This article is especially for those online poker players on whom the following description fits: You have been playing online poker at least for a while and have a basic understanding of the strategy, your results have improved and you have noticed that you are overall a better poker player but you are still losing a little money in online poker and are looking to the take the next step and become a winner.
From this online poker strategy article you will find 7 pointers of which you have most likely overlooked at least couple. The odds are that by following the pointers that you have so far ignored your results will improve and hopefully they will take your poker career to the next level, and who knows maybe at some point you will become a huge online poker winner.
7 Steps for going from small loser to winner in online poker:
1: Get a poker tracking software.
Most of your opponents are using it and they are completely legal so not using them would simply be silly. The two most popular poker tracking softwares are PokerTracker and Holdem Manager. Both of these softwares (they cost around $50) will reveal you important stats on your play but also on how your opponents are playing. Using these stats is an easy way to get better understanding on how your opponents are playing and what are their leaks, and when in poker you make money mainly by taking advantage of your opponent’s leaks these softwares are obviously very important.
2: Signup at a poker training site.
Poker books are great for getting basic knowledge about different poker games, but unfortunately during the internet era their tips are simply outdated. In order to stay on top of the latest poker trends it is very important to register at least at one poker coaching video site. One that feel comfortable recommending is Bluefirepoker, but there are also countless others.
3: Focus on one poker game.
If you are playing poker for fun it’s totally okay to play all kinds of different poker games and not really focus on anything, but the truth is that huge chunk of the pros money comes from these people who play multiple games and thus make lot of mistakes that they wouldn’t make if they played just one game. When you are deciding which game you want to focus on it’s important to keep in mind your goals as a poker player. Texas holdem games are by far the toughest there is, this is simply because almost everyone focuses on them. So if you want to play games that have more value you should focus for an example on Telesina poker or 32 draw poker, both of which are games played mainly by casual players. The drawback on focusing on these rarer games is obviously that there are no high stakes games. So once you have destroyed the small stakes games you either need to decide if you are happy with the money that you are able to make from them or if you need to focus on game from which you can make more money, but making which would be much harder work.
4: Focus on one game format.
Just a couple years ago this really wouldn’t have been an issue, and still there are people who are able to play for an example on competitive level no limit texas holdem and fixed limit texas holdem. But I would really recommend that players who are now looking to make good money from poker focus only one format. This means that you need to decided if you want to play 1-on1 no limit texas holdem, 1-on-1 fixed limit texas holdem, 6 max pot limit omaha, full table 7 card stud or what ever it might be that you would prefer. By focusing only on one game and on one format and working hard on your skills you will gain a huge advantage over the casual players and even over the pros who play multiple games and formats.
5: Put in the volume in order to get the feel.
Often top poker players can make their (good) decision almost instantly after they have seen the action taken by their opponent. When they are making their decision instantly they are not rolling the dice and just blindly doing something, but instead they have something that can be called the “feel”. This means that they have played so much poker and have been so often in comparable situations that they simply know almost instantly what is the best decision in that situation. The only way to get that feel is to simply put in massive amount of hands.
6: Think about poker also when you are away from the table.
Run different situation in your head, think about how you could have gotten more value out of the hands that you played in the last session, think about if you could have picked up some tell on your opponents and so on. Thinking about poker away from table is almost as important as actually playing poker on the table, this is because usually when you are in action you are too busy with the current decisions and can’t clearly analyze the hands that you have already played.
7: Understand the mathematical side of poker.
You might think that all the poker math that you need to know is that you hit your flush about 1/3 times if you have a 4 flush on the flop in texas holdem, but the fact is that in today’s online poker games the math is more important then ever. In fact it will be hard to even be a decent sized winner without understanding hand ranges and other slightly more complicated math elements of the game.
