Poker Tips and Strategies

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Back in the good old days of online poker, if you had a good sound technical game then you were going to make money…..a lot of money. There were fish a plenty and especially in games that were not popular or not well known at that time. It is amazing to think that by referring to the good old days, I am actually going back just five years and certainly no more than ten as the first online poker site to my knowledge didn’t start until 1999.

The games were soft and easy even when I started playing in around 2000-2001. In fact the games were so easy to beat that I turned full-time pro in 2002 and stayed that way until about 2006. A good solid technical game is still important of course but you really need to start table selecting with greater efficiency now. This even applies at the lower levels as these are where the grinders live.

There is a great compression of skill these days as the low level pro’s use table selection software and poker buddy tools to find weak players and profitable tables. You may have wondered why some waiting lists have much longer queue’s than others. Well quite often this is because these players have been using table finding software and if players are taking the time to do this then this tends to be an indication of a decent player.

Weak players simply will not take the time or make the effort to do such things. If you see a poker table with eight people on the waiting list, should you put your name down? Well if these players have put their names down to find a few fish then what chances have you got of finding fish by the time that you get onto that table?

One of two things will have likely happened, either the fish have lost their money and left the table or they will have amassed some winnings and left simply because they don’t want to give it back. Either way the table dynamic will simply not be the same by the time that you get there.

So what options do you have? Well firstly you could go down the route of getting these items of software yourself. This is always useful as information is power as they say. But there is a problem with this in that you may then end up hunting the same tables as everyone else. If you desire to make money in any form of gambling then you are going to have to do something different to what the masses are doing….within reason of course.

One tactic that I have often used is to open a new table. Now before you reel back in horror at the thought of playing heads up or short handed poker then consider this. Weak players don’t like to put their names down on long waiting lists! They logged on to do one thing and one thing only….play poker! They didn’t log on to sit waiting for thirty minutes.

This means that they want to play poker in the shortest time frame possible and if that means sitting at a table with only two other players then they will do this or at least some of them will. What I am trying to advise you to do here is to try and think differently to the masses and thinking differently means doing different things. If you can put yourself into the mind of a weak player and then do what they do then you may just find more of them.

This article was produced by Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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Tags: poker table selection, Strategies