The 1st skill: Mathematics

It is the basic of any card game. The poker players must know the statistics and game probabilities. To know how to calculate at any point of the game the odds of winning and is the risk worth the money at stake. To be able to calculate in face of your cards and the other players’ as well as the dealer’s cards what are the chances of making a Poker from a pair. When to fold and when to hit based on card counting and the statistical probabilities of the player to win. Without that basic knowledge playing with real money is a sure way to lose more then win, unless lady luck is at the player’s side. Engaging in the game without that skill means bad odds of winning.

The 2nd skill: Discipline

Disciple is the character that differentiates the professional player from the luck stalker, the fish player. A well-disciplined poker player looks forward to win where as the fish just hopes for that. The poker player plans his tactics in a fashion that help him win the game. He calculates the odds of win and lose at every step of the way and hits or runs based on his chances to win and the size of the pot ahead of him.
Discipline means to be at check at any point in the game. To know when to get up and leave the game’s table. To master a preflop strategy that helps him play any good hand to a success. With discipline a player can keep his tells at bay and even if he made a bad judgment call he will not lose control over his emotions. He will learn from that mistake so it will never repeat itself.

The 3rd skill: Psychology.

While playing poker there is one skill that can bring about the success of the game and that is psychology. Every professional poker player plays the game with some questions on his mind when his guessed answer is the leader of his play. What cards do the other players have? What are they thinking I have? And what are the others thinking that I think they have. It might sound somewhat confusing, and it is in a way. If everybody knew the answers to those questions there was no point in playing the game. Any good poker player will try to shift what the other players think of his cards, to bluff, so that he can manipulate them to make steps that would be in his favor. Creating a false tell that throws your opponents off when you have a really good hand is an important trick. Psychology is a great tool that can bring about the big bucks in a no limit game.

The 4th skill: Understanding Risk vs. Reward

It is not less important for a good poker player to understand and analyze at any point the risk-reward factors. It is not enough to win a game. The games won must bring enough cash to cover for the lost hands. The one’s lost with an intentions and one’s lost because of an error. Taking into account not only the money at hand at a game but also with respect to the overall bankroll. No point in dwelling for each buck lost but each wager made must be with a careful calculation of risk and reward. No point in wagering big sums of money over a small pot with a low chance winning hand. At any point the percent of winning losing needs to be taken into account. Good poker players play their hands in a manner that leaves them enough money to pay for their livelihood as well as for the next gaming day.

No matter how high the blinds are you always want to be sure that you are bankrolled properly. In this case 20 buy-ins will suffice. That means you will need a bankroll of $1000 in order to play comfortably. Playing with scared money is a very bad idea and will not allow you to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves as the play at your table proceeds. Assuming that we are playing cash games and not tournament poker you will need to tighten up a bit. Hands like suited connectors and small pocket pairs from early position are hands that you should muck in early position.

Why?

Because you are playing at extremely low stakes and there will be a number of factors that make folding speculative hands in early position the correct play. One of the main reasons is because players at this level will sometimes play a draw for their entire buy-in especially if the buy-in is capped. Second, pre-flop all in raises and re-raises still take place in these kind of tournaments and you, being the intelligent player that you are, are not going to call these kinds of raises with middle pairs even if you do know the raiser is holding Ace King. Lastly, cash games are about patience. There are no blinds crashing down on you like they are in poker tournaments.

The bottom line is that playing in cash games is about being the best player you can be over the long run. Giving up small pot after small pot setting up the play for a big pot is what cash game poker is all about. Online poker play tends to be hyper-aggressive and players will push all their chips in the middle in attempts to protect their hands. You need to make note of these kinds of players because they are the ones that will pay off your Set of Threes when the board has a flush draw on it and they are holding a high pocket pair.

By now you should be getting an idea of where your mindset should be. Playing cash games is all about maximizing the value of your hand versus tournament poker where you are constantly trying to protect your hands to the death to avoid being knocked out of the tournament.

Let’s take a look at a couple of online situations I found myself in recently in a $2 / $1 tournament:

Hero has $175 [A][A] on the button
Villain has $100 [Ks][Qs] in the small blind

The action folds around to the button and our hero make it $8 to go and the SB calls.

