Poker Forums, Communities, and Friends.

I will give everyone the biggest secret in poker. It's how I went from total donk to where I am now. Now this might come off as a huge surprise to some, but it truly is the most important thing you can do to become a better poker player.

Join a Poker Community. This will serve as free advertisement to my friends at my poker community, but it's well worth it since I owe everything I've received from poker to them.

A poker community is a great source to learn, you have a mix of good and bad players all communicating with one another. You will have a place to brag, a place to share frustrations, to ask about strategies or just to help find a friendly cardroom.

I personally found myself at http://www.poker-strategy.org/. I didn't dare invest any money in poker, so I free rolled my entire first few months of playing poker, I followed their strategies, posted my hands, and finally I was inticed by one of the many lucrative sign up bonuses. I invested $50 and I ended up having around 2 to 3k a few years later.

What should you do? Go sign up, introduce yourself, and ask some questions. Maybe you have that hand history saved of a horrible bad beat, or a hand where you took 30 seconds to make a decision and you still felt like you made the wrong decision in the end. Go post that hand history up on the boards, ask people if they think you made the right decision. Join them in the chat room and just rant and rave on the chat while you either steam off your chips or stack them up high.

A poker community is the best place to go tilt for free. It's a place to hone your skills when away from the felt. You can go examine the many hand examples posted up on the forums and post your own opinion on the hand, and how you might play the hand. Of course this requires being friendly and not degrading or disrespecting the members, but if you are that kind of person, you probably aren't reading this article anyway.

A poker community is also a great starting point if you plan on learning a new version of poker. Often there are experts in all different fields of poker who are more than happy to draw someone to their 'dark side'. They can give you the basics, and when you start to get into complicated situations they can analyze your play after the fact.

I hope to turn my blog into it's own little mini-community. Somewhere people can come to read my latest hand example and post their comments and opinions. Where people can read my strategies and post their own. In this I open my doors to others to do just this, if you have any hand examples or strategies of your own you want to post, send me comments. I'll sensor if I have to the content and edit it to look somewhat professional, but that's just to keep the site looking clean. Ultimately I want my site to become a wikipoker.