Online Poker Strategy - Winner’s Guide to Internet Poker
The first thing to understand is that online poker is not the same as brick & mortar casino poker (hereafter I’ll call this “casino poker”). They are different games. I???m not saying one is better than the other, or necessarily more or less profitable. They are just different in fundamental ways. Many of the abilities needed to win in casino poker of course also exist in online poker. You still need good starting cards… you still shouldn’t tilt… you still shouldn’t play at a level you can’t afford, and so on. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel on that stuff. Check out the rest of this website, the poker magazines and books to study those things that are the same online as in a casino. A flush beats a straight online. We don’t need to go over that.
Signing Up
Joining an online site is simple. You use an online payment service like Neteller (see below) or give them your credit card to buy chips just like you would buy a book at Amazon or a plane ticket at United Airlines. You don’t even have to do that at first. You can play free games without giving any credit card information. You should play the free games for at least an hour or so to get the hang of how fast the action goes, what buttons to click, what happens when you click a button that you aren’t sure what it does, all the bells and whistles of how the site works. The free games have little value in learning to play to win though. They are excellent for a total novice, offering newbies a way to practice calculating basic odds on the fly and discovering the relative strengths of hands, but you still should get off free games as soon as you can. Even playing the .5/.10 games will offer you far more useful learning opportunities than the free games.
Give thought to your login name. Some people want to be distinctive, memorable. Others want to be as anonymous as possible. Your screen name is the first bit of “table image” you present to the other players. Choose one that presents the personality you want to convey to your opponents.
Building an Online Poker Bankroll
The first enormous difference you confront between playing online and in a casino is when you go to buy chips. Card rooms generally limit how much you can deposit each day. Winning ring game poker is all about putting in hours. If all games are about equal, and you always play the same winning way, the more you play, the more you make. So, putting yourself out of action by losing your bankroll is a critical mistake.
In casino poker, you can reach into your pocket and grab more cash (for good or ill). Not so online. The first thing you need to do is build an online bankroll. No matter what you are properly bankrolled to play in a casino, when you first join you have to be sure you don’t play over the head of your online bankroll, or you might put yourself out of action temporarily, until you can get more cash online. Basically, you can’t play correctly online until you have accumulated a correct bankroll.
A quicker way to build you bankroll at most online poker rooms is to transfer funds from an existing player.
The online cardrooms have their reasons for limiting buy-ins, from protecting players from blowing their brains out in one session to not wanting to deal with substantial contested credit card charges. While these are legitimate concerns on the cardrooms’ part, the restricted buy-in is an artificial obstacle to winning that has to be overcome by new players. After establishing a record of play over a period of time, players can Email customer support for an increase in the different bankroll restrictions.