How To Win Online Poker Consistently
Becoming a consistent online poker winner isn’t as easy as it sounds. The game itself is very complex and most of the top players have been studying for years to get where they are today. That said, there are ways that you can improve your game right now, and they won’t take more than a few minutes to start relying on. If you aren’t using the right poker strategy then there is no way that you are going to consistently beat online poker these days. The best strategy for beating online poker at the lower stakes in particular is still TAG. This stands for tight and aggressive. Poker has always been a hobby for me, but I still hated the idea of losing. This course changed everything for me and it is applicable to players of all different skill levels. This course is well organized from beginning to end which makes it easy to follow.' With online poker making its return in a big way lately, we are here to give you five tips on how to win on the online felt. This article is less about bet sizing, and hand selection, and more about the disciplines that you need to master and the habits that you need to create, to make money consistently playing online poker.
With online poker making its return in a big way lately, we are here to give you five tips on how to win on the online felt. This article is less about bet sizing, and hand selection, and more about the disciplines that you need to master and the habits that you need to create, to make money consistently playing online poker. Whether you prefer tournaments or cash games, these tips are for you. Let’s get started!
#1 Keep Records
Keeping meticulous records are key to any consistent long-term online poker winner. And I am not just talking about whether you win or lose, while that information is certainly very important. I like to know when I play, what I play, and for how long I played it. Did I win? Lose? Break even?
Was it a Texas Hold ‘Em cash game? Or maybe a multi-table tournament or a single table Sit ‘N Go? The reason you want to keep detailed records of your play is so that you can go back later and look for trends, good or bad.
Are you winning at a much higher rate playing Omaha than at Hold “em? Do you tend to hit and run during your winning sessions and then play marathon sessions trying to get unstuck other times? Understanding your games strengths and weaknesses, is very important to long term winning.
There is software available out there that can help you track your play in a very detailed manner, and you should look into that right away. Our brains tend to over-exaggerate the good things and forget about the bad, and you want to make sure that you are completely honest about your poker abilities. In poker, we can lie to our opponents on the table, but we never want to lie to ourselves about results. Keep track of your play and review it often.
#2 Study Often
This second tip goes right along with the first one, study! A Lot! Whether you are studying your own results, or specific poker strategy, you always want to make sure that you are learning about poker away from the table. For some people, this means pouring over hand histories, alone, or with trusted peers. For others, this is reading up on the latest GTO (game theory optimal) theories or reviewing starting hand charts.
There are endless resources out there, and to be a winner, you need to take advantage of all of them. Read books, watch YouTube hand reviews, or sign up for online training sites. Some people even go as far as to hire a poker coach.
The key here is to find a type of learning that appeals to you and stick with it. If you are only learning about the game while at the table, you are electing to give other players ,that are willing to do their homework, an advantage. In a game that is all about gaining an advantage on your competition, that is something that you just can’t afford to do.
Personally, I love to read poker books. I have been a winning poker player since before the original online poker boom, and it has been fascinating to see how much poker strategy has evolved. There was a time, not long ago, when Super System by Doyle Brunson was the most detailed strategy ever written on poker. For people that are beating the game nowadays, that go back and read Super System today, it would seem like going back to elementary school.
You always want to make sure you are following the new trends of poker, because your opponents are. In order to be a winner, your game always needs to be evolving. The best way to stay ahead of the curve is to stay up on the most current training. I promise you, the strategies that Fedor Holt uses aren’t the same ones that Stu Unger used decades ago to win. Study, study, and study some more!
#3 Play Within Your Bankroll
You hear poker pros talk about this one all of the time, yet very few players out there follow it. You MUST play within your bankroll. Now, there are a million different definitions of when it is appropriate to jump up in limits or to higher buy-in tournaments. And while there are a lot of differing opinions out there, very few of them are ever going to tell you that you should base what stakes you are playing, on how much money is currently in your online poker account.
Personally, I think that the most appropriate time to move up in limits or buy-in levels is when you can show that you are a consistent winner at your current stakes. Here we are right back to that record-keeping we talked about earlier…
If you are a winner at one level, you should consider moving up to the next highest level available. But be very careful, that you give yourself an ample sample size of results to base that decision on. That doesn’t mean if you play a 1-2 no-limit game for three hours and win a hundred bucks, you are ready to jump up to 2-5!
