How to win at PokerThere is an old quote about poker that goes something like "it takes a day to learn how to play, and a lifetime to master". While that may be true, most people can't afford to spend a lifetime losing money while mastering the game. Everybody plays poker to win money, and if you are not playing to win, you should be. Most people think that the best poker hands win whereas in fact it is the best poker players that win, not always with the best hands.
Following on from our article about whether or not you should show your cards (you shouldn’t) it make sense to say a few words about what to do when you have been bluffed off of a big pot and then had the cards shown to you. The most common reaction is to get annoyed, then get seriously annoyed, then to start gunning for that player. That is the most common reaction and the wrong reaction. Poker should not include ego. You can’t afford it right now., Maybe when you are a superstar the you can afford to have an ego and have that ego offended. But right now you are not there. You need to not be offended by anything that happens at the poker table. What you really need to do is readjust what you consider winning and losing. Winning in this situation is not going on tilt. Even if, unlikely though it is, you go on tilt and win back all your loses, it is still not a good thing. You need to keep cool and keep you emotions in check. This is what winning is in the long run. The next best thing, if you can’t do that, is to walk away. Yes, get up from that table and walk. That may seem like a crazy thing to do, and that the next time you sit at a table with any of the players from this game they will remember that you got bluffed and walked. But believe me that if you go on tilt and lose your whole stack they will probably remember that even longer. Don’t play for revenge. And remember that the guy that just showed his bluff has probably annoyed all the other players at the table, so let them take him out for you.
A lot of player think it is extremely cool to show your rags to the table when you have pulled off a big bluff. And I guess it is, in a way. But feeling cool like that has a price, just like anything, and you should be prepared to pay that price if you are going to do it. People think poker is all about bluffing, when in fact you should not need to bluff much at all to be a profitable poker player. Especially online. So you pull off a big bluff and win a monster pot, now you want to show your cards to the table. What is the price? The upside you are thinking is that you may tilt the guy you just bluffed off the pot and so make him play recklessly and you may win more from him than otherwise. That is indeed true, but in the process you will annoy the whole table, and all the players will be gunning for you but not tilting. So now you are the common enemy and every player is going to take great pleasure in taking your money. It is not good to be the most hated guy at the table. No one, and I mean no one, is going to think that you are cool, or great, or whatever. All, and I mean all, the players will automatically despise you and want to take you down. Just think how you feel when you see someone else do it. You form an opinion of that player and it is not nice. Don’t draw that on to yourself. The only time you can show your cards is when you get a premium hand and the entire table folds. Then you can show your aces without annoying anyone. Although be warned, some players will consider that this is a sign that your luck is not in and will play into you on that basis.
Every player, no matter how good, will experience a downswing at some point. Some players regularly have them. Handling a bad run of luck is just one more skill that you must learn in order to be a winning player. Yes, it looks like I am yet again saying that losing is a part of winning. Handling how you lose can in itself be profitable – or at least not you should not make as uch of a loss than if you do not handle it properly. So what to do when you are having no luck at the table and anything that can go wrong seems to do so? Some players swear by taking a complete break from the tables. Totally walk away and forget about it. If you are a professional player then you probably don’t have the luxury of stopping playing for a while. But you can’t continue playing and put a big hole in your bankroll, or worse, lose it entirely. If for whatever reason you cannot not play, then there are a few other things that you can do. Personally, I think that there is no use in walking away – how then will you know when your luck has turned good again? I prefer to play through it Anyway, strategies for playing though a downswing can include changing games. If you are primarily a Texas Hold’em player then maybe you could try Omaha Hold’em. Having to adjust to a new game and learn a different strategy may take you out of a particular playing pattern that you are unaware of but is causing problems. You could try changing down the stakes that you play at. Sometimes, if I am having a bad night, but it’s in isolation and not a bad night in a series of bad nights, I will go up in the stakes. This can have the effect of tightening up your game. That is a high risk strategy though and has cost a lot of money when it didn’t work. If you are a low stakes player and like it that way, you could try moving to a different poker room. Aside from a change in software, and having the advantage that no player will have any notes on you, you could also get a nice deposit bonus to help with your depleted bankroll.
