If you are playing poker just for fun and not money, it is up to your decision to feel free to play as you like because you are not going to loose anything. On the other hand, if you are focusing to develop in to a player that spends money in the game you need to learn and learn.

Any art or sport requires some practice and expertise to graduate to be a pro. You need to learn poker through every stage. Like any other game you need to study poker. You need to study the rules; you need to learn to calculate poker odds, you need to understand tells.

If you are good at math you can quickly understand the odds calculation part. With knowing odds you can play poker better than those that do not do it. However, the best of your poker odds’ skills can be misled by poker tells.

Learning to identify true poker tells and deceptive poker tells can help you battle equally on the table with players that are good at play with being deceptively poker faced.

If you are going to master tells and odds then with a little luck you can dictate the moves of the table silently.