“Try to decide how good your hand is at a given moment. Nothing else matters. Nothing!” Doyle Brunson.

Often times, in the rush of poker, hands begin to meld together in value. When we get aces preflop, raise, get a caller, and flop a raggedy rainbow board, we expect to have the best hand. But, if we bet and our opponent makes a massive raise into us, how good our the aces in this moment? Stopping and realizing board texture, player tendencies, and hand ranges as much as possible during your play will help you to maintain that level of focus needed to understand the strength of your hand at particular moments in the hand. It’s the axiom that makes you protect your best hand on vulnerable boards, instead of allowing a player to peel for free. When we forget about relative strength, we miss opportunities to get value or protect and allow our opponents a chance to steal pots from us. Keep good track of your hand’s value from preflop to river, and you’ll make more accurate decisions throughout the entire hand.

“Sometimes you’ll miss a bet, sure, but it’s OK to miss a bet. Poker is an art form, of course, but sometimes you have to sacrifice art in favor of making a profit.” Mike Caro.

When we’re trying to play at our peak level, we start to see spots that we normally wouldn’t see; places we can extract thin value, preflop squeezes where players are opening light, and so on. Just because you see places where you think you can make a play or gain thin value doesn’t mean you have to take every single one of them.

By pointing your cone of focus at these highly marginal spots, you can detract from the obvious spots of profit; remember, when you’re making these plays, it’s altering your image. So, even though you might be able to make big squeeze plays and bluffs every time you see the spots, if you want to keep a tight image, it may be -EV if the pot isn’t worth very much. Don’t give yourself grief over a single missed bet or failed bluff. Just remember that it’s what you end your game with, in profit or in ranking, that matters in the end, not the hyper-sick-value bet you made with bottom pair.

“Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if the other poker players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in poker, as well as life.” Anthony Holden. (The Big Deal)

Self-perception is something that gets lost in translation at the poker table, especially in the heat of the moment. You lose a pot. Then another. Then you get rags for an hour. Then you get your aces cracked. The table is going to be watching you, trying to see if this run of bad luck is going to tilt you. Being aware of your own emotions, whether it be tilt, euphoria, boredom, and so on, is vital in ensuring you know what your opponents are thinking about your game. If you seem tilty, and your opponents are reacting to you as tilty, if you haven’t realized you’re playing angry poker, you become easily exploitable. If you think your mood or behavior in the game is shifting, make sure to take the time to catch yourself and either adjust it or become aware of it first, so that when the other players start to shift their play against you, you’ll be one step ahead of them.

“Put yourself in their shoes before you decide on the best way to take their shirts.” David Sklansky.

The optimum way to break one player in a hand may be to just attack attack attack. But, poker is not a static game with static players. When approaching each player, whether it’s online or live, understanding that each player is more than a name, a face, and maybe a “tight/loose” label can be a major asset in tailoring your play to that specific player. It’s not just about looseness or tightness. It’s about reactions. If you three bet them a lot,are they the type of player to get frustrated and four bet light? If you check the turn after betting the flop, are they likely to try to steal it from you there?

Every player that plays poker plays the game a certain way. The more accurate you can characterize their play, the more likely you can optimize your profitability against them. Online, note-taking is a vastly underrated tool for finding quirks in your opponents game that you can access with the click of a mouse. The button just 6 bet all-in with K5h? That seems like something to take a note of. Live, you may not have a notepad and pen on you at all times, but you can still do more than labeling a player with simple catch-all’s like loose or passive.

Look for tells, patterns, and styles that each player employs. Keep a mental note of tendencies that you can exploit; limping with marginal hands, always continuation betting, and look at your players from their shoes, as well. If you’ve opened preflop five out of the last six hands, whether or not you’ve had hands, if you haven’t shown any of them, your opponent will very likely think, “Wow, this guys a lunatic.” Perception is reality, even at the poker table, so use it!

“You cannot survive without that intangible quality we call heart.” Bobby Baldwin.

We can read all the books in the world on the game. Participate in forums every day. Play 16 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the rest of our lives. Do literally everything to absorb the game we love into our bloodstream. Even with all this work, all this study about proper play and right and wrong, the beautiful thing about poker is the blurring of those lines, “right and wrong” into something so majestic, we can barely comprehend it. Knowing when to five-bet bluff all-in preflop with five high, not because the book says it’s right or the guy has been hammering you all night, but just because you feel it’s the right play. Instinct, as trivial and bad as it may seem to rely upon, can sometimes be your saving grace at the poker table.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been sitting in a hand with a monster and just suddenly found myself sliding it in the muck, just because that sense picks up on something awry in the air. I’ve called 100 BB bets on the river with king high; snap-called them, and been completely, utterly right. Now, of course, I’ve also called those river bets with bottom pair and been shown top set, but, in my career, my instinct has led me to profit far more often than it has ruin. Learn to harness your instinct and utilize it when the time merits it, and you’ll find yourself reaching levels you didn’t know existed.

