Tom’s Winning Tips for Online Poker — Part II

This column is the second of a three-part series of tips for playing online poker. In today’s poker world, there are far more people playing online each day at home than in casinos. These suggestions should help you to improve your win rate.

Tip No. 4
Look for tells. A tell is a mannerism, gesture, or movement that gives away the strength of a person’s hand or the action that he intends to take in the play of a hand. For example, Ed always stares straight at you when he is bluffing, and at the flop when he has a strong hand. I know that you can’t see your opponents when playing online like you can when playing in a real casino, but that doesn’t mean there are no tells to be discovered online. Let’s look at a few of them.

Most sites have little spaces on the screen that say, “Fold to Any Bet,” “Raise Any Bet,” “Automatic Check,” “Check and Fold,” and so on. Let’s suppose, for example, that you have seen the flop in a hold’em hand. You flopped a pair, but are uncertain of whether or not you have the best pair, so you decide to check. If all of the players who act after you rapidly check, that’s a sign that they probably hit the Automatic Check button, which is usually a sign of weakness. This means that your pair is probably the best hand, at least for the moment, and you can consider betting it on the turn.

Other online players take a long time to act on their hands, and then come out betting or raising. If you pay attention to the hands they show down when they do this, you can figure out whether this hesitation is always done with a strong hand or not. If it always indicates strength at the showdown, play accordingly. If it doesn’t always mean strength, don’t put too much importance on it. People who are playing online often are doing something else at the same time, such as reading or answering e-mail, chatting with other players, running to the bathroom, watching television, or any number of other things that could cause the delay. Pay close attention so that you can better decide whether the delays have any serious meaning.

Tip No. 5
Play small tournaments first. If you’re a tournament junkie like me, I suggest that you begin your online tournament career by playing the numerous tournaments that are available around-the-clock. As a general rule, begin by playing small buy-in tournaments. Why? To create a comfort zone for yourself as a fledgling tournament player. If you do well in the smaller buy-in tournaments against weaker opponents, your confidence will steadily grow and you can think about stepping up. If you are successful in tournaments and learn to love them as I do, you can increase the parameters of your comfort zone and play bigger buy-in events.

You will find tournaments that you can enter for as little as $1 and as much as $530 on a regular basis. Some sites even offer freeroll tournaments in which all of the money is put up by the site for its players. I have seen as many as 30,000 people playing in the same freeroll tournament online. Wow, just try conquering that size of a field some time! Poker has a way of teaching all of us humility.

Playing small buy-in one-table tournaments (called sit-and-gos) or one-table satellites online can be a great learning experience. For a finite investment, you can get a good idea of what kinds of hands people play and how they perform in different situations. In all tournaments and satellites, your investment is just the original buy-in, with the obvious exception of rebuy events. This investment gives you the opportunity to get tournament experience at a limited cost. With one-table satellites or sit-and-gos, you have the added benefit of learning how to play shorthanded. Don’t forget that every tournament continues until one player has won all of the chips, so learning how to play shorthanded is crucial to your future success.

Tip No. 6
Schedule your tournament play. Because there are so many tournaments from which to choose, you need to choose the ones that suit your bankroll and your available time. Don’t sign up for a tournament that will take four hours to complete if you have to be somewhere else in two hours. Why bother to play in the first place if you don’t have the time to finish it? If a tournament is worth playing at all, it requires your best effort, and enough time to finish the job if you go the distance.

I like to pencil in on my calendar the tournaments that I am especially interested in playing. This way, I can try to arrange my schedule to be available for as many of them as possible. I note the game, the buy-in, the date, the starting time, and anything else that might be of interest. This type of disciplined planning makes good sense. Many online poker rooms offer special promotions and tournament deals that are too good to pass up. By checking a site’s upcoming events, you can choose the best bargains and put them on your tournament schedule.

Tip No. 7
Don’t play to escape from something else. When you have a lot of other things on your mind, it is very difficult to focus on poker. If you’ve had an argument with your significant other, for example, it’s hard to get it out of your mind so that you can concentrate and play your best game. If you insist on playing anyway, like so many of us often do, at least play in a smaller game, where you won’t hurt your bankroll too much if you lose.

Above all, don’t kid yourself into thinking that you can play a good game of poker even if you are distracted or bothered by something. Even the best of players can’t play their A-game when they’re stressed. Fortunately for the top players, their B-game or (gasp!) even their C-game is often better than that of most of their opponents. Most of us, however, are best advised not to play at all or to play smaller limits than normal if we have too many problems or distractions. It’s tough enough to win when you are focused and paying attention, so don’t handicap yourself even more by playing when something is weighing heavily on your mind.

Tom McEvoy is a Team Pro for PokerStars, the world’s largest online poker site. He also is an instructor for DeepStacks University, a new online teaching site, and is available for seminars or private instruction. His website is www.tommcevoy.com.