The Flop comes down [2s][6c][Kd]

SB bets $10 and the Hero smooth calls. The Turn is the [9s]

SB makes it $25 to go.

(At this point I am confident that I am not up against a Set or Two Pair. However, I am and should be concerned about a flush draw hitting the board and I act accordingly)

Hero makes it $100 and puts the SB All-In. The Small Blind calls and has a number of outs. The River is a [Qd] and the SB scoops the pot.

Should I have played the hand differently? Absolutely not! You played the hand for value and after the turn there was no way to protect your hand as your opponent was pot committed. However, this is exactly what you wanted in that you got all the chips in the middle with the best hand. However, when the Queen hit the board on the Turn it gave him additional outs and made you just a little more than a 3 to 2 favorite in the hand. Although we would love to have better numbers than that going into the River we are still ahead in the hand. Obviously, the River was an extremely bad card for the Hero and we lost the pot. It happens and you have to be prepared for these kinds of things.

The fact that our Hero was on the button didn’t help matters as King Queen was certainly a strong enough hand to call with and it is likely he put you on a steal. On the other hand you are much more likely to win this hand the majority of the time simply because of the strength of your hand and the likeliness of your opponent folding. You could also make an argument for minimum raising in that spot as well but you have to ask yourself this question, “Am I good enough to fold if I face a large raise from either of the blinds?”

Yes, even at the micro-stakes you are going to be faced with difficult decisions that will severely affect your bankroll one way or the other. For a new player to lose one or two-hundred dollars can be devastating but if played well and the cards break even you can dominate and win consistently while earning your stripes and building your bankroll. That is what micro-stakes poker is all about, building your bankroll to play higher stakes.

Curtis Mayfield III

Observing the Game in Action

Keeping a close eye on all the cards as well as the size of the pot is a very important part of playing poker and takes a conscious effort to do. The goal when observing the cards is to determine the odds that the card or cards that you need will come up as well as the likelihood that the cards needed by other players have either come up already or will come up. Plainly this is more important in some games than others, for example it is considerably more important in stud poker where there are no community cards and a number of each player’s cards are visible on the board. You also have to keep track of those cards that have already been removed from play by way of players folding.

A lot of this tracking and calculating is not necessary when playing online poker because most online poker rooms provide tools that do it all for you. While this can certainly be helpful and makes it much easier for people playing online it also means that their playing skills will probably not transfer from an online poker room to a live game very well simply because the player will not have developed the skills needed to make useful calculation without the help of the computer. If you ever intend to play in live games, it is probably worth the effort to start building up your observational skills long before you ever sit down at a live table regardless of how well you may fair online.

Observing the Other Players

Remember that in poker you are playing against the other players at the table as opposed to the house, so the more information, patterns, and habits you can detect by observing the other players the better the likelihood that you will be able to use this information to your advantage in the game. An experienced observer should be able to detect what style of player they are up against, meaning whether they are cautious and conservative (tight) or wild and risky (loose), as well as their basic skill levels. Understanding this information about the other players gives you a good idea of how they will likely respond to any given move allowing you to manipulate them into making mistakes you can benefit from.

Your ability to observe the other players is significantly curtailed when playing poker online since you cannot actually see the people directly. This means there is virtually no chance of identifying “tells” or physical clues about what the other players are doing. Nevertheless, you can still determine their style of play and their skill level easily enough. Many online poker rooms have installed featured which track a lot of this information for you and provide it in a statistical format, however you should keep in mind that this information can be faked so you should rely more on the play you actually observe than on the statistical information provided.

The games were soft and easy even when I started playing in around 2000-2001. In fact the games were so easy to beat that I turned full-time pro in 2002 and stayed that way until about 2006. A good solid technical game is still important of course but you really need to start table selecting with greater efficiency now. This even applies at the lower levels as these are where the grinders live.

There is a great compression of skill these days as the low level pro’s use table selection software and poker buddy tools to find weak players and profitable tables. You may have wondered why some waiting lists have much longer queue’s than others. Well quite often this is because these players have been using table finding software and if players are taking the time to do this then this tends to be an indication of a decent player.

Weak players simply will not take the time or make the effort to do such things. If you see a poker table with eight people on the waiting list, should you put your name down? Well if these players have put their names down to find a few fish then what chances have you got of finding fish by the time that you get onto that table?