BONUS! “Poker is a lot like sex, everyone thinks they are the best, but most don’t have a clue what they are doing.” Dutch Boyd.

So true.

Let’s take a look at a normal bankroll and the possible ways we can utilize it. Our starting capital in this example will be $1,000. We like to play heads up, so we generally play online heads up, at the $25 tables, and we’ll play until we either bust or double up. Given this “win or lose” mentality about our play, we see that, in our roll, we have 20 buy-in’s to the given stakes before we will be completely busted, if we continue to play and lose at those stakes for a set period of time. The question is, from the point that we begin the bankroll, ($1,000) what is our risk of going broke if we play 20 tournaments? Very simply, we need to look at the odds of cashing (in this case, winning) or losing.

Anatomy of a Bankroll

We’ll assume, to begin our look into this subject, that you’re an equally adept player compared to your opponent. So, we’ll give the probability of winning .5, and losing .5. If we run the scenario 20 times, assuming we have to lose all 20 times to be “ruined” and go broke, the odds of ruin are 1/2^20, or 1/1048576. This is an incredibly low number, in case you’re wondering, so even with a simple 20 buy-in bankroll, you can put in 20 sessions over the course of a month and not put your bankroll completely at risk. These seems like simple logic, but many players allow themselves to bend this rule. Let’s say that, with this bankroll of $1,000, you see a juicy game at the $500 stakes with a guy you’ve played with before; and beaten significantly. You assume that, if the two of you play heads up and play until one or the other goes broke, you’ll end up the victor 60% of the time instead of your normal 50%. The question is, does the increased odds of winning this heads up match make it worth risking our entire bankroll in one shot? It depends on a few factors, but let’s look at the simple math. We take our 60% shot and run it 2 times, giving us a 16% chance of going broke if we play the match twice.

Now, if this 60% equity situation had arose in say, a $100 game instead of a $500 game, our risk of ruin would be a lot more acceptable to take a shot than the 16% chance of going broke at the $500 game. That’s thing about busting your bankroll; you can’t go negative in a bankroll unless you have backing or another source of income. When relying on your roll as a source of income, you cannot afford situations that allow you to go broke unless you absolutely have to.

Ruin In Action

An example of bad risk of ruin management is Jean Robert-Bellande, a player I give a lot of respect to as a risk taker, but as a bankroll manager, I have to say, he takes some of the wildest shots I’ve ever seen a poker player take in my lifetime. With a 15k bankroll, he sat in a 400-800 limit (with straddle mandatory) 2-7 triple draw, badugi, and badeucy game. He had less than 20 big bets for the game, yet because he felt he had an edge in the badugi and badeucy sections of the game, he put his bankroll on the line against players that had no problem playing that game with an expecting swing of 100k. Even if his expected edge in the game gave him a 70% chance of doubling his initial buy-in, because of how short he came in to begin with, two bad orbits could break a bankroll that has the potential to keep him playing for a lifetime.

Self-sustainability is a vital asset for your bankroll, and finding that point that you can afford 100 buy-ins for your chosen tournament buy-in, or 50 buy-ins for your chosen cash game, will allow you to play your best game, with the highest possibility of profit, without risking more than 1-2% of your bankroll at any given time. When you do want to take a shot, you can do so at a level that doesn’t risk a large portion of your bankroll (no more than 5-10%) and allows you to try to make a score that moves you up in stakes ($10 to $25 tournaments, or .5/1 to 1/2 NLHE) without forcing you to step down or quit completely if the shot doesn’t go well.

Keeping in mind the potential for ruin when you step up in stakes and the odds of going broke when you do increase your stake seems like a common sense topic. But, so many amateur players make the transition to a poker professional without grasping the concept of ruin, and before long, they take a big shot and find themselves busted and grasping for straws. Stay aware of your ruin potential, and you’ll never have to worry about finding yourself busted and out of the game.

Session motivation is a massive force that resonates throughout every aspect of the session that follows. It defines your attitude, shapes the plays you are and aren’t willing to make (and also when you’re willing to make them), helps to set your tolerance for suck outs, your ability to stay calm in tough spots – in fact, there isn’t a single element of a poker session that isn’t touched by the motivation behind that session.

