out and ended up doubling them up and ended up short on the bubble. I patiently folded my rags hand after hand as my stack dwindled. There were preflop raises every single hand for about 14 hands in a row. Finally I found what I was looking for, AA in the big blind. Bad timing. This time everyone folded to me. If I had caught that hand one hand previously I could have tripled up. But all I got was the small blind. In this case I ended up bubbling when I decided to stand up to the chip leader who had started pushing folks around after picking up a big pot a few hands after my aces. He was raising every hand and when he had to show his cards he generally had junk, including J5 once. I picked up A4s in the big blind and he raised it up just as he had every other hand for several hands. I pushed all in and he easily called since it was only twice his original bet. He had 55 and they held. Again bad timing. The hand before he won with 9 high. Timing is the key, but the cards play a pretty important roll.

Now, I'd agree with that statement possibly at high stakes live games or in big money tournaments. Because in those situations you rarely see a showdown. But online, low stakes tables and tournaments, cards are very important because people there will call you down to the river with just about anything. So your hand has to be able to hold up at a showdown more often then not.