The best way to track your progress is by baselining your results to an established sample size. This can be done in many ways, but I use the below formulas for cash games and tournaments.
#4 Pay Attention
I know, I know, this one sounds too simple to even mention, but not paying full attention is one of the biggest leaks of today’s online poker players. Whether it is because they are distracted by whatever else is going on in their home, their phone, or they are just cruising Reddit or YouTube, poker players are notoriously an easily distracted bunch.
And while that is the case with brick and mortar poker players as well, it is much easier to get distracted while playing online. The fact of the matter is that playing high-level poker can be boring at times. Poker pro Phil Galfond once famously said, “the best way to win every hand of poker, is to not try and win at every hand of poker.” Sometimes the play is to fold, as unsatisfying as that might feel at the time.
And when you hit a patch of action where you are doing a lot of folding, it can be hard to stay laser-like focused on the table. But you must find a way to do it. If you aren’t in the hand, you should be focusing on the other players at the table. Try to read hands and follow betting lines, so when you are in a hand, you understand how the other players are playing.
I see situations all the time where a player will be playing like an absolute maniac, and other players make big laydowns against them because they were too busy playing on their phone to notice. Don’t play poker because you are bored and want something to do. Play poker because you want to eviscerate your enemies on the felt. And to do that, you need to pay attention, all of the time.
#5 Don’t Play Too Many Tables
This last tip is very unique to online poker players. When you are playing in brick and mortar poker rooms, you only get to play at one table. One hand at a time is all you ever have to worry about. But online, you can play as many tables as you want simultaneously. And that can get mighty tempting as the desire for action is so easy to satisfy.
But playing too many tables at once can seriously hurt your ROI. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you can handle more than one table at a time, multi-tabling can be a great way to smooth out your variance, and maximize your wins. But as tends to be the case with a lot of things in poker, poker players aren’t always telling the truth to themselves about how many tables they can handle at once.
If you find yourself rushing from table to table, and making decisions quicker than you might like, tone it down some, and drop a table or two. At the end of the day, we play poker to make money, and while it is ok to give up a little bit of your ROI at one table to add another table, thus making more money overall, there is no bigger tragedy in online poker than playing more games than you should be, and turning yourself from a winning player, to a loser, because of it. We aren’t here to impress people with how many tables we can play, we are here to make money, and finding your optimum numbers of tables is very important to your long-term success.
Wrap Up
Nothing I have said in this article is hard to do. And I assure you that if you do each of these things religiously, you will eventually find a way to beat any poker game in the long run. Poker is a wonderful game, in that, anyone can be great at it. Poker doesn’t discriminate. If you put in the work, you can be a winner. Thanks for reading, and good luck on the virtual felt!
If there is one thing I hear the most from small stakes poker players it is they can't seem to consistently turn a profit at the poker tables.
They will win big one session — or even several sessions in a row — but then inevitably the cards will go south on them and they will lose all of their profit back.
This is a problem because everybody has winning and losing days in poker. What the most successful poker players do, however, is lose less on their bad days and win more on their good days.
In this article I am going to give you five of my top strategies for learning how to win consistently in small stakes poker games.
1. Maximize Your Winnings on the Good Days
As I mentioned above, you are going to have good days and bad days in poker. Some days you will be hitting every top pair, making your flushes and the like. And just as importantly, on those good days your opponents will keep having decent second-best hands with which to pay you off as well.
But there will also be other days when you can't make a hand to save your life. And when you finally do make a hand, guess what? That's right — they will have the higher flush, the higher set, and other better hands. If you have played poker for any amount of time, I think you know what I am talking about here.
Now half the battle to learning how to win consistently at the poker tables is simply maximizing your winnings on the good days. You know that on some days you are going to have to take some losses, so winning as much as possible on the good days is absolutely key.
This is why you need immediately to shed the 'protectionist' mentality many small stakes players have of winning a few buy-ins and then wanting to quit in order to 'lock up the win.' This isn't how poker works. Poker is one long session and your results on any individual day literally matter very little.
By quitting early when things are going well — and, more importantly, when you are probably playing well also — you are only hurting yourself. When the cards are falling your way, try to keep playing as long as possible.