One of two things will have likely happened, either the fish have lost their money and left the table or they will have amassed some winnings and left simply because they don’t want to give it back. Either way the table dynamic will simply not be the same by the time that you get there.

So what options do you have? Well firstly you could go down the route of getting these items of software yourself. This is always useful as information is power as they say. But there is a problem with this in that you may then end up hunting the same tables as everyone else. If you desire to make money in any form of gambling then you are going to have to do something different to what the masses are doing….within reason of course.

One tactic that I have often used is to open a new table. Now before you reel back in horror at the thought of playing heads up or short handed poker then consider this. Weak players don’t like to put their names down on long waiting lists! They logged on to do one thing and one thing only….play poker! They didn’t log on to sit waiting for thirty minutes.

This means that they want to play poker in the shortest time frame possible and if that means sitting at a table with only two other players then they will do this or at least some of them will. What I am trying to advise you to do here is to try and think differently to the masses and thinking differently means doing different things. If you can put yourself into the mind of a weak player and then do what they do then you may just find more of them.

This article was produced by Carl “The Dean” Sampson

Online Tell No1 : Timing

Note the time taken by your opponent to raise or call you. If your opponent intentionally waits and raises you after some time, it means that your opponent is holding a good hand and is merely trying to drag you into playing. If your opponent waits and calls, it means that he or she most probably has weak hands. So, look out for the pauses!

Online Poker Tell No2 : Chatting

Just as in real play, where you can tell a lot by studying the way your opponents talk, you can find out a lot about other players by the way they chat in the online poker room. As most poker websites have chat boxes, you can study the direction of the game by watching the chat of your fellow players. A general rule is most players who hold good hands will lure you into calling. Don’t fall for it. Decipher the undertones of confidence or nervousness in the chat. Watch the chat…is the second common mantra to spotting a ‘tell.’

Online Tell No3 : Action Buttons

Almost all online poker websites have action buttons. These action buttons help players to reveal their intentions on calling or raising much before the round gets to them. There are only two times that a player will use the action button; to raise if the player is holding a good hand or to call in case of a weak hand. Generally, players do not use the action button on a bluff. So act according to the way your opponents use the action button.

There are plenty more casino games and tells that you can spot, but the above three methods should put you on the right track. Concentration and good observation skills can only make you get better in your online poker skills, and as time goes by, your wisdom will increase with experience. Until such time you reach the top spot in online poker play, or even beyond that, just keep looking for the ‘tells.’

When you learn poker, one of the first things you should figure out is how to play the bubble. The first poker game you’re going to play is often going to be a tournament, not a cash game. Anyone that jumps straight into a cash game is asking for trouble. With a tournament, your risk is often small with a large reward. You can also develop a poker strategy when you play in tournaments.

Let’s get back to playing the bubble. There are two ways to go about this, and it will depend on your goal. If you’re looking to just come in the money, as in 3rd place would make you happy, you can often fold your way in. At this point in the tournament, players will be folding and going all-in a lot. You can often wait for someone else to bust. Once you’re in the money, you can attack.

On the other hand, if you want to come in first place, you need to attack the large blinds. When you’re in this situation, you must remember that any two cards can win. This attitude will allow you to be more aggressive, which will most likely earn you more chips. You must keep in mind that the three other players are going to be cautious unless they have a monster. That being the case, the key is to play position. If they’re aggressive early, get out of the way. If they’re timid early and you’re in late position, attack. Not only will this approach most likely earn you more chips and put you in the running for first place, but it will improve your table image, which will be enormously beneficial for future games.

In conclusion, when you’re on the bubble and you want first, attack. All-in should be common. Keep in mind that other players will respect your moves because of your bubble position in the tournament.

In a cash game, let’s say you are playing a $1 - $2 table and you raise in late position with the standard four times the big blind bet and get one caller. The pot is now $19. The flop comes down giving you top pair and top kicker. How much do you bet? The first thing you must do is understand why you are betting. Do you want everyone to fold? Is it a value bet? With top pair top kicker you like the hand but it is not strong enough to build a huge pot. In cash games players will usually not get too involved unless they can beat top pair top kicker. You make a continuation bet of $10, just over half the pot. Why $10 and not $19 or more? A pot sized bet builds the pot too quickly in relation to the strength of your hand if you are called. You are likely to get a fold with half the pot bet and if you do not your bets on future streets will be cheaper. When trying to get a fold from your opponents, you want to invest the smallest amount possible to achieve that goal.

