With online poker making its return in a big way lately, we are here to give you five tips on how to win on the online felt. This article is less about bet sizing, and hand selection, and more about the disciplines that you need to master and the habits that you need to create, to make money consistently playing online poker. Whether you prefer tournaments or cash games, these tips are for you. Let’s get started!
#1 Keep Records
Keeping meticulous records are key to any consistent long-term online poker winner. And I am not just talking about whether you win or lose, while that information is certainly very important. I like to know when I play, what I play, and for how long I played it. Did I win? Lose? Break even?
Was it a Texas Hold ‘Em cash game? Or maybe a multi-table tournament or a single table Sit ‘N Go? The reason you want to keep detailed records of your play is so that you can go back later and look for trends, good or bad.
- Play money poker is really quite easy to win at once you understand how to beat it, just like Zynga poker on Facebook. It really boils down to being more disciplined than your opponents. While everybody else is going crazy playing any two cards and chasing every draw for any amount, you need to stick to the game plan of only playing the good.
- Pot Limit Omaha Poker Rules. To start at the very beginning, let’s quickly go through Omaha poker rules. Since the game is similar to Hold’em in many aspects, many players jump straight into it without fully understanding the rules of Omaha poker.
Poker is a very interesting game because you have to play against many different opponents in order to get money. Each opponent is unique and has its own style and game techniques. The best way to get an advantage over your opponent is to watch after his movements. The way a player acts can tell you a lot of information for future usage.
Are you winning at a much higher rate playing Omaha than at Hold “em? Do you tend to hit and run during your winning sessions and then play marathon sessions trying to get unstuck other times? Understanding your games strengths and weaknesses, is very important to long term winning.
There is software available out there that can help you track your play in a very detailed manner, and you should look into that right away. Our brains tend to over-exaggerate the good things and forget about the bad, and you want to make sure that you are completely honest about your poker abilities. In poker, we can lie to our opponents on the table, but we never want to lie to ourselves about results. Keep track of your play and review it often.
#2 Study Often
This second tip goes right along with the first one, study! A Lot! Whether you are studying your own results, or specific poker strategy, you always want to make sure that you are learning about poker away from the table. For some people, this means pouring over hand histories, alone, or with trusted peers. For others, this is reading up on the latest GTO (game theory optimal) theories or reviewing starting hand charts.
There are endless resources out there, and to be a winner, you need to take advantage of all of them. Read books, watch YouTube hand reviews, or sign up for online training sites. Some people even go as far as to hire a poker coach.
The key here is to find a type of learning that appeals to you and stick with it. If you are only learning about the game while at the table, you are electing to give other players ,that are willing to do their homework, an advantage. In a game that is all about gaining an advantage on your competition, that is something that you just can’t afford to do.
Personally, I love to read poker books. I have been a winning poker player since before the original online poker boom, and it has been fascinating to see how much poker strategy has evolved. There was a time, not long ago, when Super System by Doyle Brunson was the most detailed strategy ever written on poker. For people that are beating the game nowadays, that go back and read Super System today, it would seem like going back to elementary school.
You always want to make sure you are following the new trends of poker, because your opponents are. In order to be a winner, your game always needs to be evolving. The best way to stay ahead of the curve is to stay up on the most current training. I promise you, the strategies that Fedor Holt uses aren’t the same ones that Stu Unger used decades ago to win. Study, study, and study some more!
#3 Play Within Your Bankroll
You hear poker pros talk about this one all of the time, yet very few players out there follow it. You MUST play within your bankroll. Now, there are a million different definitions of when it is appropriate to jump up in limits or to higher buy-in tournaments. And while there are a lot of differing opinions out there, very few of them are ever going to tell you that you should base what stakes you are playing, on how much money is currently in your online poker account.
Personally, I think that the most appropriate time to move up in limits or buy-in levels is when you can show that you are a consistent winner at your current stakes. Here we are right back to that record-keeping we talked about earlier…
If you are a winner at one level, you should consider moving up to the next highest level available. But be very careful, that you give yourself an ample sample size of results to base that decision on. That doesn’t mean if you play a 1-2 no-limit game for three hours and win a hundred bucks, you are ready to jump up to 2-5!
The best way to track your progress is by baselining your results to an established sample size. This can be done in many ways, but I use the below formulas for cash games and tournaments.
