Transferring Your Playing Skills From Social Poker To Online Poker
Key points you need to know to transfer your offline poker playing skills to achieve online poker success
Here’s some genuine encouragement for all of you social poker players out there who are beginning to think about taking your skills online. Having done a thorough sweep through all of the big name branded poker sites we can say in the main the standard of poker on display is at best ordinary and in the main bordering on lousy. If you are a halfway decent player you have an extremely good chance of capitalising on that fact. If you’re not, don’t fool yourself, take a good online tutorial and learn the proper basics of your craft. It’ll pay you back many times over. Here are the simple things to remember at the outset.
RUBBISH & WHEN TO BIN IT If your hole cards are rubbish, do what you always do with rubbish: Throw it away.
FORGET LOW LIMIT BLUFFS Don’t bother bluffing in low limit games because it doesn’t cost people anything much to see you: So they will. Bluffing works best when there’s intestine-twisting amounts of loot at stake, when people really face a bit of wallet damage if they call you. It doesn’t work at low limits.
WHEN TO INVEST If you’re holding a potential premium hand invest in it and make sure you raise as much as you think the opposition are likely to call. When your premium hand is up against psychos with big stacks infront of them, you simply check and if they raise, you attack and go all-in.
NO MORE MR. MACHO Remember at all times not to be Mr. Macho. Poker is not kick-boxing. Don’t go up against people just because you don’t like their attitude in the chat-box. Only go after them if you can crush them.
TOURNAMENTS ARE DIFFERENT It’s never a good idea to throw good chips after a middling hand. Keeping to this discipline is even more necessary during the early stages of tournament play where the whole strategy has to be to stay in the contest by keeping your stack.
WATCH YOUR TELLS Try to take roughly the same amount of time to make action decisions to prevent opposing players from getting a fix on your hands. Take the same amount of time to check as you do to re-raise. It messes with other peoples’ heads. You’re not a book, don’t let people read you.
LOOK FOR LOOSE PLAY Think like a shark. Search out tables where there’s loose play. Be a railbird and just study other people at play for a while. Choose the right table at the right time and enter it at the right position in relation to the “button” where and when this is possible. Generals don’t look for equal armies to fight. They want the high ground, the best weapons and a weak flank to attack. So do you. Poker isn’t about macho battles between equals. It’s about picking your own killing fields and executing what you’ve learned along with your opposition.
PROPER DISCIPLINE Proper discipline is all of the above as well as being able to fold the pair of bullets you were dealt as hole cards when the board is screaming at you that there’s a flush or straight out there. No point getting attached to your top pair and a low supporting pair if it’s as clear as crystal it’s going to cost you the pot. Real discipline is perhaps best defined as knowing when to fold a perfectly respectable hand. Professionals do that all the time.
OUR FINAL TIP Never play poker for serious money if you’ve been drinking heavily. You will think you’re Matt Damon or Ed Norton in “Rounders” but you won’t be: You’ll be Tweetie Pie in Cat and Canary about to be served raw on a plate of Whiskers.
If you follow the rough advice given here we can’t promise you’ll win every time but you’ll win more than you lose and that’s good poker.