Opponents often fall into a certain pattern of bet sizing. With a draw they often bet only a small amount of the pot, usually half. They are saying to you “I do not have a great hand but if you call and I miss my draw I will not be losing too much”. Quality opponents are not afraid to make a semi-bluff re-raise if they feel an opponent may fold their hand. Sometimes players bet the pot everytime they have a set but only half the pot if they have a hand like a pair of flush draw. This is a tell seen regularly in online poker. The bet sizing always tells a story and if you can work out what that story is you have a real chance to outplay your opponents over and over.

When you are making a bet that you want your opponent to call, this is called a value bet. The size of this bet is critical also. You obviously want to bet the highest amount in this situation that your opponent will call. Let’s say you have a full house against a player in a tournament and his stack is $500,000 going into the river. The pot is $200,000 and you have $700,000 in your stack. What do you bet as a value bet? If you bet the pot this represents a large proportion of his stack so he will probably fold. But if you bet $50,000 this seems to scream “please call me” and represents that you are really strong and he will probably fold here too. The value bet I would select here is between $85,000 and $120,000 which could be interpreted as a steal or value bet. He may call thinking this bet is too standard and you are trying to get him to fold with a middle strength hand.

An advanced strategy is to represent the opposite of your intended action. For example if you want to be called you can bet a large percentage of the pot making it look like a steal. This works if your opponent can make big calls with semi-strong hands. Alternatively if you think you might be beat you can make what looks like a value bet and hope your opponent puts you on a strong hand and folds despite being offered the correct calling odds. You need to know your opponents well to make these plays as a bad player could just call off and make you look silly.

Make working on your bet sizing a major part of your poker study. This is the actual part of the game that makes you money. Learn what each bet size in relation to the pot can mean and use it to maximise the value of your hands. Your bankroll will thank you for it.

You don’t want the bubble to burst on your chances, but you can also use the bubble as unspoken pressure against other players. As the bubble nears, players will tighten up in hopes of protecting their chances. This offers prime blind stealing opportunities.

Short Stacks

Players with short stacks will be looking for a double or triple up opportunity. In their desperation, they will avoid drawing hands, and go all-in on just about any pair; hoping to flop a set.

The All In Offensive

In the early goings of a poker tournament use the all-in bet as an offensive weapon when you have the cards. The maniacs will give you action on your bet, and you can quickly chip up.

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Set a worthwhile goal

When playing in a poker tournament, make sure you have a goal in mind. While we would all love to make winning our goal, this is not realistic. Just cashing is not the best goal in the world either. If you just cash, often you will be playing at a loss. Set a goal that involves making the final table. That is where the real money is.

Have a Plan

Don’t just go in and react to what is going on around you. Have a plan, and try to stick to it. While every plan changes a bit upon contact with the enemy, try to stay to the larger aspects of a quality tournament plan.

Play to win! Don’t play not to lose

If you play in a tournament with the goal of protecting your chip stack, you won’t last very long. Your stack is a weapon that you will use to pressure other players out of their chips.

Identify the Weak Players Early

The early rounds of a poker tournament will offer you your best opportunities to double and triple up your stack. Identify the weak players, and the extremely loose players. These will be the folks whose chips will most easily be separated from them.

Choose Your Drinks Well

Tournaments are marathons, not sprints. This means you will need to keep a clear head for a long period of time. Avoid the alcohol offered by the cocktail waitresses, and be leery of energy drinks. Many of them may give you a jolt of energy, but also bring a debilitating crash later on.

Drive the Action

Over the past few years, we have seen a more aggressive form of poker succeed on the tournament level. Simply being the caller is not a good poker strategy. Be aggressive with your hands.

Bluffs are More Effective Early in the Tournament

Because of an escalating blind structure, bluffs are more effective in the early parts of a tournament. In the later stages the bar for playable hands has been lowered, so bluffs are less effective.

Use the Bubble

You don’t want the bubble to burst on your chances, but you can also use the bubble as unspoken pressure against other players. As the bubble nears, players will tighten up in hopes of protecting their chances. This offers prime blind stealing opportunities.

