Poker Lessons - How to Become a Poker Tutor

by Bodog Poker | Oct 22 2009

The game of poker is a challenging one, especially Texas Holdem. The game takes a lifetime to master, and we're all on our own stage of development and skills. Once you've mastered a level of the game you can teach the strategy to someone. Anyone who is less skilled than you can learn from what you know, and if you're smart you'll get something in return for sharing your poker knowledge. In the past a high-stakes poker teacher would collect a percentage of whatever their students won as payment for their instruction, but today's poker teacher makes money in a different way.

Today, players with credentials set up poker schools that can teach hundreds or thousands of players all at once. Players pay a fee to join the poker school and get their lessons through DVD's, downloadable information, and videos. The fees make it profitable for the teachers to share their secrets to other players without having to take a percentage of what they make for a period of time. Just about every big name in the game has an instructional book or DVD out to sell to the novice player.

Most of us won't set up a poker school of our own and will most likely be teaching friends and family how to improve their game. If you're going to give advice to others about playing poker you should know what you're doing, and you should be able to watch a player play and determine what is wrong with their game - then you can concentrate on fixing what leaks they have in their play, and you can take the right steps to correct the leaks in their game for good.

The way to know what you're doing is to read poker strategy books and articles that teach you the basics of the game. It will depend on what skill level your student is at as to what you should teach them. Teach novice players the basics of the game so that they're not completely in the dark, and teach intermediate players about position and recognizing tells. Everyone continues to learn more about the game, and in a sense we're all students and teachers in a way. The game is evolving and changing all the time, and today the best teachers are not always seasoned pros.

So being a poker tutor has traditionally required that you were very accomplished in the game somehow and that players could trust the strategy you put out because it's been proven to have success.  Today just about any player that's won a tournament creates different forms of media for sale to novice players - some of it being regurgitation of the same strategy that's existed for decades