While before the flop, you can develop a programmatic strategy, that can take in account every possible situation and how to deal with them, after the flop, things are getting far more complex and it’s not as easy to do the same thing. For the post-flop, just learning strategies is not enough and you need a lot of practice in order to get the hang of the game and to understand the adversaries’ psychology.

For the post-flop hands, the best strategy to use is the following: if you have the best hand on the flop, you should raise, if you have a relatively good hand call and for everything else, fold. There’s no reason to call if you have a weak hand, as you will simply lose the money you used for the call.

Now, the question that remains is how do you know that you have the best hand? You can’t know for sure, but you can, with some approximation you can try to guess. See what cards are on the table and think what others could have. For instance, your QQ could be the best hand if the community cards are 2-7-9, but you should be more cautious if the cards show K-A-J, as a simple ace or a king could beat your hand.

While you should be cautious about an ace appearing in the flop, you could also bluff and this could lead to your opponents to fold, because aces are quite feared by most poker players. Bluffing should be always done with prudence. If there are few people in the game, they might all fold, but the more they are, the more likely it is that someone will stay in the game.

There are some players will almost always call (they are known as “calling station” in poker slang), so before you bluff, you should let a few hands go, to see what kind of player is each of them. Sometimes, it’s even possible that the weak hands pre-flop might have improved with the arrival of the community cards, so keep all options possible when thinking the strategy.

You should also be wary of straights and flushes. If all the community cards are spades, it might be that the player who just raised the bet by a lot might have one, but it could also be that he is bluffing. Because of this complexity, it’s not possible to give a universal strategy. You need to learn to read the players and this is not possible without much poker experience. With enough practice, making decisions will become a second nature for you.