23 Jul 10

Poker expert through hand evaluations - OnkelHotte's career

Today, our Head of Education OnkelHotte will tell you how he first came into contact with poker and PokerStrategy.com and how he learned to play poker by evaluating hands.

Some of you may already know OnkelHotte as one of our first members. He's been around since the very first days of PokerStrategy.com and quickly became a renowned poker player. With the following article he shows you, how his successful poker career kicked off.

Dear PokerStrategists,

I have to admit that the interviews with Schiep and nargos during the last Black Member Party made me feel a bit nostalgic. I started reminiscing about the time when I started playing poker and first discovered PokerStrategy.com.

Go to the Black Member video with the interviews of Schiep (12:48 min) and Nargos (5:41 min.)


We have close to 4 million members - and I'm one of the first few dozen. When I learned about our community, it was still in its early stages.

There were neither videos nor coaching sessions and only a small number of strategy articles, which mainly consisted of a fixed limit starting hands chart and a few forum posts. Players who were looking for other resources, besides this small number of articles, simply had to use the forum. Helpful members provided support and advice and personally answered every question posted.

Poker expert through hand evaluations

One day I stumbled upon the forums and encountered my first problem. At the very beginning, I didn't even know all the rules and wondered what it meant to say, "The SB completes". I received a friendly answer to my question and soon learned about "real" strategy problems in the forum. Why on earth would I raise a strong draw in a multi-way pot, even though I don't currently have the best hand?

The answers I received and my subsequent analyses were my introduction to the topics of the equity and EV analysis of poker. Many topics were put together like puzzle pieces. I admit it was tedious at times and I often wished I had just been able to read up on certain things.

At other times however it was very motivating, especially when I had my first successes and discovered new aspects through my own improved view. These viewpoints would either convince others or lead to further discussion.

Discussion increases self-confidence

My self-confidence grew. Instead of always playing the role of the student posting hands and asking questions, I found the courage to comment on hands that other players had posted. Sometimes I was wrong and sometimes I was right, but I definitely left every thread a bit smarter than I was before.

That's how I learned how to play poker. Hand evaluations, forum discussions, strategy articles and 1 or 2 books, which were on the market at the time. Topics that hadn't been dealt with anywhere else had to be discussed or analysed by the players themselves.

Active learning and analysing

Today it's a lot easier to learn poker. You don't have to do the work to acquire information about rules, or concepts such as value raises or standard plays. The majority of topics are presented to you on a silver platter in the form of videos, articles and quizzes.

With the offers available today, I would have climbed up the stakes much faster than back then. I would have avoided many costly mistakes from the onset, and not only when I got the feeling that I was losing money if I played in a certain way.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to miss any hand evaluation that I participated in back then. In the end, hand evaluations strengthen a very important skill that is essential for every successful poker player: Active learning and analysing.

Disadvantages of passive learning

Passive learning has its boundaries. A poker player won't develop the flexibility to independently react to changes if he doesn't participate in active learning. This is because videos or articles can cover not every single aspect, rule or change in the parameters of poker.

This is why I can only recommend for everyone to actively use the strategy and hand evaluation forums, and to post in them yourselves. I can tell you from experience that you will greatly benefit from this and that it will help improve your game considerably.

Active members are more successful

I think it is clear that active members in strategy forums are, on average, more successful. If you want to learn actively, videos are usually not enough. Especially with the high quality videos nowadays, the danger of a didactically optimised education is that members become less and less motivated to analyse things themselves. They receive the content without being required to take an active role. This trend is reflected in hand evaluation forums, where we can see that the general levels of active participation have dropped.

There can of course be many reasons for this. One of them could be that the growing availability of resources has shifted the focus away from hand evaluations, and that new members aren’t made aware of the importance of this medium. Nevertheless, how can we convey this message, particularly to the newbies? I am interested to hear your opinion on this matter:

How would you improve our hand evaluation service further?

How to post a hand in our forum?

For PokerStrategists who have not posted a hand in our hand evaluation forum before, we created a guide that will show you how it's done. Also, with the PokerStrategy.com hand converter we are providing a powerful tool that will make your life easier if you are willing to make frequent use of our hand evaluation boards.

Professional Hand Evaluation in 4 Easy Steps