Playing Too Many Hands

This is a very difficult temptation to resist. There are few other online games where players have to sit around and watch the action. However, for online poker, it is crucial that you are able to wait for a hand.

One way players deal with this is by playing a couple of games at once so that they are in action more often, or playing shorthanded games that allows them to loosen their starting hand requirements.

Overvaluing Your Hands

Partially due to edited television coverage, some players tend to think certain hands are stronger than they really are.

Many players are willing to go all the way with pocket aces or even ace king in Texas holdem. While these hands can be very good to go all-in with pre-flop and even to show down, they are still just one pair or ace high when unimproved. Don’t be afraid to lay down any hand, no matter how good it looks pre-flop.

Playing Too Long

Without any constraints on when you have to leave the casino, many players stay online long after they should have quit. Set a specific time period to play poker, or at least continually check yourself for signs of fatigue, hunger or loss of focus.

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There is no rake paid on individual hands, and the tournament fees that you pay upon registration are covered by rakeback too.

General MTT strategy is pretty simple. Since tournament chips are your life-blood in the game, you have to do whatever it takes to protect them. In this respect, in the early stages of a MTT, you need to play tight, and act only on good starting hands, from late position.

It’s amazing how many people there are who play the exact opposite of this strategy. They launch into all-in coin-flips early on, something they should avoid at all cost. If you play in a freeroll, this modus operandi will grow to epidemical proportions.

Be disciplined, and do not allow yourself to be dragged into the early all-in frenzy. Sometimes, in the very early stages it is a good choice to fold a hand you know is the best starting one, when you’re faced with several all-in calls.

The reason is simple: more calls mean more drawing hands, which suck the odds out of your hand. If you call the all-in and lose to a drawing hand, you lose everything.

If you call and you win, you’ll double or possibly triple your stack up, which may seem like a huge achievement, but if you look at the tournament in its entirety, you’ll see it’s not that big of a boost.

According to Sklansky, play should be tighter when the blinds are very small compared to the size of future bets. In the early stages of a MTT, this is exactly the case.

As the tournament progresses, you need to loosen up a little. A good way to promote a loose table image (which you can then exploit) is to act loosely before the flop. That will also give you the chance to attempt making a good hand every time you take a peek at the flop.

The key to not paying too much for these hands is to act very tight after the flop. After the flop lands, your hand is 75% made. Keep this in mind and do not chase senseless draws.

Near the middle stages of the tournament, you’ll be confronted with a dilemma: the blinds will have escalated, and your stack is starting to show signs of cracking under the increasing pressure.

People around your table keep showing down good hands, and play doesn’t look like it’s loosened up on the whole.

Your primary objective in this situation should be to protect your stack. Acting tight won’t do anymore though, you’ll need to break out of your shell and – like it or not – start stealing some blinds.

Since the blinds are already pretty big, you’ll get nicely rewarded for your efforts.

Your secondary objective should be to catch a good hand you may trap an opponent with, because you need to keep in sight that the blinds will continue to rise, and soon, stealing one every now and then won’t be enough either.

As you’re nearing the bubble, play will tighten up. Nobody wants to be the last out-of-money player, so they’ll try to hunker up and let others bust out to thrust them into the money.

A good player can take advantage of the tight play, by stealing blinds, forcing people to fold better hands and so on. Needless to say, all the while you need to keep an eye on the size of your stack and its relation to Harrington’s M variable, which is a sum of the BB and the SB in a given moment.

The more such Ms your stack contains, the better you can focus on optimal strategy.

As you’re nearing the final table, play will get progressively looser. You’ll still be confronted with a full table of opponents, but there’s a different reason for loosening up: the size of the blinds is getting very big compared to that of future bets. This situation alone calls for loose play.

This is the coin-toss stage of the game. People will lower their starting and showdown hand requirements, even though they’ll be confronted with the same mathematical odds.

If you’re lucky enough to make it to the short-handed and heads-up stages of the game, you need to turn into a maniac. The odds are getting better too this time, the blinds keep increasing, so everything calls for aggressive play.

In short handed and heads-up play, the value of your cards gets a whole new significance: in heads-up play, for instance, 7,2o is no longer the worst hand: 2,3o is.

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Every time you succeed in doing this, you gain value, every time you don’t, you give-up value.

