As stated they are all “fun” but how can playing poker not be fun. Well, except when you are losing. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There is one option not on the list. If you are lucky you can join a Poker club which combines all of these things.
I played in a poker club of my friend, visiting as an out of town guest, and I immediately wished I had the same thing locally. The poker club had the best of all poker options in one place. Like a casino they offered security, in fact, the club was probably more secure. It put a premium on protecting players money and players. The poker club made its money from monthly dues and didn’t rake the pots. The owners only played in tournaments, never cash games, and insisted that on the tables they played on, the players deal the hands. They didn’t want even the suspicion of their dealers shooting them better cards.

They had security cameras outside and inside the venue. The tapes were housed in room that could only be open with a key that was never on the premises. Would be thieves looking to cover their tracks would never be able to access the room, at least not before the cops arrived. The club took steps to make sure they were a legal business in the area, so had an alarm wired like a bank directly to the police.

Thieves would be foolish to rob it anyway, as the poker club, scanned checks or credit cards from the players and never had much cash on the premises. The only money thieves could steal was from the players themselves. The fact that one or two of the owners were always there with a shot-gun and an armed off-duty cop worked the door made it even less attractive to rob.

The poker club had a big enough customer base that there was almost always a game. They did have a dress code, so players looking for options to play in their underwear or in the nude, would have to stick to playing online. Actually, the club went a step further then just offering live play. They had a bank of computers that players could play poker on while waiting for a game. So, in the club you could play online poker too. Some players mostly play the computers.

They also allowed players to bring their own alcohol. They put it in a refrigerator and gave the players a ticket like a coat check. Wait-staff would bring the drinks to the players. Course once your beer ran out you couldn’t buy any more. They also had a limit on the number of drinks a player could “deposit” before a session. After I think 6 or 8 hours of play they were allowed to restock. So like a bar, you did have drunks you could exploit.

The club was also very responsible about calling cabs for their players when they had drank too much, so it was safe from a number of perspectives. Also, they were willing to spread and deal home games on a table as long as they were given notice and all the players were members of the club. Considering the pool tables, dart boards, shuffleboards, big screen TVs, couches, and video games you really couldn’t ask for a better poker club.

I can also recommend to play and practice your skills at a safe and high traffic poker site such as: https://www.bwin.com/texas-holdem-poker. See you there!

So in blackjack then it is the basic strategy of playing hands that you learn first and foremost and knowing this alone would place you ahead of many of the recreational players who do not know basic. But poker too has a basic strategy although it isn’t as clear cut as it is in poker. Another huge similarity is in how very good players only have a slight edge in terms of return on investment. The variance in both games is very severe and depending on which games you select in both games then the return on turnover can be higher or lower depending on the situation at hand.

One of the big differences though between the two games is in how much potential there is to play the game for profit online. In online blackjack then there is little potential to make profit except perhaps for bonus hustling but even then the online sites have really tightened up in this area too. But in online poker then the potential is certainly there and is enough for some players at the very highest level to earn well into seven figures a year.

This is simply not possible in blackjack whether you play live or online. This is why when people say to me if I recommend blackjack as a profit source then I simply say that I would be looking to put my time and effort into playing Online Texas Holdem poker for profit. Even though blackjack takes less time to learn, there is simply more profit potential in poker than blackjack and in fact depending on where you play then making money from blackjack is more than just difficult……it is downright impossible. So you either have to choose between a very difficult environment in which to make money or an impossible environment if you play blackjack.

I don’t know about you but I do not like that proposition much and was why blackjack became dated for me in 2001 and was why I stopped and switched to online poker. Also when you play online poker then you can play several tables at once and this is another factor as to why you can make more money playing poker. However though the role of position plays a huge part in both games and this is where the house edge really comes from in blackjack. In poker many players abuse their position simply because they never make the connection with blackjack in how important position really is.

It is wrong to concentrate on results in the short term because of two reasons. Firstly as stated then results in the short term can and are a very poor indicator of longer term success and also because short term results simply cannot be controlled. Let us imagine a poker player called “Rob” who set himself an absolutely impossible goal of never having a losing day playing online. Even if he multi-tables and gets a large number of hands in per hour, the variance is so severe in poker that he can never guarantee a winning day because he could never play enough hands to make sure that he never had a losing day.

So the short term volatility in poker means that short term results simply cannot be controlled and are almost chaotic in nature. Your main goal as a poker player is to concentrate on your decisions and try to make sure that they are as solid as possible. Forget about being right all the time, poker is a game of incomplete information at the end of the day. You are playing a game where your goal is to make good calculated decisions based on odds and probabilities. This is how financial day traders work and stock market specialists. They know that having winning trades all the time is impossible and they allow for losing.

