Pros step into the poker game with confidence. They have such a
wealth of playing experience that they can make tough betting
decisions in a very timely manner. That means that they give the
odds proper consideration, keep appraised of the other players,
and make their play. This is the persona you need to adopt when
you play.

To be a shark you need to act the part.

Sit up straight like a professional. Clean the area around your
computer desk and stay organized. Prepare. Have any note taking
material handy. Plan your game play on a tight schedule. Start at a
precise time; review the casinos and tables for a pre-determined
period of time before you play. Be observant. Start play when you
are certain you have the right table in your sites. Watch the other
players carefully and make notes. Never be sloppy about your
playing time.

Remember, you are a shark, play at the pace of a shark. You scull
through the water, your eyes alert. You make thoughtful and
purposeful moves. You appraise your environment. Occasionally,
when the time is right and your prey is unprepared, you strike
aggressively and purposefully. You raise and re-raise. You push
out weaker players. You gain respect from all of those around you.
Your opponents know only one thing about you – that you have a
significant stack in front of you and you seem to know everyone’s
cards before they are shown.

You are never rattled even by a string of bad beats. They mean
nothing in the big picture to you. You play to win over the long
haul. Small bad breaks have no consequence for you. If you
become tired or you’re just not happy with the table, you leave.
And then after exactly one hour, you finish playing regardless of
your status and take a break. You then carefully polish your notes
regarding how you played and what you have learned – and
record your wins and losses. That’s one of your secret weapons.

You must keep detailed financial records. A business cannot be
successful without detailed financials and neither can you. You
must know exactly how much you have won or loss every time
you play. Be precise. If you won $102.50, then make that your
answer if anyone asks. Or maybe you lost $45.75. Get in the habit
of being exacting. That’s the key to tight play.

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When the stakes required to play a game of Texas Hold’em
increase, there is not a proportional increase in the average
winnings or money flow because most players, especially at the
start of play, play tighter at higher stakes.

Here’s how that works.

Higher stakes cause players to be more cautious. Pots do not grow
proportionately as the stakes and blinds increase. Your return on
investment will therefore decrease as the minimum blind goes up.

Most major online casinos release data on hands played (for a
price) on a regular basis. A recent study (June 2004) from one of
the largest online casinos, based on several million actual hands of
Poker played, revealed that the return on investment varies quite a
bit based on the maximum bet.

In the $2 games, the value of the winning pot varied from 28 to 37
times the Big Blind (BB) – the most you would have to invest to see
the flop (short of raises). The average pots were in the $60 range.
With the right cards, you could expect a return of 3000% on a
winning hand.

Are Low Stake Tables Faster?

Not necessarily. Texas Hold’em is the king of fast play. Several
$1000 plus pots were played in less than a minute and ranged as
long as 6 minutes – the same range for the small stake tables. Over
all, the average length of an online Poker game today is just over
one minute or 50-60 hands per hour.

In higher stakes games, one thing is quite clear. There are a higher
percentage of tighter and aggressive players at these tables than at
the small stake games. That means there are more sharks at the big
tables and a much better chance that you will be one of the fish.
The smart thing to do here is to say away from these kinds of
tables.

Given the fact that the return on investment is lower at the high
stake games, that the average level of play is much more
aggressive and that a much larger stake is required, there is very
little opportunity to be a consistent winner on tables with $50 and
up blinds.

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A delay followed by a check often indicates weakness
Most opponents who “think” or wait a longer time than normal and then cheek, are
trying to suggest they have a decent hand. They are trying to indicate strength by
“thinking” about betting, but they really want you to check so that they can get a
free card. If your opponent was going to check-raise, he would generally check at a
normal speed and then raise.

A delay followed by a bet often indicates strength
An opponent who “thinks” a long time and then bets usually has a strong hand. In
this case, he is trying to indicate weakness by “thinking” a long time to lure you into
calling.

