This is the first online poker tip in our series of helpful advice for online poker players.
#1. Don’t Play Every Hand.
This piece of advice is old news to experienced online players, but it is the most common mistake that most beginner players make.
It seems counter-intuitive to most players that playing less poker can make you more money, but the truth is that most players play way too many hands. Part of the problem is that a lot of online players play below their ideal limit, so they do not really take the money seriously because they are not staking at a serious level.
When playing online you can get a game at stakes as low as one cent. When playing low stakes it may seem foolish to fold middling cards in the face of a raise of only a couple of cents, but the truth is that the raise is relative to the stakes. Would you still play that seven five suited if the raise was a couple of hundred dollars?
Hopefully your answer to that question was ‘no’. If it was ‘yes’, you probably should not be reading this article.
Poker, whether online or in the real world, is not about winning so much as it is about getting the right odds to play. We will discuss poker odds in future articles, but for now you should try to understand that not every two cards are worth playing, no matter what the stakes are.
The only exception to that rule would be when you have already paid the big blind and there were no raisers. Although it might seem foolish to fold your two bad cards in the face of a ‘check’.
Even so, sometimes you might be better off to fold right there, as all too frequently, getting into a hand with two low cards can leave you in a bad position later on, if one or both of those cards get paired on the flop. That can see you staying in a hand against better cards simply because you cannot fold a pair (or two) no matter how low they might be.
Picking your starting hands carefully and sticking to the top quality hands will see you playing a lot less hands than you might hope for. One buig problem with this that a lot of players have is that they get bored with having so little action. When they are playing poker they really want to play. And Now!
If that is a problem for you, perhaps you should consider playing more than one table at a time. Playing with proper starting hands on two or three tables will be more worthwhile than playing any two cards on one table.
Bear in mind though that playing multiple tables can take a bit of practice. Start with one table (prepare to be bored), then when you are comfortable with the software you could try playing two tables for a while.
The initial rush of wanting to play as much poker as fast as possible usually wears off when you have lost more or all of your bankroll. It is a far better feeling to have gotten your fill of poker hands and still have your bankroll intact.