As a poker player then you must do this as well. If you are making good decisions solidly and consistently then money will surely follow. If it doesn’t after doing this then this is a sure sign that you are in the wrong games and playing at a level that is too tough for you. So your motto when you play online or live for that matter is to concentrate on “decisions and not outcomes”. If you run a bluff against a player who called you down with top pair to take the pot then review your play. You review your play for one very important reason and this is because you need to get some kind of a fix on your decision making processes. If you are making bad decisions then you have something of a problem. You can make a lot of money in online poker making great decisions. You can also make good money making decent decisions but if you make bad decisions constantly then you are going to have trouble making poker pay.

The key here is to get as much of your rake back as possible. A 27% rake deal would return just over $10/hour while a 33% rake deal would be at about $13/hr. The bigger rake deals obviously give you more money back but the main drawback with these deals is that you could do far better. An 80% rake deal would return you $32/hour here and that is a massive difference from $10/hr.

So how do you attain yourself of a non standard rake deal? Well there are numerous ways to go about this but nearly all poker sites are part of networks these days. The main deal sees the network take a percentage of this money and so approaching a poker site to give you a 100% rake deal is unlikely to work because the site is usually duty bound to pay a set percentage to the host company. For example bwin poker would have to pay expenses to Ongame etc. So the best you could hope for here would be to get a “minus expenses” rake deal where the site takes nothing from you.

In return for this of course then the site would need something in return and this is where the services of a low-stakes limit player would be valuable. At the end of the day, there are many poker players out there who have tremendous value to poker sites and so you need to realise this. There are several barriers when it comes to being able to make money online. The first barrier is your own poker game and the second and third barriers are the rake and other good poker players. So if you avoid good players and strive to pay as little rake as possible then you have a serious chance of making very good money simply by breaking even on the tables.

It is often perceived that small stakes limit games are unbeatable because of the rake. This may be true and you do need to have a better game than average to offset that. But if you are creative in your approach to the game and are not prepared to accept the levels of rake that some sites take from you then you can create chances for yourself to make more money. So remember that the rake deals that are advertised are just that…..advertised. But you need to remember that your services may be of tremendous value to a poker site and you should be very cognisant of that fact.

These principles are found in all fields including football. This is why coaches find it easier to coach defensive tactics than offensive and is also why it is becoming increasingly difficult for superior teams to record huge winning margins unlike in days gone by. This is exactly the same in poker because before you can start launching attacks all over the place then you need to be able to defend well.

So just what is good defence in poker? Well for want of a better word, it is simply to do with folding. When you fold then you are cutting your losses and this is a defensive play in poker. A fold is not geared to winning money but saving money which still adds to your bottom line at the end of the year. Your average poker player simply does not fold enough and so has a weak defence that isn’t watertight. You only have to look at the pre-flop hand statistics from a poker tracker program to show this.

It really doesn’t matter in poker if you are making brilliant plays all the time if you are making huge errors. It does not matter if you launch a successful multi-barrel bluff; these are tactics that are only successful as part of a well rounded game. If you think about this for a second, any fool can bluff in poker. You could teach a novice the rules of the game and if they were aggressive enough then they would win a very high number of pots.

But blind aggression is not a skill in the same way that passive play isn’t. An aggressive poker player is placing more money into the pot which isn’t always a good idea if your opponents are better than you are. So in poker you must first learn to defend and this means folding more than you otherwise feel comfortable doing. If you raise from the cut-off in limit hold’em with A-9 and you are three bet by the button and the flop comes K-10-4 and you lead out on the flop and get raised then fold.

Staying around for one more bet is not good defence. If your opponent has a king or a ten then you are drawing to only three outs and you may even be drawing almost dead. So get your defence right in poker before you even think about attacking your opponents relentlessly.

The flop came Ad-Qs-7c and the big blind bet out 650, our hero thought for a while and called and then the button shoved all-in. The big blind called and so did our hero. The cards were revealed and the big blind had A-K for top pair top kicker, the button had A-Q for top two pair and our hero amazingly had A-Js.

He was basically drawing dead to runner runner and the turn and rive cards were of no help and he was out in ninth place. I see these sorts of hands all the time in low-stakes SNG’s. Basically he made numerous errors in this hand. It was not an error to open raise with an A-J, that is of course an entirely standard play.

But the raise was cold called by the button and then the big blind re-raised a pre-flop raiser and a caller so the A-J was marginal at best. The suited nature of the hand made the call marginal but on the flop, he had serious kicker trouble and there was also the possibility that our hero was ahead as hands like KK,JJ, KQs, TT or even 99 could have re-raised pre-flop.

So now he was in trouble and when the big blind led out and bet the pot, this was a clear indication that he was beaten at the least by one player. The subsequent flop action merely confirmed his fate. But this hand to me indicates in a nutshell how numerous players approach low stakes SNG’s.

