People often ask me how I started playing poker, and how quickly it will be before they can start raking in the dollars playing poker online. The truth is, first you have to master the microlimits, which can also be pretty frustrating due to the sheer number of bad beats you will face. Most players who are serious about poker will beat these limits pretty quickly, and pretty easily and can move up to the higher games available. In this article I will discuss common errors that new players make when starting to play online poker, and the quick tips you can employ to avoid being the fish at the table!

Play Tight – This is the #1 thing most amateurs don’t do!
At the microstakes (up to $10 buyin cash games) we find only beginner players who are largely clueless and every now and then a more experienced player who went busto. Beginner players are often players who want to see many flops, playing as many hands as possible, and basically have a good time, in fact, some do not even expect to make money, they are just playing for fun. These type of players are often passive (rarely raising, and mainly just call) and only focus on their own cards. Other beginner players raise with everything and play over-aggressive, these are always pretty easy to spot, and they rarely last long! Purely by playing fewer hands than your opponents you are already playing better than they do, because, on average, you have a better hand when you do decide to play. A basic rule of thumb is that you should be playing about 1 in 5 of the hands you are dealt, representing the top 20% of starting hands.

Another reason for only playing good/premium hands, is that is just makes playing postflop soo much easier. You will find yourself in fewer troublesome spots. For example, if you play a marginal hand like K5, and the flop comes KJT, you are put in a troublesome spot, because your opponent(s), can have better Kings, e.g. K9, or even 2 pair combos like JT, KJ, etc. Therefore when your opponent bets on this flop, you are playing guessing games as to whether you are ahead or not. If however, you played KJ instead, you can be pretty sure you have the best hand and can try to build as big a pot as possible. Especially if your opponents are playing marginal hands like K5, J7.

Never limp, always raise (or call)
Beginner players often tend to limp preflop, this is the #1 way I can identify a bad player at my table, and I will go out of my way to play pots with what I percieve to be a weaker player. Limping means that you get involved in an un-raised pot by calling one big blind (BB). It seems logical to do this because if you miss the flop, it only cost you 1BB. That is irrational. It is better to raise. You are playing very tight and will only play good hands, therefore, by raising you (often) avoid seeing a flop against 4-5 opponents. You don’t want this to happen because your hand becomes more vulnerable the more players you are facing, i.e. KJ will has a 50% chance versus one opponent who holds Q9. However, if a third player limps in with 67, and another with 33, you now have about 25% chance to win the pot. In short, getting the pot HU (heads up), is a profitable play if you are only playing premium hands.
What hand rankings make you money over time?
Top pair/top kicker
One of the hands that occurs most often is a hand in which you hit top pair and have the best kicker and you pick up the pot. Be aware, however, that if the pot ends up getting big and there is a lot of action, your top pair might not be the best hand. An example is AQ on a flop of Q58.

Two pair
You can often win big pots if you flop 2 pair and villain hits top pair, especially on microlimits. One note of caution, bottom 2 pair can easily be couterfeited, so try to build a big pot early on.

Sets
A pocket pair of 2’s might not look too spectacular before the flop, but these low pairs are very profitable hands. Not necessarily as a pair itself, but if you flop a set (three of a kind). The odds of flopping a set or better with a pocket pair are 11,75%, or about 1 in 8 times. When you do hit your set, you will end up winning most or even all of your opponent’s stacks, so bet accordingly, do not ’slow play’ it! You have a massive hand, so you should try to build a massive pot.
Rockets (AA) and cowboys (KK)
Many beginning players tend to slow play their monster hands, especially pocket aces, often because they don’t want everybody to fold. This is a very bad idea, one concept to drill into your heads is to build a big pot with a big hand. So simple – yet amateurs often try to get tricky. It is very important to raise and even reraise these hands. With a high pair, the last thing you want is to end up in a multiway pot with 4 players, because its more likely someone will outflop you. With aces and kings you want to get all your money into the pot as fast as possible. You are an 80% favourite against any other pocket pair before the flop. Therefore, if a player raises before the flop, you should almost always reraise this player. And never ever ever ever fold KK preflop. Yes sometimes the player will have AA, but plenty of other times he will have QQ, AK, and even bluffs. Also, if you manage to get a lot of money into the pot preflop it will make it very difficult for our opponent to fold after the flop as he has already put a great deal of his stack in the pot. This is good news for us.