Just like money and cheating, in the online world where there is money there will be bots. This goes well beyond online poker though, and in fact there are many more profitable pursuits for a bot maker than online poker. Even so, there are a dedicated few that constantly try to improve their bots to be able to take a profit from online poker sites. And it certainly is a tempting proposition; having a bot that could play profitably for you while you slept comfortably in your bed or watched tv would be a wonderful situation to be in. The reality is not like this. But yes there will always be people that try to run bots at online poker rooms. There are obviously no proper figures to back this up. Some guesses put the number of bots playing online at about one in ten. The highest figure I have seen quoted is three in ten. It could be a scary though to think that you could be sitting at a table of four or five players and three of them are bots. It needn’t be though. The bot that can play like a human has not been written yet. If you are paying attention at the tables, any automated play will soon become obvious to you. And instead of being a problem for you, it will turn into a profitable opportunity. Just like with real people, if you can predict what a bot will do in any given situation then you can take advantage of that knowledge to turn a profit. At this time there are a number of sites that offer commercial poker bots. They are usually priced in a range between $50 and $200. Think about that for a moment. If you had a bot that could make a profit from playing poker, how much do you think you could make in one day? Maybe $200? Even if you could only make $50 from your bot in one day, why would you sell that same bot for $50? You would run the risk of having that bot take some of your profit, or become noticed by the poker room and end up with your own bot banned. Risk your daily income for $50? I don’t think so. If ever there is a consistent profitable bot created I don’t think that we will see it for sale online.
Anywhere that there is money being moved there will be cheating. That is simply a fact. It’s human nature. There is a lot of money being moved across poker tables, therefore someone somewhere is trying to find a way to get some of it by cheating. The online poker rooms are acutely aware of this and they have powerful anti cheating measures in place to combat it and make sure that their online poker site is a safe and secure environment for their players. All major poker sites have security departments that are way ahead of you and me when it comes to detecting cheating. Having said that, the biggest of all online poker sites, Poker Stars, who presumably have the biggest of all online poker site security departments, took most of a year to deal with the Chines collusion ring that operated on their site and netted a guesstimated half a million dollars. You can read the full 200 page thread on the two plus two poker forum. So cheating at online poker sites can and does happen. But it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You, and other legitimate players, are there too, and by now you should be watching everything that happens at the tables automatically anyway. So if anything doesn’t feel right, anything at all, then you have the choice to leave the table. That’s right, you can stand up and walk away. If you feel strongly enough that something untoward is happening then you can always contact support and tell them of your concerns. The beauty of online poker is that everything can be, and is, logged so the hand histories can be examined at any time. If there is cheating then once a trained security professional examines the records it should be easy enough for them to spot it. One thing I will say in Stars’ favor is that they do regularly redistribute money that has been taken from cheaters accounts. And what about the poker rooms cheating the players? Well, unfortunately, that does happen too. There have been some high profile cases in the last few years (Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker), and some not so high profile ones (Pitbull Poker – unproven but the site has closed down). The same rule applies – if it doesn’t feel right, you can walk away. If yo suspect cheating is taking place either by the poker room itself or some of the players, then continuing to play there is not a smart move. Finally, if you think that cheating the poker rooms would be easy and profitable, remember that most of what you can think of will have been tried by someone else before and the poker rooms probably know all about it by now. And secondly, bear in mind that the poker room can confiscate your entire bankroll if they suspect you of cheating. They don’t have to prove anything in any court of law or anything like that. The only recourse you have if you have your bankroll taken and you are innocent is to take it to a poker forum and make a case there. If you can make a big enough stink, and are telling the truth, then you will get some support that way. I have never seen a genuine case where an innocent player was accused of cheating though, but I have seen a lot of players claim that they were innocent until the proof was provided by the poker sites.
The subject of online poker tells comes up a lot, and I don’t think that there is anything definitive that is known. At least not so far. Some players say that acting instantly means that the player has a good hand, so taking a while to make a raise can then mean that the player also has a good hand but doesn’t want to give it away by acting instantly! Hmmm. Well, acting instantly can also mean that the player is playing on more than one table, or is doing something else on the internet at the same time as playing poker, and may have used the instant play check boxes that are available on all online poker room software. And taking a while to act can mean that the player simply has a slow connection, or is distracted momentarily, or is indeed playing more than one game but isn’t using the ‘tell-tale’ in-turn buttons. I think any tell you get will be on a specific player that you have been watching and maybe making notes on. BIG POKER TIP use the note taking software that is available at a lot of online poker rooms. Any read you can get on a player that you have a bit of experience with may be valuable within a specific session, but I would be wary of thinking that you can mark a player as ‘always bluffs’ or ‘raising out of position with nuts’ or similar. Players that are that easy to get a read on won’t be around for too long anyway.