An instantaneous bet/raise on the turn or river usually indicates strength
Most players who bet or raise Instantaneously using the “act in turn” buttons on the
turn or river generally have strong hands. Normally strong means weak when
discussing tells, but I generally find that my opponents have strong hands in these
cases. Your opponent thinks that you think he would never raise so fast with a
strong hand: therefore, he uses reverse psychology and raises instantaneously to
make you think that he is weak.

I believe these types of plays are meant to bully you into calling, so he dares you to
call with his instantaneous raise. Don’t let this bullying strategy work against you. If
you don’t know your opponent, generally an instantaneous action on the turn or
river indicates a very strong hand.

This tell has varying degrees of reliability depending on the street. On the river, an
instantaneous raise almost always means the nuts or a hand close to it. On the
turn, it generally indicates a very strong hand, although some players will
occasionally raise instantaneously with the intention of checking the river. An
instantaneous raise preflop also generally indicates a strong hand, especially from
early to middle position; however, if they are in late position and are raising a late
position player, it is difficult to make generalizations since they might just be
bullying their opponent.

I have found it difficult to generalize about players who bet or raise instantaneously
on the flop. Some players raise with good hands, while others raise with weak
hands trying to buy a free card. This is especially true with preflop raisers who try to
buy a free card with overcards.

An instantaneous check usually indicates weakness
Many players use the check/fold button when they plan on folding their hand to any
bet. This is especially true with players who are playing two tables. There are two
situations where you can use this information to your advantage. Let’s say you are
in last position. The first player checks and the next two players instantaneously
check. Since the two middle players probably don’t have anything, a bluff might be
successful against the lone opponent who checked early.
Another situation occurs when you are the player who checks early. If your
opponents instantaneously check behind you, you might have a bluffing opportunity
on the next card. These tells work best at the larger sites such as Paradise Poker
and Party Poker where use of this button is common. Many players at these sites
play two games at once and use the check/fold button to quickly move back and
forth between hands.
Two notes of caution related to this tell. Although not very common, be careful
against some tricky players who might use the check/call button to slowplay their
hands. Second, there is a fine line between instantaneous checking and checking
quickly. Use of the auto check/fold button before another player has acted means
that they would have folded their hand if their opponent had bet. This is very
different than someone who checks very quickly once it is his turn to act. This leads
us into our next tell.

A quick check usually indicates weakness, but beware if the player check-raises
A quick check can indicate weakness also, especially when there are several
players playing the hand; however, if a player checks quickly and then raises, be
very careful! When a player check-raises, the quick check was probably an attempt
to indicate weakness so that you would bet into his strong hand.
Remember that all of these tells are generalizations. They work best against
unknown opponents since you don’t have any other information to go by. Once you
have played with a player for a while, observe their betting patterns and then record
what happens when they don’t follow their usual pattern. Does his betting pattern
follow the general tell or does he use reverse psychology? Some opponents use
the “act in turn” buttons with both good hands and as bluffs, so an instantaneous
bet from these types of players does not mean anything. Record notes on each player’s tendencies
or “tells” for future reference.
As a final note, try not to give tells about your own play to your opponents. There
are two ways to do this. One way is to simply bet at the same speed throughout
every hand. Another way is to randomly change the speed of your betting. For
example, if the last card shown is a red card, you act after two seconds, and if it is a
black card, you act after four seconds. This strategy will confuse your more
observant opponents who are looking for tells and can’t find any.

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If you haven’t already noticed, probability is a huge factor in Texas Hold ʹem. For example, there are 2,598,960 possible hands in a 52‐
card deck but only 4 Royal Flushes. If the average serious poker player is dealt 100,000 hands in their lifetime, they will never hold (on the first five cards) more than 4 percent of all the possible
hands. And likely a lot less.

