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Ensuring That You’re Setting Yourself Up For Success

Guide To Winning Poker (2)

Nothing is more important than choosing the right poker rooms
Most players make some very big mistakes here
There are lots of opportunities to make extra money by trying out poker sites

Your Initial Decisions Are The Most Important

We’ll be talking about two important elements in your overall success at online poker, which are poker room selection and game selection. This is definitely worth going over in detail, as you may or may not have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing here, but most players could stand to improve here by putting more thought and effort into the process. So I’m going to outline here a few things that you need to be thinking about in order to set yourself up properly. We’ll start with proper poker room selection.

There are a number of reasons why players play at a given poker room, but it’s rarely the case that they’ve put in the right amount of research in their decisions. If you aren’t intimately aware of the opportunities out there at poker rooms you don’t play at, then you’re included in this group, and this includes most players. Now, depending on where you live, there may be limitations on where you can play, for instance if you’re from the U.S. there are a lot of rooms that won’t take you, and there are restrictions in place for certain other countries as well. As a general rule though, if you can play at a poker room, you need to know about it.

Why Players Select The Wrong Poker Rooms To Play At

Marketing plays a big role in attracting poker players to a poker room, which is why they spend so much money on this. There’s also elements such as building the brand, and other strategies typical to business in general. This is how demand is created, however there’s much more on the line here than which detergent you are using, and you need to be able to step away from all this and be in a position to decide things from your own business perspective, since playing poker online is a business of sorts. If you are unable to do this properly, you won’t be playing at the proper poker rooms, and this can even make the difference between being profitable, or losing money continually.

The research you need to do involves both seeking to gain information online, and actually going to the rooms and experiencing things for yourself. You definitely need to add a grain or two of salt to online poker room reviews, as the reviewers are being compensated for your signing up there, so they naturally can be a little biased. There’s absolutely no substitute though for your actually going there and trying the room out by playing, and we’re talking more than just a few hands as well. You need to gain at least enough experience to get a good feel for the level of competition at a given game type and stake, while keeping in mind that this both differs by game and stake, and can also change over time. Then, as you go along, you’ll be more and more in a position to make comparisons and decide which ones, and there will be several, that you want to maintain accounts at and provide yourself opportunities to play at.

How Much Traffic Does A Good Poker Site Need Really?

One of the things that a lot of players, and a great many in fact, get confused about is the amount of action that’s required to justify having an account at a given poker room. This is one of the main reasons why players gravitate so much to the biggest rooms, as there is a ton of action day and night and they never even need worry about playing anywhere else. The fact that you don’t need to worry about this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t, and almost always there are some better games elsewhere that you constantly miss out on when you take this lazy approach. The best players select from among games at several rooms concurrently, and some of the rooms may not even have a game running at their stake all the time, but when they do it may be a more profitable one than the norm, so they don’t want to miss out on these opportunities. Neither should you.

One of the benefits of the need to try out all the poker rooms out there with enough traffic to make it at least a viable part time alternative is that you will be collecting bonus money along the way, as all poker rooms are willing to generally double your initial deposit up to a certain point for trying them out. There are even deals where you can get sites to deposit money for you at certain poker rooms, where you don’t even need a bankroll to get started. You generally have to play there a decent amount to be able to withdraw the money, but that’s what you want anyway, as you need to get enough experience there to make accurate comparisons with other rooms.

Trying Out Poker Rooms Also Builds Your Experience

Once you’re finished your initial research, then you’ll be in a position to decide which rooms you want to keep an account at, to make sure that you’re given an opportunity to select the best tables and tournaments. By the way, it’s not merely how fishy a game is that will decide this, as the ease of getting a seat factors into things as well. It does you no good to see several juicy tables running, with so many people on the waiting list that by the time you get to sit down, the fish are all gone, and you’re left with all similar minded people as yourself, all looking to prey on players that are no longer there. This is another reason why you need alternatives, as this is quite common at the busier rooms but much less so at those with less traffic.

I also want to say a little about game selection before we wrap this up. What I’m talking about here is playing a certain type of game rather than another. There are a lot of factors that go into these decisions, or should go into them, but it does pay to be at least somewhat systematic about your approach to this, similar to what is needed in poker room selection. There are two main factors here, which are your skill level and the general skill level of opponents. Like poker room selection, the most important of these is making sure you’re playing at the softest competition possible for your given stake or buy-in. Softer competition means that it’s simply easier to make money, and since our goal is to make as much as we can, that’s going to be pretty important indeed.

Select The Games That Are Best For You Overall

However, there are other elements that must be taken into consideration, like the level of enjoyment that you have for a certain game, but as mentioned before, profitability must still be accounted for as well, since you probably won’t be as happy losing at it. There’s also differing skill levels across different games. For instance, heads up would require the most skill, with other forms needing lesser amounts of various degrees. As well, a game which you may not be the best at may still be worth pursuing, as it may represent a much better option as you improve at it and get to the point where your skill at it versus the average skill may represent the biggest gap and thus may represent the biggest opportunity.

Putting the two together, once again we may have certain game types that are easier at one room and another type which is more difficult, and we really need to look at these separately in order to get the best idea of what to choose where. This all will require an investment of your time, and you do want to ensure you are giving all of this its proper due by not being lazy and causing yourself to not achieve anywhere near what you could had you spent the proper amount of time on it.

In the next section we’ll look at what you need to be thinking about in terms ofbuilding and managing your poker bankroll.

Ken’s Guide To Winning Poker – Index

Starting With A Solid Foundation

Aggression Series

Position Series

Various Poker Strategies

Mistakes Series