Instrumental Pointer

I really hate it when the luck in poker is not running your way. There are some sessions where you can just feel things not going your way, you know you should just walk away and stop playing for a while, but still you stubbornly believe you can make all your money back. This happened to me recently during a session of online poker I was playing. I had lost several hands where I was an overwhelming favorite to win, and my opponents got incredibly lucky each time. I finally decided to myself that I would just stop playing for the day. I decided to play one final hand.

I was dealt pocket sixes so I thought, okay I’ll play this one hand and see if I get lucky. Well, imagine my surprise when the flop came out 6-10-10. I was ecstatic. I was in first position with two other players.

I checked, the second fellow checked, and the third guy made a big raise. I reraised him,and the second guy folded. The third guy went all in, he had about the same sized stack I did. Great, I thought, I’ll win this hand and be even for the day and start again tomorrow.

So I turned over my pocket sixes and he turned over kings. I was an overwhelming favorite. The next card was an ace, no problem. All he could get was a king on the river to beat me, and of course he did. I was crushed, cursing and throwing things around my house. That just goes to show you; when you can feel things not going your way, just get up and leave. Even playing one more hand can be disastrous at the casino online.

We live in modern gambling society where everyone is quick to fire accusations of cheating. We are quick to call the authorities when we see the slightest incongruence, notify the casino if we even suspect or even stop playing when we suspect that there is something slightly off. I would like to propose that we may have actually become a little too sensitive to the issue of cheating. Sometimes I suppose cheating can just be an honest mistake. The trick is to know the difference between well intentioned mistakes and actual instances of cheating so that your poker game stays as accurate as possible.

Let’s look for example at the online poker peak. This is the old school cheating technique where a player just takes a peak at your cards. Normally, this takes place when an inexperienced player does not know how to hold their cards. The players who get caught in this situation often make wild accusations of cheating against the person who saw their cards. Let’s have a little bit of perspective here. If you hold your cards incorrectly, and someone accidently gets a peak, whose fault is that? There are instances when the online poker peak can just be an honest mistake. There is no need to overreact.

Every type of online poker game and tournament requires a unique strategy to make you a winner. You can’t play the same way at all different times. Nowhere is that more true than when it comes to sit and go games. Sit and go tournaments are becoming increasing popular, but you will need to fine hone your strategy to stand out from the crowd.

The best way to get the most out of your metaphorical strategy buck is to focus on the beginning of the online poker tournament. At this stage the blinds are low and people are most likely to make foolish mistakes as they adjust to new surroundings. There is a very popular school of thought that says you play aggressively at this point. The argument is that the blinds are very small at this stage, so you have little to lose by going all the way to the showdown every time. This aggressive school of thought is very popular among new players and online players.

The problem with playing aggressively in the beginning of a sit and go tournament is that all those small blinds add up. You can find yourself out of money very quickly with this strategy. It’s better to loosen up a bit if you want to win playing poker online.

The concept of having a tell online may seem silly to some people, but there are timing or bet size tells that can give away your poker holdings. These tells have much more bearing in heads up play than they do in ring games. However, statistical tracking software acts as a tell detector in online ring games, so this is also a factor to be aware of. Good poker players are experts at detecting betting patterns. In online play, there is much less sensory information available, so players must focus on things like bet sizes, frequencies, and timing of bets placed to determine what a player may hold. Referencing this information with the possible hand ranges and the board texture allows the player to decide whether or not they hold the best hand relative to their opponent, or if their opponent’s hand is weak enough to fold to a bluff-raise. By mixing up your timing of how quickly you bet, or consistently taking the same amount of time on every decision, you give your opponent a harder time getting a read. Also, by varying your bet sizes and over betting and under betting in strange ways, you confuse your opponent’s read. Be careful not to be too tricky, however, and outsmart yourself. Many online ring game poker players use stat trackers, and they use a database of hands played by each opponent they have history with to allow them to make decisions based on previous actions of the opponent. These trackers display various pertinent statistics such as pre flop raise percentage, continuation bet percentage and volume put into the pot. These are barometers allowing the player to assess how strong or weak a particular player is, and what his tendencies are in a given situation. When playing many tables, this is a simple way to assimilate a complex read with very little sensory information to allow a quick and simple logic-based conclusion to be reached in each hand. This is not so much an online tell as it is a means of competitive intelligence that you should be aware of your opponents possessing. The empirical lesson to take away from this is that you should always do research on what your opponents know about you before you sit down to play them. If you play online for significant enough stakes, they likely have information on you, and you can perceive this as an initial edge they have on you. Work to even the playing field in this respect and you will be successful in online poker.