Certainly, you won’t be able to play exactly like that unless you cheat (like some guy did a little while ago in one of the top poker rooms), but you can make it your goal to achieve the next best thing.

Playing mostly positive mathematical expectation situations is what you should go for. What is mathematical expectation?

Let’s see an example. Let’s say I bet you $1 on a coin-flip, against your $1. You do agree that if we were to do this for two weeks without stopping, at the end of it we’d both still have our $1, without having gained or lost anything, right?

That’s because the mathematical expectation on the above named bet is 0. The coin-flip itself, (the object of the bet) is a 50-50 event, and so are the sums involved in the bet. If we were to play it differently though, like I would bet $1 on the coin-flip against your $2, the situation would be different.

The bet is still a 50-50 one, but you’d be laying the odds, and that would be reflected in the mathematical expectation. Out of every two bets, (on average, of course) I’d win one and lose one. When I win, I’d take $2 from you, when I lose, I’d give you $1. There’s a difference of $1 there which is my profit on every pair of bets we make.

That makes for a $0.5 mathematical expectation per bet for me. This way, depending on how many flips we play per hour, I’d be able to relieve you of a lot of money in a relatively short period of time.

The more such bets we play per hour, the better my hourly rate (another fundamental poker concept) will be. You’d be playing with negative expected value, which is exactly what happens when you play roulette, slots, blackjack and other casino games.

This is why poker is not gambling, but much more of a skill-game. In the long-run, only the EV+ matters (that’s what casinos make their money on too) and exploiting EV+ is a matter of skill, not luck.

To put it another way: whenever you play negative EV situations, you lose a little. Whenever you play positive EV ones, you win a little, regardless of whether you win or lose on any particular hand. This way, sometimes you lose even when you win and vice-versa.

In order to give yourself the chance to let the EV+ work for you, you need first hand knowledge of another thing:  Poker Bankroll Management.

While this has little to do with how you play your poker hands (rakeback has little to do with it too, yet it’s a giant edge regardless), it has everything to do with your becoming a long term winner.

A proper bankroll will buy enough time for your positive mathematical expectation to produce visible results. There is variance in poker, and sometimes you may bust out even while playing only EV+. The bankroll is your safety cushion against this sort of situations. It will tide you through the variance, and let your edges work for you.
As you can see, some of the most important elements of poker strategy are not even directly related to play. There are countless edges that you can exploit even before you take a seat at the table. Table selection is one such edge, and so is poker rakeback.

They’ll both boost your game, so you simply cannot afford to leave them unexploited. You do understand now that winning poker is not at all as glamorous as you first believed, don’t you?

It’s a lot like a job: putting in the hours, staying disciplined enough to act on EV+ only (or most of the time), and perfecting your edges in order to increase your hourly rate. This is what it all comes down to.

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The reason is that if you get into a pot with someone you have no read on, and you are holding a marginal hand such as top pair no kicker, it is tough to decide what to do.

Too many times you will see people sit down in a game, post the BB without waiting, and get involved in a pot they never should have played to begin with. This is a good way to go broke.

Instead, when you sit down, wait for the BB, and watch what the players at the table are doing. Don’t worry about having to play right away. Let them expose their weaknesses to you through observing them.

Then you can take advantage of them when you do start playing.

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The Cake Poker Sunday Night Tournaments always have an incredible overlay.  I played the one this Sunday for a $100+10 buy-in (satellites available), with a $75,000 Guaranteed Prize Pool.

There are others, but this one is my favorite because the amount of OVERLAY the Cake Poker tournament provides.

You start with 3000 chips, and there are usually 700-800 entrants.  Almost every single time I have played this, about half the field has been eliminated by the first break.

All you have to do is sit tight and wait for a chance to double up.  there WILL be a chance.  The players on Cake Poker are some of the worst on the internet.  Play tight, and solid in the first hour and you will be able to succeed fairly easily.

Next time…the middle game.

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The new membership Royal Flush Club site opens it’s doors on Feb 14th, and the membership is filling up fast.

The information on strategy, and videos are second to none when it comes to learning and seeing the strategies of professional poker players in action.

They also offer one-to-one coaching and mentoring for those players looking to take their games to the semi-professional or professional levels.

Brett “Gank” Jungblut (who happens to own a WSOP Bracelet) is just one of the many resident pros spilling their guts with all the devious little secret tips and strategies that they use every day to dominate that games they play in.