The majority of players who are nodding their heads at the above, however, aren’t likely to give their motivation a second thought when they sit down to play poker. This is problematic for players because, simply, there are great reasons for wanting to play poker, and there are terrible ones. Most self-observant players know that the sessions that start for terrible reasons are essentially DOA – unless you run like Cada, things aren’t going to work out well.

Five Terrible Reasons to Play Poker

The following five mistakes are listed, roughly, in order of their terribleness (from least to worst). It’s also worth noting that many of the below can (and often do) play a partial role in your motivation to play poker, and that’s fine – it’s only when they start to become the dominant reason you play that problems arise.

Playing Poker for Revenge
I’m a little ambivalent about this one. For some people, revenge is an excellent motivator – it gets them paying attention, thinking creatively, and really engages them presently in the game. Others, however, allow revenge to distort their game, resulting in a really myopic focus that prefers all information and situations that allow them to tangle with the target of their revenge, an approach that observant opponents will notice and exploit quickly.

On balance, poker playing motivated by revenge is going to be -EV. Playing poker well means placing the highest value on – actually, placing value exclusively on – winning chips. Revenge will often tempt you to make decisions where the value isn’t in winning chips, but rather in embarrassing your opponent, bolstering your own ego, threatening their stack specifically, and so on. Those decisions may sometimes result in you playing optimal poker – they’re not mutually exclusive – but since they’re not decisions driven exclusively by maximizing your profit, they’re (drumroll) … not always going to result in your maximizing your profit.

Playing Poker to Cure Boredom
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and they also do a pretty good number on otherwise healthy bankrolls. While it may share several characteristics with its arcade brethren, online poker is not a video game. It should not be, as a matter of habit, something you do to pass or kill the time.

Boredom is usually born of a certain mental sluggishness. The reason you’re bored in the first place is because you can’t think of anything to do. You’re not always like that (probably not, anyhow) – you can probably look back over the last few months and identify several times that you came up with something to do. The difference between then and now? Now you’re lazy, uninspired, mentally dull and physically lethargic (all to varying degrees).

Sounds like an excellent time to make precise, demanding decisions for large sums of money!

If you like to blow off a break in your work or a couple dozen hands on the sofa when you’re waiting for a show to start, no big deal. Just be aware that making a habit out of starting sessions when you’re at both a mental and physical low point is a pretty sure path to earning less money than you’re capable of.

Playing Poker To Impress Others
Let’s keep up the aphorism trend: Pride goeth before a fall. People who play poker know that some sessions are awesome, activity-laden, action-raging experiences, some are simply catatonic, and most are in-between.

However, when you’re playing poker to impress your friends (whether they be real or virtual), you’re going to feel some pressure to ramp up the highlight-maker. People don’t watch poker to see a lot of folding – that’s why the WPT just shows the final table – and they’re either expecting you to bust out some nifty tricks or you’re expecting them to be expecting you to. Either way, you run into value-creep again – you’re now making decisions based on a value derived from other people’s approval, instead of swearing full and deserved allegiance to the one thing that matters when you play poker – making the most possible money in a given situation.

Exacerbating the situation is that fancy plays tend to be expensive – sometimes very expensive. A buy in is a pretty tough thing to win, and all it takes is one super-bluff or hero call you never would have made in a normal session to blow one off. It’s just not worth wasting hours of work to prove to others how good you are (which attempting to do will generally ensure failure to achieve said goal anyhow).

Avoid situations where you’re asked to put on a show, or – at the very least – temper people’s expectations upfront.

It wasn’t long after I sat down that I found myself in a tough spot. I had a hard 15 and the dealer was showing a 6. Though I didn’t care what the dealer’s up card was, I did know that hitting a hard 15 meant that I was likely going to be watching my dollar bet sliding into the dealer’s tray. A couple seats next to me was Paul Burke, our junior catcher and one of the team captains. He was a great player who would later go on to sign a professional contract with the Atlanta Braves and a person that all the freshmen looked up to. When Paul noticed my hesitation, he said, “Yelly- you have to expect that the dealer has a 10 for his down card, since there are more 10-valued cards than anything else in the deck.” His basic credibility combined with some quick common sense told me that he was right. After thinking for a few seconds I decided to do something that I would never have done before- stand on 15 so that the dealer would bust. To make a long story short, the dealer did just that, I felt like a genius, and thus began what would surely become a very profitable career as a professional blackjack player. Of course, this would have been lovely, except for the fact that it never happened. Intermittently over the next 5 years, my little bit of “helpful” knowledge was enough to get me to keep going back for more at our local riverboat casino and bled me to the tune of about $80 a session, which was my average daily take as a waiter at Applebee’s. How strange, I thought. Why don’t I ever win when I am as good as I am?