Flush draws in multiway pots
A nice nut-flush draw (Ace-high flush draw) can cost you a lot of money if you are sitting HU, as you will often not get the right odds to call, and generally calling down draws is a losing play. In a multiway pot however, you can profitably call if two other opponents have already called in front of you. Against 1 villain you would be paying $0.10 for a pot of $0.22, while against 3 villains you pay $0.10 for a pot of $0.52, you see the difference. Remember to not to pay too much money for your flush draws just to see if it hits on the river. And when you do hit, don’t slow play, bet and hope our opponents get curious, or have smaller flushes.

What hands cost you money?
Top pair/ weak kicker
With a hand like A3 you will often get into trouble when you flop an ace but no flush draw. Ie. AT9. You do have top pair, but on microlimits, almost every ace gets played, and every ace out there beats your kicker, for example is someone has A8, you are crushed. If you get a lot of betting action then the chance is high that you are way behind in the hand, and conversely if you don’t get any action that you win little anyway.
Middle pair
If you have to call a bet on the flop and the turn from one villain and all you have is 2nd pair, then chances are you’re beat. Eg, we hold JT and the Flop is KT6 and the Turn is a 2. What hands beat you? Always ask yourself this when calling with a marginal hand. In the case above, any hand with a K in it beats you, plus bigger Tens, e.g. AT QT . Avoid making these marginal calls as much as possible. There are plenty of more profitable spots to be in.

Position
Position is vitally important when playing poker. In one position you might raise a hand that you would fold in another position. The best position is on the dealer button, as you get to make the last decision postflop and know how the players in front of you have acted. On the button you can also often steal the blinds, which over 100s of hands is very profitable. The small blind is the worst position postflop because you are always first to act. Here are the names of the different positions, listed from worst to best position:

1. Small Blind (SB)
2. Big Blind (BB)
3. Under The Gun (UTG)
4. Hijack (UTG + 1)
5. Cut Off (CO)
6. Button (BTN)

The better your position, the more hands you should be playing.

Opening range
Here you find a list of all the hands that you can play on microlimits in my opinion. Of course these hands are not set in stone and can vary depending on the players on your table. This range is somewhat tight and you will be playing about 16% of your hands.

UTG: 22+, AQ+, (this does not include AJ, KQ and JQ)
UTG + 1: 22+, AJ+, QK+
CO: 22+, AT+, JQ+
Button: 22+, AT+, TJ+, 45s+

Calling range
You can pretty much use the same range to when you call raises if you have position, but always focus on the player who raised. If this is a very tight player you should probably fold hands like AT-AJ, TJ-JQ and 45s-89s. Try to see who is playing bad starting cards, and play the pots with those guys. If an opponent has been identified as playing only the best starting hands, only call their raises with the strongest of hands that you are dealt, hands like AK.
SB and BB
It is very tempting to see flops when in the small or big blind as you have already invested money into the pot. This is a big leak, a very big leak. Being out of position, its very difficult to play hands profitably, because statistically you are going to miss 1 in 3 flops (i.e. not flop a pair or better), so you are forced to give up the hand 2 out of 3 times if and when your opponent bets. This just leaks money.

Bad beats
On the microlimits you suffer the most bad beats, and that is a good sign. You get a bad beat if an opponent calls you although his chance of still winning is minimal. Bad players make a lot of suck outs, as good players tend to not put themselves in a situation where they are that far behind. Just remember 9 out of 10 times you will win the hand after your opponent mucked his cards, and you don’t really have a clue what he was holding. Often he would have been chasing a gutshot or a flush draw. And its these 9 situations where we are making our profit! Yes, we lose 1 memorable pot when our opponent gets lucky, but over time, they go bust, and we get rich!

As always, good luck at the tables

Johnny.

No Limit Hold’ Em is sometimes referred to as ‘the Cadillac of Poker’. Some people consider it to be the only pure form of poker. You can lose all your money in one hand or the game can suddenly turn around in your favour just like that. The risks in a no limit game are huge and that’s what makes the beauty of the game so real. No-limit allows you to play your opponent instead of your cards.