Earlier I said that expecting to lose was a good thing, something that you should be happy with, and I stand by that. It is always good advice for a newer player. But as you get some experience under your belt, and even though you might still be paying your dues, so to speak, still paying for your education, you now have to adjust your ‘losing’ attitude a bit. When you know how the game is played, and how to watch the table and the other players, you should still accept that you may lose, but you should not go into a game expecting to lose. Losing while learning is one thing, but losing due to ‘bad luck’ or ‘the cards being against you’ is a total nother thing. I don’t know how realistic it is to think that your attitude can affect the outcome of a random number generated online card game, but I’m willing to err on the side of caution. If yo are not in the right frame of mind, if everything is going wrong, or , worse, you NEED to win, then that is the real wrong time to play poker. So, I guess in essence, accepting that you could lose is way different to expecting that you will lose.
While watching the table be aware of the size of the stacks of the other players. Think what you would do if you had a small stack and had a playable hand. Would you hang on tightly to your remaining few chips or would you be looking to get them in with the best hand you happen to find? When you are looking to take a pot with a big raise because it has drawn nothing but callers, take a quick look at the stack sizes of those callers. A smallish big blind could have taken a big chunk out of a short stack and they may now be looking to get all their chips in with it. Again, if you were short stacked in middle position and had a hand that you were happy to go all in with, you might just flat call in order to entice a later player to push so that there would be enough chips in the pot for you to double up. If that is what you would do, then it is reasonable to expect that other short stacked players would think and do the same. Be wary of the short stack when making plays like that.
Another common mistake that new poker players make is to concentrate entirely on what cards they are holding. That may seem to you to be the right thing to do, but in reality your own cards are the very last thing that you need to concern yourself with. Consider this scenario: You are in the last seat, the dealer is on your left, you are the last to act. You look at your cards and you are holding the best cards you could hope for – pocket aces. The action goes round the table to find a few players fold and one or two flat call. On your turn to act you made a reasonable bet of three or four times the size of the big blind. The blinds fold quickly followed by those players that had called initially. You take the pot unseen and curse your luck for getting no action on your premium hand. Ok, now consider the same situation with one difference; you find yourself in the same position holding a nine of clubs and a two of diamonds (in other words, rubbish, rags). What if you acted as if you were holding aces? When you had the aces everyone folded, what would happen if you three or four bet now? If you do it properly,m then the same result should ensue – you take the pot unseen. Now that is not such a bad scenario is it? Taking a reasonable pot with nothing in your hand sure can feel pretty good. The only real difference here is what your cards were. And you were the only one to know what they were. So from everyone elses’ point of view both situations are exactly the same. The point I am trying to make here is that if you paid attention to what was happening at the tables you wouldn’t need great cards a lot of the time. Heck, you wouldn’t even need to know what your cards were. If you could get a reasonable read on the other players at the table, you would be able to spot dead pots like this one – pots that no player had the cards or the interest to contest. So, to take this a bit further, what would happen if, having made a reasonable sized bet, the action goes around to one player that re-raises? In the first situation, with you holding aces, it’s an easy enough decision to make; you re-raise. But in the second situation what do you do? Do you dare re-raise holding 9 2 off suit? The decision you make here can be the difference between being a long term winning player or a long term losing player. If you have been watching the table, you will have an idea what this guy has. You must form an opinion on what you think he is holding right now. What did you think when he called the big blind? Did you think he was out of position for a raise so he could only call safely and hope for a raise? Did you think he was hoping for a cheap flop with a possible draw? Or were you just concentrating on your own hand and didn’t think about the other players at all? Take the time to watch the other players, get a feel for the table. Especially when you are a newer player, and are hopefully only playing premium hands most of the time, you should have a lot of time when you are folded out of hands that you can use to study the other players, and the flow of the game. Don’t lament the fact that you are not getting cards right now, and don’t lower your starting hand selection criteria just to be playing. Remember that even when you are not in that particular hand you can still be playing by watching the game.
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