In the stores of every casino lobby, for $1.99 you can purchase a small card that contains the correct basic strategy for blackjack. Ask yourself why a casino would sell such a useful item at such a low cost. Surely the players would play worse without it, leading to a greater short-term profit for the casino, but is allowing them to do this better than earning their long-term business? Does this card actually accomplish anything? Yes. It allows the owner to feel that he is smarter than his fellow tablemates, even though he is certainly not going to follow the instructions on the card 100% of the time (he’s psychic, too- don’t forget that). This concept is not lost on the casino. They understand full well the value of making that player comfortable within the game while still possessing an unbeatable, albeit smaller edge. They would rather keep the golden goose alive and hatching than to slaughter it for its meat.

But what about the complete novice poker player? Is he any different? Does offering this player (read: potential customer) a bit of sound advice or perhaps recommending a good book really hurt your bottomline? Should we really take the fly-by-night mortgage broker approach and punish them as harshly as possible on the first confrontation for merely being ignorant? Much as getting a hot stock tip hardly makes you a solid day trader, no green poker player has ever immediately started crushing the games after being taught that 92o sucks. Though Paul had no idea what he was doing when he gave me my first good tip about blackjack, he was definitely on to something…

Clearly, helping the semi-competent player who regularly wins the annual perfect attendance award at your local cardroom hardly makes any sense, but creating a long-term customer out of the curious gentleman who strayed a little too far from his regular craps game is sheer brilliance. Though his motivations for wandering into the unknown might not be entirely clear, two things are for certain: he wants to enjoy himself and he doesn’t want to look like a complete fool. Obviously, berating this man’s bad play is such a horrendous breach of good business policy that it warrants no further discussion. Likewise, being courteous and sportsmanlike should be so obvious that it also need not be mentioned further as well. But how about the heretical example of offering up a quick tip about something as remedial as pot odds or schooling him about the long odds of drawing to an inside straight and ask yourself which of the following it is more likely to accomplish: creating a dangerous adversary or potentially igniting a long-term interest into a game that on the surface seems so simple but is actually highly complex? How about recommending a good introductory read such as Winning Low Limit Hold’em by Lee Jones or Getting Started in Hold’em by Ed Miller? Will this man immediately stop donating to the Average Joe Poker Pro Fund or will this game instantly become more interesting than its upstairs 3-card variant on the blackjack felt?

From where I stand, I can only see the upsides to taking this approach. After all, these novice players getting their feet wet in the game for the first time can never usurp your knowledge when you are the source of that knowledge. You now know what they know, but they will never be able to grasp the depth of what you know and what it took for you to get where you are. The next time they come wandering through and there are several open seats around, don’t be surprised if they choose to sit with you for being the helpful and kind soul that you are. That tiny bit of knowledge that you drop on them will probably never be particularly helpful, but like Paul’s little blackjack tip, it might get them to keep coming back for many years to come. After all, as we all know, you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once.

Like the article? Read more from Lorin at his blog here.

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Videos on PokerStars.tv
PokerStars.tv has a ton of videos. A lot of them are basically video blogs from EPT and APPT events, but there’s also a decent amount of live coverage of tournament final tables and replays of major online poker events. In both cases, you’ll often have the opportunity to see the tournament played with all of the hole cards face up. Watching how established players deal with big-pressure situations (and how inexperienced ones deal with the same spots) can teach you a lot about some things you might be missing, some tricks you may have forgotten and keep you on the leading edge of current game trends. Bonus: You can watch videos in the background while your play or work. Cost: Free.

The Two Plus Two Strategy Forums
2+2 has, hands down, the best strategy forums online. whether you’re into cash or tournament, there’s likely a dedicated forum for your game and level. Even if you just lurk through a thread or two a day, you’re bound to pick up useful nuggets that will serve as, at a minimum, solid jumping-off points for your own thinking about the game. Want to get more out of it? Stop lurking and start posting. If you’re intimidated by the sheer volume of the forums, try the strategy forums at the site you’re most comfortable with (you can find ours here). Cost: Time, but no dollars.

TeamViewer
TeamViewer is a nifty piece of software that essentially allows you to view someone else’s desktop from a remote location. The application for poker players is clear: hit up one of your friends who plays online and ask them if you can sweat a session. Maybe you can even get them on Skype and have them walk you through their thought process as you watch. Either way, you’ll get to see a different approach to the game than the one you’ve developed for yourself, and a new point of view is often just the cure for a mental rut.
Cost: Free – just some of your time.

