Online poker players have fallen on hard times. Between the ongoing saga of funds in NETELLER limbo (at least we finally got good news on that front) and many sites closing their doors to U.S. customers, online poker just ain't what it used to be. But online poker is far from dead, as the $1.4 million prize pool of a recent PokerStars tournament indicates. It's just that with fewer cash games available to Americans, and with deposits and withdrawals becoming more difficult, it's not so easy anymore to make a living playing poker online.
Thus, a new, yet old, skill has become a requirement for any serious online player, and that skill is game selection. In the glory days, a good player could've sat down in virtually any middle-stakes cash game at PartyPoker and expect to have a sizeable edge. With PartyPoker, and the scores of maniacs, calling stations, and tightwads who played there (actually, there weren't very many tightwads) a distant memory, American players must now learn how to evaluate a game before they sit in it. Heaven forbid!
Many people think evaluating a cash game for profitability is easy, and for the most part they're right, at least online. The problem is, there's more to it than simple evaluation. When I asked a few good players how they go about exercising good game selection, they were at least honest with me. "I don't," they said. At their core, most poker players are action junkies, and they will sit in any poker game that fits their bankroll (and many that don't). Skilled players can get away with this approach, as long as they don't mind a few rough patches along the way, and as long as they manage not to go on tilt very often. It's the savvy game selectors, however, who might be the best at managing their money, lowering their variance, and exploiting what's left of the weaker players in the poker universe. Their powers lie in information, and discipline.
In brick-and-mortar casino poker, information on opponents can be rather difficult to come by, which makes it harder to assess the profitability of a particular game. Some variables, like location and stakes, can be accounted for, but how do you ever know for sure who's playing there? Most of the time, you probably won't recognize seven of the 10 people in the $20-$40 game at the Mirage - even if you play there all the time. Usually, the unrecognized players will be tourists, whom you'd welcome as opponents, but still, the element of uncertainty will always be there.
Online, these issues are mitigated through the power of data. First, each site keeps track of the average pot size and the average number of players seeing the flop at each table, so that's a quick and immediate gauge about how profitable a table might be. In general, a bigger pot size and a higher percentage of players seeing the flop means a more profitable game. But be careful; two skilled, loose-aggressive players might've been playing heads up for the last half-hour before the table filled, dangerously skewing the statistics. An even more reliable approach is to invest in some software to track your opponents. If you gather enough hands in your database, you'll know exactly who's winning and who's losing, which means that you'll know exactly which players to take on and which ones to avoid.
If you don't want to bother purchasing software, you can at least take notes on the opposition, and those notes will be available every time you play. In brick-and-mortar casino poker, you might face a player you've seen before, but not recognize him. Even if you do recognize him, you might not remember everything about how he plays. In online poker, your notes are stored for you, so such issues do not exist.
Once you've become adept at choosing the right game, you must actually have the discipline to exercise good game selection. This sounds like the easy part, but in reality, this stage is where the vast majority of players fail. The most difficult thing to do for most poker players - gamblers at heart - is to pass on an empty seat in a game they would enjoy playing. All of the good players I know can tell a good game from a bad game, but plenty of those good players sit down in bad games all the time. They just can't help themselves. In casinos, you might wait for hours to get into a game, so there's a greater temptation to sit down, even when the game is bad, once they finally call your name off the list. If you're an online player who has a constant need to jump into every available game, there may still be hope. When you're at home, you can read, or watch TV, or maybe even do something truly crazy, like spend time with your family, while you're waiting around for a good game to open up.
The skill of game selection is, paradoxically, not in selecting the right game. The skill is in refusing to sit down in the wrong game. Most every player I know, myself included, would help his bottom line by thinking long and hard every time he decided to enter a game, and asking himself, "Is this really the best game I can find right now? And if so, is it a good enough game to justify sitting in?" Poker players, especially good players, can convince themselves that they have an edge at just about any table. But if those good players chose to expend their energies finding only tables where they had their biggest possible edge, and putting in as many hours as they could at those tables, just imagine how much more money they could be taking in.
If you're a player who just can't stop himself from taking the first open seat in an online or brick-and-mortar casino cardroom, you may want to spend some time training yourself in the discipline of game selection. In this changed online poker environment, that discipline may just save your bankroll.
Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at www.CardPlayer.com.