If you decide to enter a No Limit Hold ‘Em game, you have to determine how far you could go regarding swings, and how you’d bear any of the negative swings. Your bankroll is the thing that is suffering from bad days, so you have to state a stop-loss limit whilst playing No Limit in order to keep the bankroll intact. Your bankroll will (just as in limit) serve as a buffer to catch up from the possible losses and bad swings. It is unfortunate, but realistically, you can’t win every day, even if you are playing at your best. There will always be variance. It’s all about making profit in the long run by playing well time after time.

I advise to start with a bankroll that contains at least 25 times the maximum buy-in. This means that if you’re playing a NL $.01/$.02 game with a maximum buy-in of $2, you have to have $50 to start with. Be aware of the fact that some online $.25/$.50 tables have a maximum buy-in of $25, but that you have to assume that it’s $50. This means that you should have a bankroll of $1.250 for these games! Sounds like a daunting investment, but if you do it right you will thank me!

It’s important to sit down at a table with the maximum buy-in. This is due to the fact that you can bet as much as you like in no limit, so the more you have in front of you, the stronger moves you can make. If you want to play a game that lacks a maximum buy-in, you should enter with as much money as the chip leader has on the table. This will give you a big advantage and it will strengthen your position.

The way you’re playing no limit completely depends on the amount of opponents you’re sitting with and how loose or tight they play. Usually, I’d say that you should play particularly tight and aggressive. If you can’t raise, just fold. If you want to play a hand, then do this by raising first. As you gain more experience, you’ll see more and more possibilities in the game and you will probably play a bit looser.

Since anything can happen in no limit, it’s significant to have position. If you called a raise out of position on the flop and checked the turn it’s hard to estimate how much your opponent will bet. This subsequently makes it harder for you to calculate your pot odds and in no limit, dealing with pot odds and implied odds are calculations you have to deal with all of the time.

With implied odds you can add a couple of starting hands to your list, which you wouldn’t be playing in limit hold’em (or just with a lot of calls and raises in front of you).

The hands which you normally raise in Limit Hold’em are:

Early position: AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK

Middle position: AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, 99, AK, AQ, AJ, QK

Late position: AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, 99, 88, AK, AQ, AJ, AT, QK, KJ

You have to adjust a couple of things for playing no limit. In a ring game you can raise the next hands to a fair amount (by this I mean to at least ¾ of the pot):

The Good Hands for No-Limit:

Early position: AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK

Middle position: AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, AK, AQ, AJs

Late position: AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, 99, AK, AQ, AJs

As you can see, there are fewer hands in the list for no limit. That is due to the fact that I want to discuss of few of them separately. You have to apply a different preflop strategy in no limit as the pots can get out of hand easily. The hands I removed from the limit list in middle position are 99-KQ (and I’ve changed AJ suited). In late position these were: 88-AT-KQ-KJ, with AJ still being suited. I will divide the removed hands in two groups. The first group contains hands like AT-KQ-JK and the second group includes pocket 2/9.

The first group of hands: AT-KQ-JK. These are the hands you have to raise sometimes and sometimes not. Again, it’s about analyzing the playing styles of your opponents correctly. But if I had to mention a strategy for these types of hands, it will be one that says that you should call if multiple players in front of you limp in, or even raise it up if it is folded to you. Also realize that hands like these tend to become a bit stronger when they’re suited or connected.

The second group that I’m discussing separately contains the pockets 2 to 9. These are hands that you can add to your list of playable hands in no limit. Pockets pairs are valuable because of their implied odds. And that’s what it’s all about: you can call pocket pairs in every position because they have so much implied odds. You can even call a few raises with them (but I advice not to call really big ones). When a lot of players put enough money in the pot preflop it’s possible for you to hit trips and win from the players who hold AA, KK, QQ, two pair or one pair with a good kicker.

With pocket pairs you’d like to call instead of raising. Your goal is to hit trips on the flop and if this doesn’t succeed, you fold your hand and wait for the next opportunity.