Training Memberships Via Rakeback
If you’re playing online, you should be getting rakeback. If you’re getting rakeback, it should be through a site that lets you earn credits for online poker training sites like Cardrunners and PokerXFactor as you earn rakeback (you can do so if you get rakeback through PartTimePoker). Training sites are an awesome resource for improving your game, and if you can get them for free just by doing something you’re already doing anyway – paying rake – you’d be silly not to. Cost: Free, if you’re an active player.

Pick Apart a Hand a Day
Habits are the key to improving in poker, and one habit all good players should be in is to deconstruct hands on a regular basis. to make this a habit, commit to doing at least one a day for a set period of time until you feel like it’s become a natural part of your day. Doing a thorough hand review keeps you aware of your assumptions about the game, makes you more insightful when it comes to putting yourself in your opponent’s shoes, and keeps your mind focused on poker – and likely keeps it working on poker in the background after you’ve moved on to the rest of your day. Cost: Free, and really just a few minutes of your day.

Poker players tend to focus their energy on correcting what happens during a session – a call they shouldn’t have made, a three bet they should have, and so on. That, however, is a bit of a myopic approach that ignores a simple fact: a lot of mistakes that happen during a session occur because of how you approach a session. Here are five simple errors frequently made by online poker players in how they think about a session.

ESTABLISH A PRE-SESSION ROUTINE
While your mind isn’t technically a muscle from a physiological point of view, it shares enough characteristics with a muscle that the metaphor is still useful. Just like a bicep or quad, your mind prefers a little preview of the activity its about to engage in before the activity actually begins.

I’m not suggesting you play some practice hands before you sit down for an online session. Rather, I’m suggesting you establish some sort of simple routine that you engage in before your session begins. It can involves anything – exercising, making some food, meditating, whatever works for you – but it should be consistent and it should be done before every session to get yourself into the proper frame of mind, to tell your brain that whatever it was focusing on before is finished, and now its time to focus on poker.

DEFINE THE SESSION BEFORE IT BEGINS
Before you start to play, you should establish a clear time frame for the session. For cash players, you can set a certain length or win / loss goal, or frustration point, or whatever. For tournament players, a frustration point or a clear cutoff for registering works.

However you do it, the idea is the same: before you begin a session is when you’re best equipped to make quality decisions with an eye toward long-term profitability. Once a session begins, it’s way too easy to get caught up in the drama of the moment and make some really tilty decisions, especially if you’re losing. Having an exit plan before you enter is a great tactic for getting out as healthy as possible when things go wrong.

SCHEDULE YOUR DISTRACTIONS
During a long session, especially if you’re a tournament player, you’re going to get bored. That’s just a fact. There may be a few people who can manage to stay 100% focused during a ten hour session without the aid of a prescription stimulant, but chance are you aren’t one of them. That’s ok, as long as you recognize that fact and deal with it before hand.

Know what you’re going to do when you get bored before you get bored and you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration. Maybe there’s a web game you enjoy or an episode of The Office you’ve been meaning to catch. Make a plan beforehand and you will avoid searching for something to do while you’re playing poker and having to settle for something that doesn’t actually distract and recharge you while you’re playing. Don’t kid yourself about mental breaks – you need them, and planning them ahead of time is good for your game.

HAVE A TOOL FOR MEASURING YOUR FRUSTRATION
Sessions are odd things. They’re hermetic little worlds in which you can really lose sight of yourself in a hurry, especially if things don’t go your way. Maybe you’re a cool customer who can remain level-headed amidst the flurry of beats online poker delivers.

Chance are, you aren’t. That’s fine, as long as you can remain aware of how frustrated you’ve become, as that level will inevitably impact how you play. Everyone has a different system, so play around with a few until you find a good way to accurately track how pissed you are at any given moment, and how you should adjust your game.

ESTABLISH SOME META-GOALS
While we all wish it wasn’t so, not every session can result in a profit – especially if you’re a tournament player. That inevitable loss can really grind on some people, especially if you’re an inherently competitive individual. So, what can you do?

Find some ways to win even when you lose. Specifically, establish some goals for your session that have nothing to do with profit or loss. Maybe it’s to not make any hero calls for the session. Maybe it’s to force yourself to open more in late position. Whatever it is, pick something you want to improve about your game and focus on it, so that even if you have a losing session, you still have a way to eek out a win.

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It doesn’t matter what the game is, tactics will only ever take you so far. To take that quantum leap in any field then you are going to have to start looking at things in a different way than just looking at isolated tactics in a vacuum. Tactics after all are just something that we use to try and implement our strategy.

