Poker on TV

[Scientize]

What is the best poker show on tv if you want to really learn?

[edfurlong]

Off the top of my head, none of them. There are dvd's you can buy if you are averse to reading for some reason.

[Kojak1984]

go onto any online poker site, and start observing some tables.

Watching on TV, while helpful in terms of giving the player a feel for percentages and betting patterns, will only teach you to play your own cards. What we really want to do is play our opponents, and to do this we must be able to put them on a range of hands.

By watching online, you have access to none of the hole cards, and therefore have to try and figure out the player's holdings based on their betting behaviour. As you get more and more hours in, you should see that you are able to place players on a narrower range of hands.

I also find this particularly helpful because every so often you will find that you were wildly off in your hand range. Immediately you can locate the hand history, and study the betting round by round, and try and work out where you went wrong.

Well that's my advice - I spent the first year I played the game thinking only about my own cards, which is fine in tournament play, as long as you can keep a nice run of cards going. You'll probably make the odd final table in a year, maybe even win a local tourney or two, as I did. But then there's the other 95% of the tournaments.

However if you want to find yourself on and around those final tables week in, week out, you're going to have to learn to play the player. And that is where watching 'blind' has helped me more than anything else.

[kassdog]

If your talking about stuff like poker after dark and wsop don't look at those for advice. Most of those are shorthanded and you will see some bad play. I like what kojak is saying also to add read a lot of books and if you play online post hh in the apropriate forum on this site to get feedback on your play.

[monkover]

What Kojak said is very true, it is better to learn without seeing the cards of the other players...
But i guess, because u only got 5 posts that you first have to learn how to play you own hands. This means that imo any poker shows on tv are good enough for you. just try to watch those with good commentators, this way you will be told quite a bit of what is going on in a poker players head! I´d watch shows with Gabe Caplan or Mike Sexton, they really do know a lot about the subject and are able to point out a lot of helpful things.
Try watching high stakes poker first, it´s i think a 300/600 NLHE cash game. You will learn a lot from this, then go to youtube and try to find WSOP shows where you cant see the cards. There are some of those but not too many.
I think this will help you get going quite well and then go to online poker rooms and try to figure out who´s got which cards by putting people on hand ranges. For this you might also want to read this really excellent thread:
sorry can´t find it at the moment...
will post it later...
also read the poo-bah posts they´re really good and will help you improve your game. Sorry that this isn´t really about your question but it will be very useful for you!!
cheers

[Webster]

One of the reasons there are so many fish is because they watch poker on TV! Honest! These people play an entirely different game. You do not see the 12 hours of folding and playing one hand.

All you see are the highlights which MANY times are bad play or play where they have played 1000 hands against their opponent and thus are mixing it up the play.

I try NOt to watch TV games because I do not want to to get bad habits!

[mvdgaag]

Any TV game is great to learn and fun to watch as long as you realize everything said above. You only get to see the highlights and big mistakes (is this also true for high stakes?).
As long as you try to get into someones head watching this and realise what they know and don't know it is a great learning experience. It's better to learn from someone else's mistakes than from their successes.

In short: Just don't assume this is how they play all day and don't assume it is the correct play you see. Try to figure out what they're thinking instead.

[PantsOnFire]

[ QUOTE ]
You only get to see the highlights and big mistakes (is this also true for high stakes?).

[/ QUOTE ]
I believe High Stakes Poker shows every hand.

[Bubble Bully]

I think that high stakes is a cash game with more implications, so I consider it to be the better show.

For Tourneys I would say the PPT because it shows how the players get to the final table, and not just a slew of all-ins.

Is poker after dark any good?