Short Stacks

Players with short stacks will be looking for a double or triple up opportunity. In their desperation, they will avoid drawing hands, and go all-in on just about any pair; hoping to flop a set.

The All In Offensive

In the early goings of a poker tournament use the all-in bet as an offensive weapon when you have the cards. The maniacs will give you action on your bet, and you can quickly chip up.

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With the persistent interest in this virtual game, many poker casino sites have found that by being generous with the amount of rake that they accumulate from hosting the online games truly does pay off. Poker players that receive larger amounts of rakeback cash will be adamant to return to a particular poker site over and over again. Of course ! why turn down free money ?

Playing on poker sites which offer rakebacks is a great strategy, although its not something you could use to improve your game, it does help minimizing your losses.
Indeed, if you take a list of poker strategies, it could take someone a lot of playing time in order to perfect the different techniques that they may be advised to try.
However, poker rakeback is available to players regardless of their skills, so anyone can take advantage of this “strategy” now.

The Basics Of Rakes

If the word rakeback seems a little odd to you, allow us to explain the concept a little more. Online poker sites accumulates certain percentage of money based off of their player’s winnings. These funds are normally a small percentage of the actual winnings for the game that was previously played. This is one way the poker sites make money, they make money on every hand played basically. This is called Rake.

As any type of business, setting up an online casino require a lot of upfront investment, since casinos are dealing with money there cant be any mistakes and everything needs to be flawless… The rake that the online poker site gets allows them the opportunity to keep their games being persistently played 24/7, since many online poker sites do not ask for funds upon joining, the sites are not making a lot of money on their own and rake is the most common way to make profits.

Therefore, they take a small percentage out of the money that they generate on their website. In a lot of instances winners do not even realize that any money was taken from their winnings.

RakeBacks Help You Get Your Piece Of the Cake

There are special programs that you can sign up for when you engage in online poker games, these programs, commonly referred to as rakeback ( try absolute rakeback , or ultimate bet rakeback for instance) all pay players who have engaged in a game of poker on their site a certain percentage of their profits. Players are paid up to 30% of the rake that was taken in during a game that they played in.

The rakeback that online poker sites offer is making everyone who even takes the time out to play a game to still feel like a winner at the end. Sure its not like you actually won, but at least you lost less money, which allow you to play more and get better

In technical statistical terms, average is a measure of central tendency while variance is a measure of probability. In English, this means that average tells you what tends to happen while variance tells you how likely something is to happen. When determining whether to get involved in a pot in poker, these are both very important concepts.

Average and Variance for Poker Players

When poker players consider their results in terms of average and variance, it may go something like this. A player may decide that their win rate is $5 an hour. This is how much they win on average. However, let’s say Player A and Player B both have an average $5 an hour win rate.

Over his last 10 one hour sessions, Player A’s results have been as follows: Session 1: +$10 Session 2: -$15 Session 3: +$25 Session 4: +5 Session 5: -5 Session 6: -5 Session 7 +10 Session 8 +10 Session 9: +$15 Session 10: +0.

For Player B: 1: +200 2: -$50 3:-$100 4: +$50 5: -$100 6:-$100 7:+$100 8: 0 9: -$150 10: +100.

Breakdown of Average and Variance

Both players have a win rate that averages out to $5, but for Player B, the variance is much higher. He is winning and losing hundreds each session, meaning that even though on average, you can expect either player to be up around $25 after a five-hour session, Player A will usually be up or down around $15, while at any given time Player B could be down hundreds.

Average, Variance and Your Poker Bankroll

What should be clear here is that even if you are a winning player, if you are a high variance player you will need much more money to be successful than if you are a lower variance player. If you don’t have the bankroll to sustain it, a high variance style will be hard to succeed with.

You should also compare the different games. Short-handed no-limit hold’em usually has very high variance, especially if you are the type of player who likes to push your chips around and put pressure on your opponents each and every pot. Sit and Gos, on the other hand, is for most players a game format with low variance. New players should also look for the best bonus, which decreases variance in the beginning of a poker career.

The bottom line is: when you examine your game, don’t just look at the average win rate. In doing so you might go bust although you have a winning strategy in the long haul.