#4 Pay Attention
I know, I know, this one sounds too simple to even mention, but not paying full attention is one of the biggest leaks of today’s online poker players. Whether it is because they are distracted by whatever else is going on in their home, their phone, or they are just cruising Reddit or YouTube, poker players are notoriously an easily distracted bunch.
And while that is the case with brick and mortar poker players as well, it is much easier to get distracted while playing online. The fact of the matter is that playing high-level poker can be boring at times. Poker pro Phil Galfond once famously said, “the best way to win every hand of poker, is to not try and win at every hand of poker.” Sometimes the play is to fold, as unsatisfying as that might feel at the time.
And when you hit a patch of action where you are doing a lot of folding, it can be hard to stay laser-like focused on the table. But you must find a way to do it. If you aren’t in the hand, you should be focusing on the other players at the table. Try to read hands and follow betting lines, so when you are in a hand, you understand how the other players are playing.
I see situations all the time where a player will be playing like an absolute maniac, and other players make big laydowns against them because they were too busy playing on their phone to notice. Don’t play poker because you are bored and want something to do. Play poker because you want to eviscerate your enemies on the felt. And to do that, you need to pay attention, all of the time.
#5 Don’t Play Too Many Tables
This last tip is very unique to online poker players. When you are playing in brick and mortar poker rooms, you only get to play at one table. One hand at a time is all you ever have to worry about. But online, you can play as many tables as you want simultaneously. And that can get mighty tempting as the desire for action is so easy to satisfy.
But playing too many tables at once can seriously hurt your ROI. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you can handle more than one table at a time, multi-tabling can be a great way to smooth out your variance, and maximize your wins. But as tends to be the case with a lot of things in poker, poker players aren’t always telling the truth to themselves about how many tables they can handle at once.
If you find yourself rushing from table to table, and making decisions quicker than you might like, tone it down some, and drop a table or two. At the end of the day, we play poker to make money, and while it is ok to give up a little bit of your ROI at one table to add another table, thus making more money overall, there is no bigger tragedy in online poker than playing more games than you should be, and turning yourself from a winning player, to a loser, because of it. We aren’t here to impress people with how many tables we can play, we are here to make money, and finding your optimum numbers of tables is very important to your long-term success.
Wrap Up
Nothing I have said in this article is hard to do. And I assure you that if you do each of these things religiously, you will eventually find a way to beat any poker game in the long run. Poker is a wonderful game, in that, anyone can be great at it. Poker doesn’t discriminate. If you put in the work, you can be a winner. Thanks for reading, and good luck on the virtual felt!
There are a handful of critical aspects when it comes to learning how to play poker. There’s learning the different poker hands and their ranks as well as learning to call, raise, and fold. But there’s also more to it than just that.
This post tries to capture some of the other aspects of how to play poker, including a few hints about general strategy that might keep you from losing too much money early in your career.
How to Find a Good Poker Game
It’s easy enough to find real money online poker, although if you live in the United States, only a limited number of websites will actually allow US players to compete for real money.
If you’re brand new to poker, though, I suggest getting started with the free, play money games on the internet. You’ll learn a lot about how the game goes.
The most important things to pay attention to begin with is what order everything happens in. It’s important to understand this, especially when you switch to live poker.
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And I recommend switching to live poker as soon as possible. I got my start playing on the internet, but live poker has charms all its own.
Another option, which is a better option financially, too, is to find a home poker game. Why’s that a better option? Well, you can avoid paying the rake that way.
When you play poker in a casino, the casino has a dealer run the action. The casino also takes 5% of every pot as their “rake.” This is one of the ways they stay in business.
If you’re at a table with players who are equally skilled, you’ll eventually break even over time. But not if 5% of the pot disappears on every hand. To break even in that situation, you have to play better than everyone else.
How do you find a home poker game? Ask around at the office. If you hang out in a bar, ask around there. You can also find message boards on the internet where locals host poker games, but some of them charge a rake. Such games are “underground” games and are probably illegal.
How to Host a Poker Game
If you have trouble finding a poker game, you can always host. You’ll need at least five or six players to have a decent home poker game, so you’ll probably need to invite 10 people to get a decent game going.