Figuring out straight card combinations for the purpose of this text are called Card Odds (you will be introduced to other kinds of odds later). Card Odds can reveal some quite interesting information. For example, how many pat straight flushes will you see in your
lifetime? To determine that number, the expected number of hands that could be dealt during your lifetime is estimated by the
following calculation:

10 complete poker hands / hr. x 5 hrs. / game x 50 games / yr.
x 40 yrs. / poker life = l00,000 hands of poker per lifetime.
This is a pretty aggressive estimate, as most people will never
come close to this number of complete hands in Texas Hold’em.
Based on this level of play, the number of pat (on the first five
cards) poker hands that you should get during your lifetime is
calculated from the card odds and tabulated as follows:

Cards Dealt | Number of Pat Hands
No pair 50,000
One pair 40,00
Two pair 5,000
Three of a kind 2,000
Straight 400
Flush 200
Full house 170
Four of a kind 25
Straight flush 1.4
Royal straight flush 0.15

So statistically, you should see a pat straight flush on your firstfive cards once or twice during your lifetime. Most average poker players will never see even one.

Card players often talk about having a ‘lucky streak’ or a ‘run’. Mathematically, ‘streaks’ don’t exist. But suppose you did have an
amazing run of cards one evening. What would the odds be of having five consecutive straight flushes in a row?

Players use card odds to make playing decisions. A decision made without taking into account card odds makes poker a guessing
game. The chances of finishing a flush or a straight, the probability of getting an over card (face card), the percentage of times youʹre
going to flop a card to match your pocket pair ‐ are all extremely important factors in Texas Hold’em.

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1. Wait a full table rotation before posting the BB
This tip is probably debatable by many of the players out there. In my opinion, unless you know what you are doing, this tactic will save you money in the long run by letting you not only get mentally prepared for the game, but also gives you invalable time to evaluate your opponents. The worst thing that can happen is to get dealt a strong hand early and then get caught in a massive raising war between two players you don’t know. They could be two maniacs for sure, but what if one of them is a maniac and the other player is super-tight? Most likely, that super tight player is holding the nuts while you are bumbling by with top pair or two pair. Not a good move. So be patient, take notes in the meanwhile and save money in the long run.

2. Turn on your sound, turn down the music
It’s no secret that us humans work better using more of our senses, otherwise we wouldn’t have been born the way we are. Yes, it may get annoying to hear the dinks, beeps and chip sounds of the game after awhile, but hearing those audible cues are vital to your play. You are much less prone to make mistakes when you can hear and see what people are doing, as opposed to just seeing it. For me, I notice it helps my timing when I am trying to figure out if I am onto a online tell or not, based on the delay during the other person’s actions.

3. Show the avatars (people in chairs), but don’t stereotype them
This is probably the most debatable tip I’m guessing, because if you’ve turned them off, you probably really don’t like the avatars to begin with. And if you do like avatars, well, they’re probably on already. I just want to get my two cents in about this Party Poker tip by saying that even though avatars are computer graphics, it’s again human nature to easily identify faces. That means we can more easily associate a personality to a face, so it makes it easier to remember how someone is playing when we can attach a face to a playing style.

That being said, I’m sure there is some negative influence of these faces as well, because we probably tend to associate a certain avatar with a playing style. For instance, I’ll admit that I used to mentally associate one of the avatar pictures with bluffing. I think this was caused by a long string of coincidences, when different players using that avatar would constantly bluff, so I just starting linking that specific avatar with bluffing. Don’t let this happen to you.

4. Learn to leave the table
This is really just a general poker tip, but it still nabs even the poker pros at times. At Party Poker, if you find that you are being outplayed, outclassed or just unlucky at the table, it’s ok to leave. Don’t think about getting your money back or getting revenge on the bastard that rivered you for the 3rd time now. If you are losing money at your table, you do NOT have good table image no matter what you might think. Not only are you not in a good mood, which puts you on tilt (admit it or not), but other players will be more likely to make plays against you. This makes your game harder in more ways than you want. With so many tables at Party Poker, just get up and go, it’s that easy.