Another type of tricky hand is two cards which are connected and suited at the same time, such as: 5s6s, 6h7h, and 7c8c. Doyle Brunson marks these hands as his personal favorites. Suited connectors have great potential, but it’s important to play them correctly. People who just started to play poker might overplay these hands by raising and bluffing with them too often. While these hands are valuable, players without much experience have to fall back into a more conservative playing style. The intention of playing these hands should be to see a flop as cheap as possible, so you can raise post-flop when you’ve hit an open-ended straight or flush draw, trips or two pair. This could force your other opponents to fold their hands, which is ok. There is no shame in winning a semi-bluff with 8 high! Try to play these hands the same way you’re playing small pocket pairs preflop. Hope to hit the flop you’re looking for, which is a draw-heavy flop. Use your information gathering skills to decide if hitting your draw will win the hand, and go from there.

What do you do after the flop? You’re usually sitting in some sort of situation where you have to decide whether to play your hand or fold it. By this I mean that you already have to decide on the flop if you’re willing to play your hand to the river opposed to mucking your hand post-flop.
This is usually due to the fact that the raises you made or called on the flop can lead to inevitable all in situations on the turn. The pot is big which makes the bets on the turn larger as well. You have to look at the pot size on the flop, the amount of players who sit behind you and the possible draws on the flop. Of course, this isn’t the only thing you pay attention to, because there are also things such as the stack sizes of your opponents, the position of the button and the tells you might have on an opponent. Poker is a difficult game, because you have to think about so many things. Learning all these things costs a lot of time and effort to understand.
A good rule is to try to take the leading position on the flop by raising people out. A worthy tip, to help you from going broke is: don’t overestimate your hand on the flop when three of your suit, or connected cards appear. If it’s not the nuts, then you could be behind.
In conclusion, I think that it’s the fast paced action which makes hold’em unique. It attracts a lot of professionals, and can scare out the players who have difficulties with making complex decisions in a short amount of time. The skills that eventually build one into a good poker player are a combination of controlled aggression and the ability of laying down monster hands during crucial situations in the game.

As always, good luck at the tables. With a little practice, there is a lot of money to made

In order to win a tournament, you need to accumulate a lot of chips, but more importantly, you should try and lose as few chips as possible. The following five tips are designed to stop you form leaking too many chips.

1. Continuation betting to often and too much post-flop

A tournament consists of playing hundreds of hands (if you make it to the end that is). During the course of these hands, you will fire out quite a few continuation bets, ie. betting the flop after you have raised pre flop. Most of the time, however, you will have missed the flop and might be forced to lay down the hand if you meet resistance.

That is why it is sensible to:

a) don’t continuation bet 100% of the time
b) don’t make the continuation bet too large

Only place a continuation bet when you are pretty sure that your opponent is going to fold or when you hit a nice draw. Losing those chips will make a difference when you start adding up all the lost bets. These chips might have formed a substantial part of your stack.

Another aspect is the size of the continuation bet. You often see players raise the standard 2/3 of the pot or even the whole pot. This is a serious mistake, because in the long run it will lose you money/chips. Keep your bets smaller, so that you have to win less and still make a profit. If, for example, you only bet half the pot, you will only have to win 1 in 3 continuation bets to break even.

For more guidance on when to continuation bet, and when not too, refer to my free coaching video on continuation betting with the Poker Coaching section of this site.

2. Overplaying premium hands

You are in late position with AK. A big stack player in middle position raises 4x the big blind. You think for a couple of seconds and decide to push in your whole stack. Your opponent calls with QQ, and before you can even type “nh”, you’re already out of the tournament.

This scenario occurs all the time, especially during the early stages of a tournament. Good players will want to take a look at the flop before committing all of their chips with Ace-high.

Instead of just pushing with this hand, it makes more sense to call or maybe even re-raise. If your opponent makes it $100, you make it $400. Maybe your opponent will fold and you pick up the pot there and then, or you get to see a flop and can still fold your hand if you don’t hit. At least you’re still in the tourney when the hand is over.

The same counts for hands like JcJd. Often enough players will raise this hand all-in so they can’t be outplayed on the flop. In the end, you will most likely only get called by higher pockets or by hands against which you have a 50/50 chance. Take a look at the flop, and if there are no overcards, make a bet to see where you stand. This is poker. Pushing blind is more like Russian roulette.