2. Minimize Your Losses on the Bad Days
The reverse is true as well. On the days when absolutely nothing is working for you, you want to quit early and stop the bleeding.
But again, many small stakes players do the exact opposite. They want to keep playing to get back what they've lost. Or even worse, they'll jump up in stakes if they are stuck a lot to try and win it back faster.
The problem with this strategy is that even though you might not realize it in the moment, you are likely playing very poorly on days like this. Your judgment and decision-making is clouded by emotions. You are likely to play a looser game and more aggressively, and as a result you'll be more apt to make bad calls and other poor decisions.
If you want to start turning a long term consistent profit in poker, one of the absolute best things you can do is just leave the poker table on these bad days. You have to remember that poker games literally run around the clock. That's true both for online poker and even for live games for the most part. In other words, the games aren't going anywhere.
One of the absolute most valuable lessons you can learn in poker is how to take a small loss and come back the next day with a clear head rather than continuing to play and burying yourself with a big loss.
3. Don't Play in Unprofitable Games
Something else you can do in order to win consistently in poker is to start paying more attention when it comes to game selection. If there isn't a clear reason why you are at the table (i.e., somebody at the table who plays much worse than you), there is no reason why you should be at that table.
This is a big mistake that I see small stakes players making all the time. That is, they sit down and play in games full of other strong regulars, not thinking how detrimental taking on such a challenge is likely going to be to their bankroll.
How To Win Online Poker Consistently Real Money
While I know it can be a pain to change tables or even poker sites or casinos, you have to understand that the profit in poker does not come from playing with other people who are equally skilled to you or better. You are going to be essentially trading money back and forth with them in the long run (if not losing). And truthfully, even if you hang in there against such opponents, you will often still show a loss once the rake is taken out.
It is absolutely crucial, then, that there is always at least one player who is a clear soft spot in any poker game that you choose to play.
4. Don't Pay Attention to the Short Term
As I touched on before, short term results (day-to-day, week-to-week) really just aren't that important in poker. It is only the long run of months and years of play that really matters.
This is why I would suggest you make a real effort, especially if you play online, to stop checking your bankroll so often. Keep recording your results after each session, of course, but avoid the constant checking. As long as you are properly bankrolled for the games in which you are playing, there should be no issue.
By not checking your bankroll so frequently, you prevent yourself from getting emotional during the downswings. You also prevent yourself from getting a false sense of superiority during the good times.
As I often say in poker, neither the heaters nor the downswings are what is real. Both are illusions — the outliers, the abnormal. The truth about your abilities actually lies somewhere in the middle.
5. Take Them to Value Town
Small stakes poker games are often dominated these days by tight-passive regs and loose, 'calling station' recreational players. The biggest key to your success in these games therefore is going to be getting the maximum value with your good hands.
There is no point in trying to bluff a lot at stakes like this. They are just going to call you down, which will cause you to get even more tilted.
You need to become a master of the value bet instead. And I am not talking about situations here where you have or a flush. Everybody knows how to value bet in these spots. I am talking instead about the thin value bets where you have something like second or even third pair on the river and they check it to you.
Oftentimes many of these bad players at the lower limits will be willing to hero call you with their ace-high if you make a bet. This is especially the case with smaller bets like one-third of the pot.
Don't just check it back and take the showdown like most people do at these stakes. The very biggest winners in these games are always getting that thin value even when it seems impossible that they can call you with worse. Trust me, they can and will at the micros!
Final Thoughts
Learning how to win consistently in the lower limit poker games is one of the very first steps you need to take in order to have a lot of success in this game.
One of the most important keys to remember is to maximize your winnings on the good days and minimize your losses on the bad days. Most players do the exact opposite.
You also want to make sure that you are always playing in profitable games, getting the absolute maximum value out of them, and ignoring your short term results.
Nathan 'BlackRain79' Williams is the author of the popular micro stakes strategy books Crushing the Microstakes, Modern Small Stakes, and The Microstakes Playbook. He also blogs regularly about all things related to the micros over at www.blackrain79.com.
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cash game strategytournament strategylive pokeronline pokergame selectionbankroll managementtiltvalue betting