I can’t stress this enough if the game gets short-handed (6 or less players) and you are not familiar with short-handed play. This is an easy way to lose a lot of cash if you don’t know what you are doing. I see this happen all the time, when a table breaks up and I’m stuck with two solid players and three guys who don’t realize they are about to get run over. Don’t be road kill when all it takes is a single click.

5. Buy-in more than necessary at the poker table
If you’ve been doing your homework, you’ll know that you should always sit in with at minimum 20 times the big blind at any poker table. In the realities of online poker, this should be more along the lines of at least 40 times the BB. Personally, I like to sit down with practically 100x the BB. You should think about doing this too. Why? First, don’t ever be in the position of holding the nuts and not having enough money to raise the pot. I’ve seen this happen too many times, where a guy will have flopped a full house in a $3/6 game, but only have $12 in his bankroll. He could have made a killing if it weren’t for the fact he was playing with a small stack.

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1. If you are worried about losing your money, you should stop playing poker, switch tables or take a break. Second reason to buy more than is necessary, is for intimidation factor. Opinions may differ, but faced off against a big stack, my feelings are that a good amount of players (but not all) show a bit more respect (read: fear) and will play accordingly – which is to your benefit. Now, don’t read this as buying in for $1,000 in a $1/2 game, because then people will think you are just nuts, but $400.. now we’re talking.

2. Move out of the $5 tournaments ASAP
This isn’t as much a trick as it is advice. The $5 sit and go tournaments on Party Poker are cheap, but at a price. With a $1 entry fee, this amounts to a 20% rake, which is no light task to beat. If you are good enough to win enough $5 tournaments that you can beat this rake, you are good enough to be playing at the $10 tournaments. There really is no difference between the two; and in my opinion, the $10 tournaments might even be easier because you don’t get filled out tables of nothing but calling stations. Try as you might and throw the book of poker at me, but there almost nothing humanly possible you can do at an entire table of maniacs or calling stations. The game makes more sense at $10 and even more sense at $30.

3. Protect your computer!
This may sound like some paranoid or strange advice, but it never hurts to take extra precautions when it comes to protecting your computer and poker information. Anti-virus software of course is nice, but in reality isn’t as much a threat as spyware or trojans. I recommend getting Ad-Aware 6, which is a very popular (and free!) spyware killer that will thouroughly clean your system out of tracking junk on your computer. Firewall software is great too and highly recommended. Windows XP comes built in with it’s own firewall that you can enable, but other software like BlackIce defender are even better. Chances are nobody will be coming after you for your poker passwords, but why chance it?

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Many players play two tables, read e-mail, watch television, talk on the telephone,
and many other things that might distract them from the game. Since there are so
many distractions, some of your opponents may not be aware of all the action that
is taking place. This is yet another reason to use less deception in your game, since
some of your opponents will not even see some of your plays so that you can gain
some future value out of them.

One final point about play on the Internet. Since players move in and out of games
a lot, can’t see your face, and are distracted by many other things, they tend to
notice less that you are playing a tight game. In a live game, if you sit there a
couple of hours without playing a hand, don’t expect a lot of action when yon decide
to bet or raise. On the Internet, you can play a straightforward tight game for a long
time and still get good action when you bet since opponents either do not notice or
have not had enough time to realize that you are such a tight player.
On the other hand, if you don’t play many hands in a live game, your chances for
pulling off a successful bluff are high, while on the Internet I doubt this gives you
much of an advantage. A bluff on the Internet is usually only profitable by the merits
of the play of the particular hand, not by table image.

Table image is not as important online as in a live poker game since players are
easily distracted and move in and out of games a lot; therefore, generally play a more
straightforward tight game online than you would in a live game.

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One of the enjoyable things about poker is the social aspect of the game. Although the Internet is very different than live play in this aspect, the chat feature adds a unique dimension to Internet poker. Of course, you can chat in live games, but if people said the same things in a live game that they sometimes say on the Internet, there would be a lot of bloody noses sitting at the table. Although some players abusethe chat feature, in general it adds a great dimension that allows you to talk to players from all over the world.

