As a player who is new to poker, or certainly new to the Sky Poker site, then without doubt your greatest resource on the site is the Sky Poker Community. There are several different aspects to the community that cater for the needs, interests and wants of different levels of poker player, but when viewed as whole, the community is a treasure trove of information – especially if you are a relatively inexperienced player seeking to learn the subtle nuances of the game.
There are two distinct sections to the community part of the site: blogs and the forum.
The blog section is the least active part of the community section, but it does have useful threads about the Live Sky Poker TV shows and details about which tables will be featured on the show and competitions you can enter to try and win freeroll entry into some of the big competitions on offer each week.
In addition, there are blogs from presenters like Richard Orford and the official Sky Poker blog.
While these can contain useful tidbits of information from time to time, you are better off spending the proportion of your time looking through the forum.
The Sky Poker Forums
The forum is divided up into several sections:
The Poker Clinic, a dedicated section to help beginners improve their game.
Fancy a Bet, a section for poker players who like a bet too.
The meat of the site is in the Sky Poker Discussions section, where there are several sub-forums broadly entitled:
- Poker Chat
- Team Talk,
- Brags, Beat and Variance, (A place to comment about wins or poor runs of luck)
- The Sky Poker TV Channel,
- The Sky Poker Tour,
- The Rail (non-poker related chat),
- The Football Corner (comments about Soccer),
- Sky Poker Announcements
- Community Suggestions and lastly
- Community Help and Advice
Without doubt you should spend at least some time investigating the discussion threads in Poker Chat and if you are a beginner, then The Poker Clinic is where you should start reading.
The Poker Clinic
The Poker Clinic allows you to read comments and advice on a wide variety of topics from experienced and novice poker players alike. A lot of the forum posts detail what a player did in a particular situation and with a certain hand and then other players will comment on whether what they did was a good or poor move and perhaps outline other strategies they could have done.
For a novice player, this is a gold mine of great information. For example, what do you do if you have a pair of nines, but someone has put in a relatively big bet pre flop? Do you fold, call or re-raise?
In the Poker Clinic, you can read not just about hands other players have had but also post your own hand and situation to see what the consensus opinion is about what you should have done in any given situation. This feedback is great for letting you know how you can go about improving your game.
Poker Chat
The Poker Chat section is a much more generalised poker forum, but contained within it are plenty of hints and tips for poker players of all abilities and experience. The forum is great not just for picking up hints and tips about your game but also for early notification of poker tournaments, freeroll events. This is a section where all enquiries about poker are welcome and where you can contribute your own ideas and opinions, as well as starting threads to ask the opinion of others.
While the content of the forum does vary as widely as the number of people who post on it, one thing to consider is that if you are a novice player, then you may want to brush up on the more specialised terms used in poker. Many of the players who post and comment in both the Clinic and Poker Chat section are veterans of the game.
The other forum subgroups are self-explanatory and can be useful from time to time, but from my experience, they are not used anywhere near as frequently as the Poker Chat or Poker Clinic options.
As a community, the site is generally welcoming and players who even hint at trying to play less than fairly are usually swiftly rebuked. Reading the guidelines on posting will give you a good idea of what is acceptable and unacceptable to post and having the knowledge of hundred of poker players to draw upon can be an invaluable tool to any poker player seeking to improve their game.
