Poker strategies

July 15th, 2005

Online poker is a bitch, it really is.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on poker strategies and a lot of experimenting with playing style. I’ve been taking different approaches to hands than I usually take. It’s been educational and slightly costly. I’m starting to think that online poker is simply too hard to be profitable.

Being a computer geek, my finances are meticulously monitored via a very complex spreadsheet and I was recently able to calculate wether I was a good poker player or not. Since January I have made an average loss of £5 per month, which isn’t bad for a hobby. Take out the online play though, and I suddenly become noticably profitable.

You’ll read all sorts of nonsense about how to play poker online such as paying attention to the length of time taken by a player to act. The trouble is you don’t know wether he’s slow because he’s just taking a sip of his coffee, or he’s fast because he clicked the ‘auto check’ button because his* wife is talking to him about something and he’s not too bothered about the hand.

This morning I read through a digest of poker usenet postings and came across one discussing which drugs are best to be on when playing online. Apparently opinions are divided on wether cocaine makes you concentrate more and play aggressively, or wether it makes you play stupid hands.

How are you supposed to play against opponents like that when you can’t tell what’s going on around them, what they are smoking, or how much they’ve had to drink?

I know that there are people who can make a lot of money from online poker playing but I know how they do it - they are high rollers who play at expensive tables where the people they play against are fewer and can be recognised and better read. I keep notes on players I play against in the lower tables but I rarely actually see those players again to make my notes worthwhile.

And incidentally, the theory of raising with low pocket pairs and playing aggressively after the flop as though you’d made a set doesn’t work. I need a better poker book.

* - Yes I know there are quite a few female poker players out there, but my example player is male.

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