They simply wait for a good hand and then go with what they have even if at the back of their mind they know that they are beaten. Novice players make numerous mistakes in SNG’s (not just in SNG’s but poker in general). The first error is that they do not take advantage of the excellent software that is on offer. I used “Sit and Go Shark” which is one of the best SNG tools in existence in my opinion.

Using such software isn’t just an advantage, it is also a necessity these days. The table selection processes, ICM knowledge and a good sound understanding of the basics of SNG strategy will catapult any player into being a long term winner at the lower levels.

But if you are going to make money in poker then you are going to have to take the game far more seriously. If you don’t then there will be plenty of players out there who will. If you don’t put the time in or you simply cannot be bothered to use software or you cannot find the time to try table selecting or all of the other things that require effort then what in heavens name makes you think that you can make money long term playing poker?

Also I would definitely recommend that you set aside enough time to be able to play the game. Don’t rush it, don’t play an SNG merely because of the quick time frame and then look to get your chips in the middle as quickly as possible with the first decent hand that you get.

Think about this for a moment, if you walked into a card room or you logged onto a poker site and you could have your choice of any poker game that you wanted, then there has to be an underlying reason for why players choose full-ring over six max or vice versa and it cannot just be to do with the fact that these players are better at this form of poker. There has to be underlying reasons as to why these people preferred this game or have gravitated to it over time.

So your average full-ring low-stakes player is someone who is multi-tabling and getting rakeback. They are not overly aggressive but they will take advantage of profitable opportunities when they arise. They may even be under bankrolled or playing with money that they can barely afford to lose. They may not essentially be risk takers as most people in poker are strangely risk averse.

This statement may shock a few people but I believe it to be mainly true and certainly at certain levels. So what this means is that when someone raises and especially from early positions in these types of games then they basically have the goods. It also means that if you raise and get re-raised then you can be sure that this is a raise that is the goods more often than not.

There will be exceptions of course, if you have been raising from position and you find that you have been getting re-raised constantly by the button or one of the blinds then this may be an indication that something has changed and the dynamic of the game has altered. But on the whole, simply backing down to aggression is the best way forward most of the time because your opponents either do not have the nerve or the ability to make plays of this nature without a hand of some sort.

However there is a difference between aggression and normal betting. For example, let us say that it has been limped by four players and you are in the big blind with junk and you check along. The flop comes 10-7-2 rainbow and everyone checks, the turn is another deuce and you check and so do the next two players to your left.

The button now bets half the pot, this stands a fair chance of being a pick up play and you in the big blind could easily have a deuce as it was checked around. Unless someone is slowplaying a monster or limped with A-2s then a raise stands a very good chance of taking the pot down here. This is what I mean by normal betting, a bet by the button here is not something that I call an aggressive play……..you have made the aggressive play not them.

If the roles had been reversed and it had been you who was making a similar play from the button and the big blind raised you then this is a far more aggressive move and something that needs to be respected at low-stakes poker.

In this instance, if you had been the button then the likelihood of the big blind having a hand is more real. They could have anything, 10-7, 10-2 even 7-2 in fact. If you learn to respect raises and re-raises in low-stakes poker and be prepared to let your opponent get away with the odd bluff then your earn rate will quantum leap.

You will need to have a strong winning poker game and you must also have strong discipline. Every time I play low stakes No limit Texas Hold’em then I see horrible play all over the place. I often used to think that the games online had got tougher and they have but I still think that there is money to be made at no-limit play.

If you can maintain discipline and fold more than your opponents in full-ring then you will make money as long as you are not making huge post flop errors. No-limit hold’em is such a tough nut to crack and what confuses many players is that there are untold numbers of variations of how to play the game. This confuses the novice and intermediate players who mix up concepts from deep stack play with short stack play, cash game play and tournament play, limit poker from pot limit and no-limit and full-ring from short handed and short handed from heads up.

The list is long and it highlights that poker can be very difficult to crack when attacked from the wrong angle. The problem with the average person is that they do not put the necessary work in or they are not aware of what the necessary work is. Or you get other types who think that sophisticated and glitzy software packages will get them where they need to be. There is no doubt that trackers will improve your poker game but they simply cannot substitute for a good technique.

What they also cannot substitute for is a lack of discipline and you can have all of the coaching in the world but if your technique is poor and your discipline is non existent then you will not make money or you will not make money and be able to keep it. That is the key issue in poker, it isn’t difficult to win poker pots. Good cards will win pots and aggression will win pots but it is keeping the money that is the hard part. Many players lose discipline in other ways and the most common is being too aggressive or aggressive simply because you are either greedy or you want something to happen.

What tends to happen then is that the player loses money by being overly aggressive and gets himself into the hole for $50 when he should only have been down $10. So when he wins a $50 pot then he ends the session breaking even when he should have won $40. These differences separate players who play for a living from those that recycle money or lose.