You’ll also need the proper equipment to host a poker game. Obviously, you’ll need decks of cards. I like to have two decks going, so you can have a deck shuffled at all times. There’ll be no pauses in the game while the deck’s getting shuffled.
I also like to use plastic playing cards rather than ones made of cardstock. You’ll pay more for such a deck, but it should last you forever. Kem is a good brand for this.
You’ll also need a poker table. You can find cheap poker tabletops that you can just put on top of your dining room table online. They’re good enough to start with.
Finally, you need clay chips. These used to be expensive, but they’re not too expensive anymore. Don’t host a game with plastic chips. They’re just lame and lack gravitas. Also, don’t host a poker game with a lot of cash on the table. Have your guests buy chips.
Be sure to let everyone know what variant you’re going to play and for what stakes. It’s okay to host a poker tournament and charge an extra $5 toward the buy-in if you’re going to provide snacks and drinks.
You should, in fact, provide snacks and drinks. Just because it’s a poker game doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be a good host, and a good host offers refreshments to his guests.
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Also, check out this blog I wrote on how to deal a home poker game if you need extra help on getting your game started.
How to Bluff in Poker
Since I’ve already written posts about how poker hands and hand rankings work, as well as how betting in poker works, I’m going to skip those subjects and get straight into the subject on most people’s minds—bluffing.
A bluff is when you bet with a hand hoping that everyone else will fold. In that event, you win the pot by default.
A true bluff is a bet where you’re almost certainly have a lower-ranked hand than your opponent. If you think you have a better hand, you’re value betting, not bluffing.
If you don’t play much poker, you might think that bluffing is a bigger part of the game than it actually is. But the truth is, bluffing doesn’t work often enough to be profitable, especially in lower stakes games. They call lower stakes Texas holdem games “no foldem holdem” for a reason.
You need a perfect situation to bluff successfully. Part of that situation is few competitors.
But if you bluff into a single opponent, your odds improve dramatically. Paying attention to your opponents’ tendencies also matters if you’re going to be bluff.
A better strategy is semi-bluffing. When you semi-bluff, you bet aggressively with a hand that probably won’t win, but might improve and be a winner later.
You have two ways to win in such a situation. You win if your opponent folds, but you also win if your hand improves.
The classic example is when you’re heads up with someone and you have four cards to a flush on the flop. You have a roughly 1 in 3 chance of making your flush. If you bet aggressively, though, your opponent might fold. You have two ways to win.
Poker Strategy Tips for Beginners
You can find plenty of strategy tips for poker beginners online, but the biggest and best involve your overall approach to the game.
Most people agree that, especially for a beginner, a tight aggressive approach is the best way to play. There are two concepts to understand in that sentence:
- Tight
- Aggressive
I’d like to address tightness first. Poker players can be categorized as tight or loose. This refers to how many hands they get involved in.
A tight player doesn’t get involved in many hands, while a loose player gets involved in lots of hands.
This implies that a tight player has a better hand going into any situation than a loose player. The better hands don’t come along as often, so the tight player obviously only plays when he has good cards or better.
A loose player, though, plays too many hands and sticks with them too long hoping they’ll improve. Some loose players think of themselves as some kind of sheriff with a responsibility to keep the other players honest.
Being tight or loose is a separate concept from aggression, though. An aggressive player might play few hands or a lot of hands, but when he plays a hand, he’s usually betting or raising with that hand.
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You’ll rarely see an aggressive player just call a bet. The opposite of an aggressive player is a passive player. And passive players call bets to stay in a hand.
You want to be the kind of player who usually bets instead of checking, who usually raises instead of calling. The goal is to only play when you have good cards. When you do play, you want to bet and raise. You want to get money into the pot when you’re likely to win. This is called being “tight aggressive.”
Tight passive players lose money because they don’t bet and raise enough, so they don’t get any value from their winning hands.
Loose aggressive players sometimes make money in games with poor players because they get a lot of their opponents to fold. Still, when they face someone with some discipline, it’s easy enough for them to win just by waiting for good cards.
Loose passive players are the best opponents. They will call your bets with lousy cards all night. Don’t be a loose passive player when you’re gambling with real money.
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Conclusion
There are some of the basics of how to play poker, including how to find poker games and how to host poker games.
I also included some poker strategy tips appropriate for beginning players. You will definitely learn more as you go and put all these tips into practice. So good luck and have fun!