Tactics and strategy predominate in games like Chess for example but this is one of the reasons why intermediate players struggle to break into master levels and beyond. The main problem is when players only ever think tactically and try to win games by using tactical measures and nothing more. This can work if your opponents are not sophisticated but the problem arises when you progress to playing better players.

They understand and know all of the tactical measures that you know so your method of winning Chess games is now no longer giving you an edge. What has this to do with poker? Well the similarities are self evident, too many poker players spend far too long discussing the merits of how to play certain hands in certain situations. As I have stated, there is fundamentally nothing wrong in this…..as long as you understand that there is a case of diminishing returns when you do this as tactical prowess has serious limitations.

It is why so many good and knowledgeable players struggle to make money. Having “knowledge” is only worthwhile if it is used correctly and is pertinent to making money. Most of the time, most situations in poker can be played differently anyway but yet people still persevere in trying to literally analyse things to death.

I have been recently ghosting the games on Pokerloco after not playing online for a while and to me, nothing seems to have changed at certain levels. I see the same players making the same silly mistakes for the same reasons although this may be because the Ongame network is currently weak and that will merit further analysis.

There is so much available information now that the ability to play hands relatively well is all too easily learnable. What does this mean? Well it means that you need something else in your arsenal if you want to make money above and beyond being able to play “hands” well. This can still give you an edge but only against players who don’t have solid tactical knowledge and this tends to mean players at the lower levels.

A good example of a solid tactical player who cannot seem to make money is a player who doesn’t take advantage of rakeback and sign up bonuses. How many players who are failing to make money could do so just by doing these two very simple things? In no way am I saying that acquiring rakeback and sign up bonuses is deeply strategic because it isn’t. My point was that tactical prowess isn’t always enough irrespective of the level that you are playing at.

You need to develop a strategy for making money to be able to do so and this applies even more now that the online game is getting tougher. But strategic thinking basically involves the formulation of a long term plan or objective. How you play each individual hand is tactical and merely serves as a tool to achieve the strategic objective.

Don’t get me wrong, just like in warfare, if the tactics are very poor (playing of the hands) then the strategy could be a sound one but yet still fail. But the difference is that even bad tactics can be enough if a good sound strategy is in place. An easy example to highlight this comes in the role of bankroll management.

You could be tactically flawless (playing your hands perfectly) but yet lose money simply because you are under bankrolled or you insist on playing too high for your respective bankroll. The pursuit of a strategic objective in poker is not satisfied by knowing how to play certain hands. Because as I have already said, that isn’t always enough and is why players in many games are now struggling to find value online! They will insist in trying to make money by purely tactical measures and the days when these were enough are disappearing fast.

Game selection, seat selection and even time selection (choosing the time of day to play) are strategies that have nothing to do with actually playing hands. If your tactical game is pretty good then there really isn’t much mileage in trying to make it better. So what do you do if more and more players educate themselves to your tactical level…..what do you do then?

More and more in the future, players are going to have to start concentrating on issues that have nothing to do with the actual playing of the hands if they want to make money playing online poker. They will need to start thinking differently than they do now because they probably already know the game very well on a tactical level…..but to make money we need to start thinking strategically and over a much longer term than merely looking at the intricacies of how to play individual hands in a vacuum.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson can also be seen on his blog at www.pokersharkpool.com

If you could find enough action and are prepared to multi-table then playing Omaha /8 could become a nice steady revenue source for you with just a basic understanding of it and nothing more. Maybe it is because I took to this game like a duck to water that I find it so staggering as to why many players struggle with it. In fact I have been watching the cash games recently on Pokerloco which is on the Ongame network and the level of play at this form of poker is quite low in my opinion.

I will assume here that you have an understanding of just how it works so I will not be expanding on that here. But what I find happens an awful lot online is that many players drop into cash games for thirty minutes to an hour or so before a tournament is due to start or that they have got bored of their usual cash game and wanted to try something different.

Well poker and gambling for that matter is a very unforgiving business where naivety and ignorance rarely go unpunished for long. Omaha /8 is a split pot game where the high hand takes half the pot and the low hand takes the other half providing it qualifies of course. All right so I have just took the award for the most obvious statement of the year but hidden in that statement is one of the reasons for why many players fail at Omaha/8.

The fact that the pot gets split means that you should not be playing hands in O/8 that aim at winning only half of the pot. I sometimes think that many players view winning half of the pot as some sort of major achievement and the way that some of them play a bare A-2 underlines the fact even more. But when all you have is a bare A-2 and nothing else then even winning half of the pot could be out of your reach as two or more players having the nut low is very common in O/8.