There is no substitute for the Poker education you can get from professional players. They have been through the mistakes, the leaks, the bad beats–And they overcame them.

…And the fact that they are offering all of their wisdom and secrets makes for a +EV proposition for you, the player.

So go check out the site, and sign up:

Royal Flush Club

It’s well worth checking out. Your bankroll will definitely thank you for it.

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The most popular ring games online are by far the 6-max NL Hold’em Cash Games.  For this reason, they seem to be filled with inexperienced players who have no business playing in them due to their ignorance of the differences between 6-max and full ring game play.

This is great for players who DO know proper strategy for shorthanded games, because it allows them to fully take advantage of inexperienced players’ mistakes, and profit from it.

Many players sit in the 6-max games for the wrong reasons some of which are:

• They are playing on a short bankroll (This is awful because the swings can be bigger and faster in shorthanded games due to the marginal situations a player is often faced with)
• They want to play more hands (You have to play more hands in these games or else you won’t get action when you do get a hand, but playing shorthanded and playing more hands because you are not patient enough to wait for good hands in a full ring game, is a recipe for disaster)

The reality is that shorthanded cash games require a certain set of skills in order to be successful, which usually includes being able to play a LAG (loose-aggressive game) at some point in your sessions, so that you are able to get big hands paid off when you do get them.

Don’t just jump into 6-max without reading and learning about how to adjust to it.  Do your homework, and it will pay off when your bankroll starts consistently growing.

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Playing at higher stakes than you are used to can be exciting; it will certainly generate more rake and rakeback, but it can also be dangerous. The rewards are greater, but so is the possibility that your bankroll will be completely wiped out. If this happens, you may be completely out of action or find yourself in a game much lower than you are used to, where it may be difficult for you to focus and play well.

Setting Yourself up for High Stakes Poker

Small Steps

You don’t want to automatically jump from playing free texas holdem to $2/$4 limit, or from $2/$4 limit to a $15/$30 no-limit game, no matter how badly you are beating the first game. Whether you play limit, no-limit or pot-limit, you should start at the lowest level where the money is still meaningful and work yourself up incrementally, from $1/$2 to $2/$4 to $3/$6 and so on.

Bankroll

You must be sure that you have a bankroll that supports the new game. If you don’t, you probably haven’t been beating your current level consistently enough to be ready to move up. Having a bankroll for the new game doesn’t mean you’ll have enough money to play ten hands unless you get lucky. It means you have enough money to withstand even an extended streak of bad luck. Ideally, a winning player will be able to put at least 50 to 100 times the big blind in play during a session to be safe from the short-term luck swings.

Assessment

Before you move up in limits, you need to make an honest assessment of how well you are playing at your current level. You really need to be consistently beating your current game to move up. Having a couple of good weeks and then chalking up subsequent losing sessions to being “off your game” or “getting unlucky” is not sufficient. Ideally, you should keep accurate records of every session so you have it down on paper just how well you are doing over the course of several months.

The Consequences of Moving Up in Poker Stakes

Even if you are consistently beating your current game, you may not be ready for the next limit, either because your bankroll is not yet big enough to sustain the larger bets or because there is a quantum leap between the limit you have reached successfully and the next limit. If the new game is beating you, don’t be afraid to move back down until you are ready. The higher stakes game will always be there when you are prepared for it, and if you persist at a game you can’t win, you may end up having to start all over from scratch.

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Having knowledge of this fact can help you understand that people are also raising your blinds with weak hands in an effort to survive, and build their stacks.

Don’t be afraid to re-raise someone you think is making a steal-raise. There are a few things to consider when deciding to make a Re-steal raise.

• How often has the raiser been raising pre-flop?
• Is the player a very loose player who would call with a wide variety of hands?
• How is your chip position?  Will a failed re-steal leave you short-stacked?
• What position at the table is your opponent in relative to the button? (Many players will raise A LOT of hands in Late Position and on the button)
• Does the raiser frequently raise when the action is folded to them?
• Is your hand easily dominated if you do get called?

These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself when deciding whether to make a re-steal.  It seems like a high-risk play, but if you know your opponents, it can be a good way to pick up some chips in the middle to late rounds of a tournament.

For more on this topic relating  to SNG’s check out our SNG Strategy section.

Big Money Freerolls | Online Poker Strategy

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