A big area of growth in the online casino business is, without a doubt, poker rooms. When I say “poker”, I mean the type of poker played at a table with others, not video poker, although as you’ll see they both have a lot in common, not the least of which is the fact that a player can gain an advantage if the conditions are right and you know what you’re doing. Perhaps you’ve played some poker at home with friends or have given it a go at a brick-and-mortar casino or even on-line. I have done all of them, although not extensively, especially when it comes to playing in the poker rooms at the casinos near me. The big drawback for me has been that “live” games are slow, there are a bunch of rules that I’m unfamiliar with (stuff like “no ‘string’ bets”, “don’t splash your chips”, etc.) and I’m not one for looking my opponent in the eye whilst I try to take their $$$. Of course, I sort of do that when playing Blackjack, but I really don’t consider the dealer my “opponent.” He or she is just an employee of the casino, which is my real opponent and, truth be told, most Blackjack dealers are rooting for me to win because then I might tip them.
But my big problem with table poker has always been the fact that it’s so damned slow. A table poker game may proceed at a rate of 35 to 40 hands per hour, versus a Blackjack game that will go maybe 60 hands per hour at a minimum and 200+ hands per hour when I’m alone at the table. I can usually play Video Poker at 500 or more hands per hour, so any game in the 40 hands per hour category does nothing for me in terms of satisfying my urge for “action”. With me, it’s simple: if I have an edge, I want to play as quickly as possible, so long as the speed doesn’t affect the accuracy of my playing decisions. Another consideration has also been the basic fact that it takes a fair amount of skill to make $40-$50 per hour at table poker but that’s fairly easy to do at Blackjack, if you have a big enough bankroll.
On the flip side, the nice thing about table poker is that you don’t have to hide your skill from the casino, because they earn their profits from a “rake” of the bets at a table, so they really don’t care who wins. In fact, skillful poker players are hailed as some sort of folk hero, judging by all the publicity that tournament winners receive at events like The World Series of Poker that’s held every year in Las Vegas. It should be the same for skillful Blackjack players and, to a degree, that’s the case when it comes to tournaments, but I’ve always felt that the casinos are a little leery about hosting such events because of the fear that hoards of card counters will descend upon them, when in fact, card counting is of limited value in a tournament. However, I will say that a good portion – probably a majority – of those who enter the “high stakes” Blackjack tournaments are counters and what else are they going to do in between tournament rounds?
Okay, let’s drop the philosophical stuff and get back to the topic of making $$$ at table poker. I don’t know if you’ve experienced an on-line poker casino, but it was a revelation for me when I downloaded the software of a couple of them. What I found was poker in an automated format. It’s literally click and play with all types of nifty features that would be impossible to incorporate at a brick-and-mortar version: no sweating over the “etiquette” of the game because you can’t break a rule if you tried; the total of the pot is displayed and updated bet-by-bet (helpful when figuring the odds of a play, which I’ll get into later) and you are basically anonymous, beyond displaying your “handle” and, most of all, the game proceeds very quickly, at least twice as fast as most games in a brick-and-mortar casino. I’m constantly fascinated by the technology that is developed for the Internet and on-line poker is no different.
Think of the possibilities. Not sure if a Flush beats a Straight? No, problem, just tape one of those “cheat sheets” to your monitor and you’re set. In fact, you can have all types of helpful information right next to you as you play, which is something neither of us is likely to do at a “real” table. Well, that got me thinking maybe the world needed a “GameMaster’s Poker School” that was designed to teach people how to play a winning game of poker – Hold ‘em poker, in particular – just as I have tried to do with Blackjack. Also, because of the very nature of the on-line games, poker played on the ‘Net is less of a “people” game and more of a “mathematical” game, although I won’t rule out the human element entirely. That said, it’s still a game of probability, expected value and return on investment, just like Blackjack and Video Poker and, like those other games, it’s relatively easy to calculate what can happen when there’s only 52 cards in a deck.
Because all of the on-line poker rooms that I’ve visited up to this point allow you to try out their software in a play-money mode, the opportunities to practice your game against real, live opponents are plentiful and instructive. By their very nature, the play-money games aren’t necessarily a reflection of how things will go for you in a real-money game (the play-money games can best be described as “loose”, in the sense that raises come quick and often and you cannot bluff very effectively), but they do have considerable value. First of all, if you can’t win at a play-money game, you simply aren’t ready for the real-money version. Plus, playing for “fun” gets you familiar with how the software works and it’ll give you the opportunity to not only test out my ideas, but to get organized so that you have the information I’ll give you set up in a way that it’s quickly and easily available.
I should mention that although I’ll be focusing primarily on Hold ‘em poker as it’s played on-line, much of what I’ll show you will apply to “live” poker games as well. In time, if you do as I say, you’ll memorize most of the information you need to win and that should enable you to do well at your local, friendly brick-and-mortar casino, not to mention a poker night with “da boyz and/or gurlz.” And yes, poker has been – for quite some time – a male-dominated activity but the Internet changes all that. Don’t want people to know your gender? Fine, pick an ambiguous handle (“golfnut”, “9 iron” and “wingnut” are some players I met recently) and the world won’t know (or care) whether you’re a man or woman, or something in between; all that matters is how you play. Of course, if you’re “Sexylady”, “Hooters” or “Psychoboy”, people are going to make some guess as to your gender, although they may be totally wrong and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. In my case, I use “Aceten” as a handle and I really don’t care what people think I am; I’m there for the $$$, period.
Okay let’s get started. Just like my Blackjack School, this will unfold as a series of lessons that present various concepts, show you how to learn them and, as always, will include some “homework” that’ll reinforce what I’m teaching. Just how many lessons this will turn out to be remains to be seen, but my guess is that it will be much bigger than the Blackjack School, which currently stands at 24 lessons. But for starters, here’s what I intend to cover:
- The Basics of Hold ‘em Poker
- Limit Hold ‘em
- Pot Limit Hold ‘em
- No Limit Hold ‘em
- The Mathematics of Poker
- Money Management
- Playing Strategies
- Poker Tournaments
I’ll begin with limit Hold ‘em because that game is, in my opinion, the most popular and is the easiest to learn, plus it’ll form a good base of reference for the other types.
(Source: GameMaster)