3. Not adjusting your ‘calling hands’ when the blinds are relatively high.

Towards the beginning of a tournament you might be able to call a bet of $80 with a hand like 6c7c, to see if you can flop a well hidden monster. When the blinds have increased to 400/800, however, this play becomes pretty expensive.

The same can be said for small pocket pairs like 4d4c. You want to flop a set, but this only happens 1 in 8 times. So if you have to call a $2,400 raise 8 times and don’t hit 7 times, you lose 16,800 chips in these 7 hands. So that one time you do flop a set, you need to make sure to win at least 16,900 to make this play profitable. I prefer to just hold on to the 16,800.

4. Not stealing the blinds

The deeper you get into a tourney, the more aggressive you need to play. Playing tight is a great strategy for the first couple of levels, but as soon as the blinds start rising, you need to start making more plays in late position.

Your hand: KJ
Position: cutoff
Blinds: $300/$600
Stack: $10.000

Everyone folds towards you. Your hand isn’t that great, but it’s not a helpless hand either. It is definitely strong enough to try and steal the blinds with. Raise it up to 1500 and see what happens. If the button folds but the big blind calls, you at least have position on your opponent, and he can’t really do much more than check when he misses the flop. A simple continuation bet wins the pot more often than not, and you can add 1,800 to your stack.

If you keep on waiting for premiums and don’t want/dare to make a steal, you lose 900 chips per orbit, which won’t have a very positive effect on your stack.

5. Chasing draws without getting the right odds.

This remains to be a very frequent problem; somebody flops a nut flush draw and his prepared to call off a great deal of his stack to chase the flush. On some sites a nut flush draw is often seen as the absolute nuts and players have no hesitation to insta-push.

Your hand: AJss
Flop: 5s9sQd
Your stack: $11.000
Pot: $2.500

Your opponent (stack = 5,000) bets 1,900 here. Do you have to call here? No, because you’re not getting the right pot odds to call.

You have a 35% chance of hitting your flush but have to call 43% of the pot. In addition to that, your opponent is pot committed, so you already know that he is likely to push on the turn. His $5,000 is enough to hurt your stack, but not enough to justify the call in terms of implied odds.

Let the hand go and wait for a better (cheaper) spot. Too many of these calls can make sure that you quickly join the group of the shortstacks.

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to present you with a couple of tips that will hopefully extend your tourney life. Of course you’re going to have to take risks every now and then, but try to minimise those situations, and don’t blow have your stack in a situation where you shouldn’t have called in the first place. You’re not going to win all the coinflips (i.e. a 50/50 when a pocket pair is up against 2 overcards, eg. JJ vs AK), so the less you play, the better.

Good luck at the tables.

 

This article will focus on multitabling poker, i.e. playing a number of poker games at once. Some of you might already be playing 4+ tables at a time, but for those of you who don’t, or are in the process of adding more tables to your sessions, here are a couple of multitabling tips.

The great thing about online poker is that you have the possibility to play at more than one table at a time, which can be very profitable if you are a winning player because this enables you to play more hands and win more money. Then again, you often have to sacrifice a part of your winrate because you will have fewer solid reads on your opponents, seeing as you aren’t just focussing your attention on one but potentially 8 or more tables at the same time. One key tip is to play as many tables as you can comfortably, whilst not feeling overly rushed.

A simple calculation proves that the profits outweigh the losses when playing at numerous tables at a time:

Lets say you are currently playing at two tables at the same time, and over the course of the last 2,000 hands (that’s roughly 15 hours of play when playing two tables) you set a winrate of $2/hr. When playing $0.05/$0.10 tables, this equals a profit of $15. If you now decide to start playing eight tables at once, and we assume that your winrate will drop slightly by 20% (because your reads will deteriorate slightly), you will play 8,000 hands in the same 15 hour period, which would result in a profit of $48! Therefore, although your winrate per table has gone down, your overall profit has increased considerably.