But ending up with £250 out of a £1000 pot even if your boat comes in is not my idea of a successful pot. Because of how the game is played then there will always be a winner for high but not necessarily for low.

This means that if all you have going for you is a nut low draw in a multi-way pot then you had better not get too excited about your prospects. But because of the fact that you are aiming for the whole pot and not just half of it then you can certainly play a hand that has high potential only because of the fact that there may be no qualifying low.

Winning the entire pot is called “scooping” and this is really where you make your money in O/8. But as a follow on to the subject of just having a bare ace deuce working for you and nothing else, not only do we have the very distinct possibility of getting quartered as was explained earlier but also the very real chance of getting your hand counterfeited. Let us say that the flop comes 8-7-4 giving you the nut low but then an ace comes on the turn….oh dear oh dear, look what has happened to your lovely nuts!

O/8 like it’s cousin Omaha high is basically a drawing game and if you are drawing then you had better make damn sure that you are drawing to something that is worth drawing to. The fact of the matter is that an A-2 by itself is simply not worth the effort most of the time. Even if you hit it then you are only getting half of the pot at best. But someone else could easily be holding the same low and especially in a multi-way pot. Then you can make your hand only to lose it again if an ace or a deuce arrives.

Many a time in full ring games and especially in a limit format then O/8 can actually get very boring because an awful lot of folding can sometimes be involved and the game is nowhere near as complex as hold’em but yet the split pot nature of the game seems to confuse an awful lot of players.

In games at the lower end of the spectrum then tight is right as it is in most low stakes games irrespective of the form and drawing to non nut hands especially on the low side can prove fatal to your bankroll. But creativity and aggression will be rewarded in higher limit games and especially in pot limit play. But as I said earlier, you can play a very dull and unimaginative game in low stakes O/8 and actually do quite well.

As well as playing professionally online I also coach poker and what I have found over the past year to eighteen months is an increasing number of players coming to me wanting to learn about O/8. Of course you cannot approach any kind of coaching with a “one glove fits all” attitude and what I tell them is highly dependent on what type of experience they have and what levels they currently play at and how much they actually understand poker.

These are key elements, it is no good showing a player how to beat low limit ring games at O/8 if they have been playing $25-$50 No Limit. They just would not be interested in playing at that level and this would certainly mean them losing money even though they could be technically the best player in the game at all round poker. If you are a very good poker player and actually have a very firm grasp of what poker is and the underlying concepts of it then you will quickly find your feet at any form of poker.

But when players do not understand the game then they have nothing left to fall back on other than learning what constitutes a good hand from a bad one and playing very tightly and grinding it out. But many players cannot even manage that in the low stakes O/8 games where multi-way pots are common and players are coming in with all sorts of junk. An example, someone limps into a multi-way pot because it is cheap with A-4-J-8 rainbow…..what in god’s name is that?

You are drawing at a third nut low even if you make it and some kind of straight….crazy! Somebody out there is likely to beat you not only for low but for high as well. You need to go both ways and try to scoop but you need to exercise a great deal of caution in exactly how you go about it.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson can also be seen on his blog at www.pokersharkpool.com

In this article, we’re going to break down a sample hand to give you an idea of the different layers that can exist in even a very typical situation.

The hand below is taken from the 20R 6 max on Full Tilt Poker. The rebuy period is closed. The table has two regulars in Seats B and D. The SB was just moved to the table last hand You gained a good amount of your chips an orbit or two ago from the BB when you took a big pot away with a river bet.

When you play a hand, it’s important to remember that you’re actually playing a unique game against each of your opponents. In this hand, here are a couple of factors helping to define those sub-games.

Stack Sizes
This is a critical one, and it comes up more often in tournament play than cash games. In this example, you’re clearly playing at least two different games based on stack size – one with Players B, D and the BB, and another with the shorter stacks Player C and the SB. If C and the SB weren’t in the hand, you’d probably be willing to open a wider range. If you do open and get flat called by C or the SB, your post-flop situation is much different than it would be if you were called by, say, the BB. Recognizing the different stack sizes and how you should react to each is a critical aspect of your preflop (and postflop) planning.

Skill Levels
You’re also playing various games against opponents based on their skill levels. For example, let’s say you open raise and the regular on the button three bets you. You should react very differently to that three bet then you might to a three bet from the unknown player in the BB, as a skilled, regular player is more likely to be three betting you with a wider range. If you raised preflop and were called, you would also likely feel more comfortable making a continuation bet against the BB post flop than you would c-betting against the strong player in seat B, simply because you could feel more confident that the BB would play their hand in a more straightforward fashion. Skill level defines what a player is capable of, and the varying capabilities of your opponents can justify wildly different tactics on your part.