Internet chat has created a lot of jargon to shorten the amount of typing required.

One of the most popular is lol or Laugh Out Loud. Most players use this to laugh athow a hand developed usually in a bad beat situation, but it can also be used as a laugh in general. Arg is another common term used when someone is not happy with something. Some other common terms you will see include:

Smiling face

Frown

vnh Very nice hand

brb Be right back

tx or ty Thanks

woohoo Celebration

zzzz Going to sleep from the slow play

t Testing or time

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The basic steps in applying odds at the poker table are as follows:

1. Determine the number of discounted outs.
2. Calculate the pot odds. This is the size of the pot in relation to the bet.
3. Calculate the implied pot odds. This is the current pot plus the bets you
expect to win in relation to the current bet.
4. Compare the implied pot odds to the odds against improving your hand
5. Determine your best strategy.

Let’s look at a few examples to show how to apply these steps.
A middle player calls and you raise from the cutoff with K♣ Q♥ in a $10-$20 game. The big blind calls and three players see the flop of T♣ 7♦ 5♠. The big blind, a tight rock who never bluffs, bets out and the middle player folds. What should you do?

• Determine the number of discounted outs. We assume your opponent has at least a pair since he never bluffs; therefore, you need a king or queen to improve, which is six outs. You would be drawing dead against TT, 77, or 55, unless you hit a runner-runner straight. Other likely holdings of your opponent include AT, KT, QT. and JT. In this case, a king or queen would not help against either KT or QT. It is doubtful that your opponent would call a raise preflop with K7, K5, Q7, Q5, T7, 75, or T5: therefore, you only need to discount your outs for the probability that your opponent holds KT, QT, TT, 77, or 55. One other consideration is what could happen if you hit the king or queen on
the turn. Your opponent could possibly win on the river by hitting two pair or better. You should discount your outs a little more for this possibility. To determine how much you should discount your outs, it is helpful to evaluate the probable hands of your opponent. Probable hands that you could beat if you improve include JJ, AT, A7, A5, JTs, and 99. Discounting outs is always a matter of judgment, but you might expect to win this hand 50% of the time when you improve, considering the possibility that your opponent might have a set, KT, QT, or improve on the river. Therefore, you should discount your six outs and play as if you had three outs.

• Calculate the pot odds. The total pot at this point is $75 (three players paid $20 to see the flop + $5 small blind + $10 bet on flop by the big blind): therefore, your pot odds are 7.5 to 1 for a $10 her.

• Calculate the implied pot odds. Do you expect to win more bets when the king or queen comes? You should win bets 50% of the time when you improve, but you will lose more bets the other 50% when your opponent has a better hand. A simplified assumption would be that all future bets break even.

• Compare the implied pot odds to the odds against improving your hand. In this case, we look at the pot odds since the implied odds are the same. The pot odds of 7.5 to 1 are compared to the odds against improving with three outs of 15 to 1 (see out chart).

• Determine your best strategy. The odds against improving are 15 to 1; therefore, we should fold since the pot odds are only offering 7.5 to 1.

Let’s discuss this hand a little further to show the importance of discounting outs. Many players draw to overcards on the flop hoping to pair up, and this example shows that this often is a big mistake. If we played our hand thinking we have six outs to the king or queen, our odds are 7 to 1 against improving. This compares favorably to the 7.5 to 1 pot odds; therefore, we would call expecting to make a
small profit. However, this assumes we would always win when the king or queen comes. As we discussed before, our opponent could very well have KT, QT, TT, 77, 55 or beat us on the river.

Some players also justify calling by saying that they have implied odds of winning more bets should they improve. This is true if your hand wins, although sometimes you won’t even collect more bets when your opponent folds on the turn to a bet or raise. The problem is that sometimes you will lose additional bets. If your king or queen comes on the turn, you will probably raise and then be faced with a reraise, if
your opponent has a set or two pair.

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