You’ve done it. You have all the supplies necessary for a great home poker game. You bought a nice set of chips. You have a felt tabletop to throw over the kitchen table.

You’ve arranged a loser’s lounge where eliminated players can hang out. The fridge is filled with beer. You’ve bought a dartboard package with a new set of darts just like the pros use. The TV is switch on to a sport event so the degenerated gamblers you call friends can make silly prop bets.

All your friends have arrived and it’s time to begin. Except, before you start, there are a few things you need to settle. For starters, you have to iron out the rules of the game so there will be no problems, but more importantly, you have to estimate the stop time of the game.

The Stop Time

Simply put, the stop time will be the time the game is over. You can’t play a home game all night long. Well, you could, but most players won’t go for it. Johnny needs to work in the morning. He can’t play all night. The game needs a pre-determined stop time, and this time needs to be established before the first hand begins.

Prepare a Strategy

Estimating a stop time before the first hand allows all players at the table a chance to develop their strategy for the game. If a player knows the game will end in three hours, they will also know, in a nutshell, how the stages of the game will unravel. In the early stages of the home game, you may be more apt to play conservative and wait for a great hand. Conversely, you may choose to play aggressive in the early stages to accumulate a chip stack. Either way, by knowing exactly when the game will stop, you have the opportunity to develop a strategy, shift gears accordingly, and have an end to look at without exception. A stop time gives the game a sense of completion, and it is a goal all players look ahead to.

Setting the Blinds

If playing a no-limit home game, having a stop time then gives the host or coordinator the opportunity to set the blinds accordingly. If the game is going to last 120 minutes, and everyone is comfortable with 10 rounds of increasing blinds, then it will be established that the blinds will be raised every 12 minutes. This is a very important aspect of a home poker game. You can’t have a proper home poker game without an organized sense of order, with regards to blind levels, and a stop time. You need these things categorized so a player can develop a strategy and play according to the strategy they develop.

Hopefully you’ve had this experience in your poker games: Your opponent makes a big bet and you just feel that he is bluffing. You haven’t picked up a specific tell; you don’t know why, you just know that he doesn’t have a hand. You move in all your chips to call with a lowly pair of twos and wait expectantly. You smile as he finally frowns and announces, “you got it. I missed.”

Is There Such a Thing as Poker Intuition?

There are few better feelings than picking off a big bluff in a poker game (getting away with a big bluff is one of them). It’s not always easy to do, but sometimes you just know what your opponent is doing. World Series of Poker champion Phil Hellmuth has claimed there are times when he just absolutely knows what his opponent has. At these times he feels as if he is looking right through the backs of the cards to see his opponents’ holdings. Hellmuth is famous for playing up his poker abilities to a sometimes outrageous extent, but given that he has won eleven WSOP bracelets it’s hard not to give his claim some credence.

How Does Poker Intuition Work?

Poker intuition is hardly magic. Rather, it is the result of a combination of signals that your mind is subconsciously picking up on over the course of the session. When you just seem to know that someone is bluffing, it’s probably because there is something in his posture, actions or demeanor that you’ve seen before when he didn’t have a real hand. Because the signs he is giving off may be subtle you may not have picked them up overtly, but subliminally they reached you and are telling you to call. This is the essence of poker intuition.

What Do You Do With Poker Intuition?

In general you should trust it. Man has survived for thousands of years based on instinct. If you have a strong sense that someone is bluffing or strong and no major evidence to the contrary, go with your gut. If your gut has proved consistently wrong, you may want to reconsider. However, these gut instincts are often on target. Be sure what you are listening to is really your intuition and not just your desire. There could be a situation where you have a strong hand and really want to call, or you think your hand should be good but are afraid to go with it because you are facing a big bet. Do not confuse these feelings with intuition. Your poker intuition should be your gut feeling, not necessarily what you want to be the case.

Fact: 90 percent of those who play poker on the Net are losing players, five percent break even, and the remaining five percent win in the long haul. It’s true. Only 1 in 20 actually has a growing bankroll.

This might sound strange since almost all poker players – at least the ones I’ve met – claim to be winning. But the odds are against that I only should’ve bumped into players in the top five percent. No, I think people simply forget about their losses. Something a winning player never does.

Nevertheless, it’s possible to reach positive expectation – you (only) need to be a better player than most of the ones you’re up against. This can be achieved in a two ways:

First we have the category of winning players who have done it the hard way. Learning by doing or learning by grinding. Then there is a category of players who combine their playing with poker studies. They don’t have to pay for all mistakes. Instead they read about other players who’ve done them and learn a winning strategy through others.

Here, I’ll give you a glimpse of what has made me reach the top five percent of poker players, and hopefully you’ll get some advices that’ll save you some bucks at the table.