History
Perhaps more than any other single factor, your history with an individual creates unique levels to each individual hand. In our example, your recent history with the BB suggests that they’ll probably be more inclined to get involved in a hand with you than a typical player would be, and probably more stubborn about getting out of the hand post-flop. You’d probably be inclined to make a marginal call or re-raise if the BB showed aggression, given your recent history. Contrast that with the SB, who will be making their decisions based solely on their cards and a generic read on you.

In any single hand, each individual opponent will have their own reasons for choosing how to play against you. Treating your opponents as a homogeneous whole or even as one of a few generic types is a mistake. Pay attention to the factors that control your intra-game with each opponent, and you’ll likely find value that you didn’t know existed.

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When someone’s account is hacked, the fault is almost 100% with the player and not the room. Rooms spend significant amounts of money securing their information, and if a hacker were to manage to breach that wall, it’s even more unlikely that a single user account would be the target. Instead, account hacking generally occurs due to an oversight, accident, or laziness on the part of the account holder. Below are the solutions to the most common leaks the average online poker player has in their personal security plan.

1) Use a Separate Email Account for Online Poker: Gaining access to your email account is one of the easiest ways for someone to gain access to your online poker room accounts. You can make that a far more difficult feat by having a separate email that you only use for online poker accounts and for nothing else. Don’t give the email to anyone, and don’t choose a user name that matches your online poker or online poker forum user names.

2) Strong Passwords, Secure Passwords: A majority of hacks aren’t sophisticated coding triumphs – they’re just logic employed to take advantage of someone else’s inherent laziness. Choosing weak passwords leaves you vulnerable to someone simply guessing your password (that’s how WSOP champ Greg Raymer had his account hacked). A general rule of thumb: if it’s a password that’s easy for you to remember, it’s also easy for someone to guess. Choose a combination of numbers and letters of various cases, and if it absolutely has to be a word or phrase that is familiar to you, butcher it in an unpredictable way.

Of course, choosing strong passwords doesn’t count for much if you don’t keep them secure. Having a password like iIiNt3rN3tp0k3rzZz (no, that’s not my password) doesn’t do you much good if you keep it taped to a post-it on your screen or saved in a text file on your desktop. Consider a password vault application or maybe, you know, trying really hard to remember it.

3) Secure Private Connection > Aircard > Secure Public Connection > Open Public Connection: Wireless internet is excellent, no doubt, and it’s something online poker players rely on, especially when they travel. But using a wireless network brings with it certain risks. Obviously, your home connection should be secured (and not visible), but when you’re forced to use another network, you’re really opening yourself up to some dangers. If you’re off your home network frequently, consider getting an aircard from Sprint or Verizon, as it’s a more secure solution than using the free wifi at a hotel or coffee shop. If you do use a public connection, strongly consider changing all of your passwords once you’re back to a hardline or trusted wireless connection.

4) No Downloads Without Research: This one should be a no-brainer, but every now and again you’ll see a small rash of people who download some shady poker software (usually packaged as a ‘bot’ or some sort of cheating software) and end up with a compromised machine filled with spyware and keyloggers. Not only are these programs generally bullshit, but when they’re not, their use is usually prohibited by the room. Don’t download any poker-related application without a quick post on a major poker forum. Any community (ours, 2+2, P5, etc) will be able to tell you quickly if the program you’re considering using is reputable, legal and safe.

5) Don’t Click Links in IM: IM is an immensely popular way for poker players to carry on conversations, and is often a welcome break from the tedium of a long session. That dynamic results in most online poker players having a buddy list a mile long, generally populated by people they don’t know the slightest thing about. It’s sadly easily to consider someone you’ve chatted with over the course of a few months to be a friend, but the fact is, they could be anyone. Just having a blanket policy of not clicking on links in IM conversations is an easy way to avoid one of the most common ways that hackers install keylogger software on your computer.

6) Take Advantage of What the Room Offers (and Demand More): Poker rooms are pretty responsive to customer demands, and are starting to roll out extended security features as a result of player requests. Take advantage of these features! For example, PokerStars offers a PIN feature that effectively serves as an un-keyloggable second password. If you’re not a fan of Stars, demand that whatever room you do favor adopts similar policies and preventative steps for securing your account access.

If you have significant amounts of money online, there are additional steps (system encryption, a dedicated machine for poker, etc) that you should likely consider, but for the average player the above should suffice. If it all seems like too much effort, ask yourself – would you rather spend a few minutes a month beefing up your security, or spend that time typing out the latest sob story about a hacked online poker account on your favorite poker forum? Seems like an easy choice to me.

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