If you intend being good at anything, you have to develop some skills for that particular interest and poker is not an exception. If you have ever played poker, then you very well know that it is a game of skill and strategy. There is no need of sitting around the table if you do not know what you are doing. That is why you see the players sitting on their seats for long hours constantly sniping glances at their opponents and looking at their hands. If you look closely you realize that there is a tense atmosphere but the players appear to be calm. Poker is not a game whereby you will find the players physically active or shouting, they may appear very come because the game is highly depends on the mind of an individual. In order to develop adequate skills, you need to spend most of your time playing and not just with anybody but with people who know how to play, people who can teach you one or two things about being good at the game. You should avoid gambling if you know that you are not good because you might end up losing everything. People have been known to go insane or even commit suicide because of losing a game of poker which they had placed a fortune as the bet. Therefore, to be a successful poker player, very special skills are demanded. Some people are mistaken to think that successful poker players are those people with high IQ average but this is not true. There are some few factors that should be considered in order to be a skillful and successful poker player. Aggressiveness is one of them because the game requires someone who does not leave anything to chance, someone who is very aggressive. This is to mean that you should not except to be intimidated by other players or be scared because these are some of the tricks that are used to bring someone down. The other important factor is that you should have a math aptitude. By this I mean that you should be conversant with a bit of mathematics especially probability. By knowing the probability and odds of one card showing up, fatal moves can be prevented. The knowledge of poker statistics is another important factor of being good at the game. You can be able to calculate every move which will further develop your strategy and by doing so you can be able to save a lot of valuable time if you know the statistics. Apart from the factors that have been discussed, the most important of them all is discipline. There is no way that you will ever flourish if you do not have discipline and self composure. That also applies in other factors of life. You should not have the perception that luck plays any factor in your game. All the seasoned players do not depend on this, what they do is that they know very well that their fate is dictated by their decisions and moves that they make on that table.