Ok, so multitabling is a good idea, but how on earth does someone manage to follow eight tables at the same time?! This is a question of practicing and making the right arrangements beforehand. I went from playing 1 table at a time to 2 pretty quickly, but only after a while did I become happy 8 tabling, here how I did it.

Your computer system
Having a good computer is of vital importance, as you wouldn’t want your PC to suddenly shut down when you get dealt Aces and there’s action in front of you. Also make sure you have a good mouse and a good set-up for your keyboard and monitor, as the effects of RSI (repetitive strain injury) are not something you should underestimate.

A good monitor is also important, as playing eight tables on an old 17″ CRT monitor isn’t going to work. Make sure to have at least a 19″ screen with a resolution of 1600×1200. My current set up is 2x Dell 19″ LCD screens, both set at 1600×1200 resolution. This can handle 18 tables comfortably with no overlap.

It is important to run software like Holdem Manager or Pokertracker with PokerAceHUD, seeing as you can obtain a lot of information on your opponents from these programs (if you are unsure on what these are, refer to the Poker Tools section of this site). Also make sure to make notes on players once you have a good read like “thinks top pair top kicker is the nuts” or “goes all-in preflop with JJ”, seeing as this information can win you a lot of money.

Your surrounding
Make sure you are sitting in a quiet, tidy room at a desk that isn’t covered with junk. It can also be irritating to have a house mate, girl/boy friend or mother walk into the room starting a conversation with you. The same counts for MSN/Skype; set your status to ‘busy’, ‘offline’ or just turn the whole thing off. You are playing poker, and that’s the only thing you should be concentrating on.

It is also a good idea to have a comfortable chair that you can easily sit in for a couple of hours, but don’t make it too comfortable, or you might fall asleep during your session. Playing poker when tired bad news, so only play when you are 100% up for it, physically as well as mentally.

Setting of the poker room
With a resolution of 1600×1200, you can fit exactly 9 tables on your screen without having the tables overlap, as long as you can resize the tables to 520×390. With most poker rooms you will now still be able to see all the cards and all the betting. Turn off all unnecessary animations (dealing the cards one by one, avatars and possibly the “congratulations” message when winning a hand) and choose a calming background. You should try and not get distracted, so you might have to replace the picture of your favourite babe with a neutral black background. Choosing to play with a 4-colour deck can also be a good idea to help you see potential flushes more clearly.

Practice makes perfect
If you are used to playing one or two tables at a time, it might not be a good idea to add half a dozen tables to that list immediately. Taking small steps is the best way of adjusting, so instead of opening two tables next time you play, open three. Once this goes well, open up a fourth table, and so on. While the difference between playing one and five tables relatively big, it is only a small step to go from five to eight or nine tables. Don’t be afraid to open that extra table during your next session. At the end of the day, you can close the table just as fast as you opened it if things aren’t going very well. As a benchmark, I played 2 tables for a few weeks, then 4 tables for a few weeks, before going to 6, then 8 or 9. Now I feel comfortable playing 6 tables at once, however, if I play lower stakes, I will play up to 10 or 12.

When multitabling, you need to make sure to play your best game at all of your tables. Don’t start gambling on one table because you are already up two buy-ins at table #6. Stealing blinds and making winning moves are still very important aspects of your poker game.

If, during one of your sessions, you feel like things aren’t going very well (you just suffered two major bad beats), sit out for one or two orbits, go to the bathroom or get something to eat/drink. Remember, when multitabling its easy to generate more profits, however, if you suffer from tilt, then its just as easy to lose your money faster! It is also a good idea to have something to drink next to you when you start your session, so that, thirty minutes into your session, you won’t be forced to get up when thirsty.

Taking breaks in between your sessions is very important. After having played for two or three hours, stop and make yourself some food, watch some TV, knit some socks for all I care, as long as your mind is not concentrating on poker for a while.

Finally
Once you’re done with a session (try playing for at least an hour), analyse some of your hands of which you think you didn’t play them correctly, with Holdem Manager. Look at all the big pots you were involved in and make notes of things you need to pay more attention to. Try not to change your playing style too much. Don’t start playing too tight because you feel you don’t have enough time to click. Once you realise you are starting to play too tight, it might be a good idea to close one or two of your tables for now.

As always, good luck at the tables.