Back when online poker got started majority of the players were playing fixed limit texas holdem, as opposed to no limit which is these days the most popular game. However possibly due to the influence of World Series of poker no limit quickly became by far the most popular poker game played online. These days on some poker networks and sites it might be hard to even find fixed limit games running, still as there are some sites on which these games are popular we thought it might be a good idea to share some tips to small stakes fixed limit games.

The following tips have been written by player who has experience at playing fixed limit texas holdem games as big as $300/$600 and who has extremely good track-record in the $20/$40 and $30/$60 games. As the author has by far more experience in playing headsup and 6 max games than 9 / 10 player games these tips are also mostly aimed for those shorthanded games. However, even the players playing full table games might be able to get something out of these tips.

TOP 10 Low stakes & Mid stakes fixed limit texas holdem poker tips:

1: Pay attention to your starting hands. In the No Limit games you can get away with playing lot of speculative starting hands if you are good enough player after the flop, this is because the pots can grow much bigger after the flop compared to the preflop pot in the no limit games. In fixed limit big part of the final pot goes into the middle already before the flop and that is way you need to use better starting hand selection. What this means in practice is that you should try to avoid playing hands such as 54s against a single-raise (barring some special circumstances). In fixed limit holdem top-pair good kicker type starting hands such as KJ offsuit go up in value and those speculative connectors go down in value.

2: Only play in good games. In order to win money over the long term in any poker game you must play mostly in games in which you have positive expected value, you achieve this positive expected value by playing against opponents who are worse poker players than you are.

3: Review your hands after each session. One thing that has helped me a lot during my poker career is reviewing all the key hands after each session and seeing if I could have played them in some better way.

4: Watch the winning highstakes poker players in action and try to figure out what makes them so good. Not only isn’t it extremely entertaining to watch the games such as $1,000/$2,000 fixed limit, but you can also learn something by paying attention to how the pros play certain hands in certain spots and trying to figure out exactly why they played the hand in that manner.

5: Don’t ignore the odds. In theory poker is nothing but a complex math-game, and the player who does the best decision based on the math wins the most money. So for that reason never ignore the odds, and instead let them guide your decisions.

6: Study the game by reading poker books and watching poker coaching videos. Some of my favorite poker books include for an example Theory of Poker and Aces On The River and in my opinion one of the best poker coaching video sites is BlueFirePoker.

7: Make sure you get something extra from the poker room. When you play lot of poker you also pay lot of rake. Make sure that you get a good chunk of that rake returned to you, majority of the poker rooms have either some type of rakeback deal or VIP deal available for their players so before you register an account at a new poker room make sure you are entitled for that deal.

8: Use tracking software to find out how you play and how your opponents play. Whenever you play you should be using some tracking software such as PokerTracker to stay aware of the stats of your opponents and of your own stats. At the moment PokerTracker is allowed by all the major online poker rooms, however that might change in the future.

9: Learn headsup poker. It is bit of a secret that by far the easiest way to make money in poker is to become a good headsup player. So I suggest that you put serious work in improving your headsup game and after that wait in the headsup tables and only play against the bad players who you should be able to crush easily.

10: Don’t let your bankroll get ruined. In order to make money in poker you need to be able to actually play poker in the first place, so no matter what never put big part of your bankroll at risk.

Good luck!

If you want to play some good low stakes and mid stakes texas holdem games online I suggest checking out Everest Poker: while they don’t have lot of games running, those that do run tend to often have bad player(s) in them. They also have a nice VIP system and decent first deposit bonus available for new players. Play fixed limit games now at Everest Poker and get good first deposit bonus.