Online poker is a world apart from poker at a land-based poker room or around a dining room table with friends. So, here Juicy Stakes will offer some pertinent tips to online poker players.
Take Your Online Poker Bonus
Online poker rooms as well as online casinos can offer bonuses to players. A poker bonus simply gives you more money to play with and makes online poker commensurately more flexible. Still, there are actual gameplay tips that online poker players can use to make their poker play better.
Tip #1: You can’t win them all.
It doesn’t matter how well you analyze a hand, there will be hands that you lose to simple good luck on your opponent’s part and poor luck on your part. Often, poker players refer to these losses as a bad beat.
When you realize that you can’t win them all, you will be able to accept a bad beat in stride and immediately get ready for the next hand.
Players who do not accept a bad beat in stride are said to tilt. Even great players have been known to tilt. Avoiding tilt is the first method to making your online casino gaming better.
Tip #2: Online poker is anonymous.
You will hardly get to know an opponent when you play online. So, you have to rely less on knowing the other players and more on making sound and logical plays yourself.
We always have to make sound and logical decisions in poker and in life. The fact that you are playing at an online poker room like Juicy Stakes makes it even more important that you make good decisions.
Tip #3: There are no tells in an online poker game.
When you play around the dining room table with friends, you can almost always “know” what the other player or players have because they telegraph the strength of their hands. These are persistent and obvious tells.
At an online casino, you cannot see a player’s reaction to filling a straight or a flush or having a high pair hidden. So, try to avoid thinking about online poker tells.
A slow bet may or may not indicate a bluff. It may or may not indicate a reverse psychology play. It may just be a slow decision on that player’s part.
A pot-sized bet may be a bluff or it may be a bet to get others to call to a nut hand.
Tip #4: Start playing at low stakes.
This is very important. Even if you can afford to play at higher stakes, your poker level will almost always be less than your bankroll. So, start at lower stakes. You will get invaluable experience at very little risk if you can afford to play for higher stakes.
Tip #5: Try to alter your betting and playing habits.
The other players will be trying to read you. So, make it hard by playing a bit oddly. One way is to not follow the standard opening on calling charts in an early position.
It is okay to call at low stakes with a low pair, suited low cards, two cards of the same suit, and so on. You will want to avoid doing this often; do it just enough to make the other players question what you are calling or raising with in early position.
Another way to alter your play is to try to bluff at a late stage in the hand. Even if you lose the hand and the others know that you were bluffing, they might think that you are bluffing again in a later hand where you do have a powerful hand and they can be tricked into calling or raising in a losing position.
Tip #5: Understand that stamina in poker is a matter of experience and training.
People who start an exercise program often last a very short time because they try to do too much too quickly. Poker is very similar. When you start playing poker in a situation other than the dining room table scenario we alluded to earlier, you will need to see and play many hands before you can feel confident that you know what you’re doing.
In baseball, they say that a player has to see 10,000 pitches before they can be confident that they can hit big-league pitching.
Poker is very similar: you need to see and play a lot of hands to develop the confidence that you know what you are doing. In the process of gaining confidence in their own play, a lot of poker players come to the realization that any given opponent at any game does not know what he or she is doing.
Tip #6: Understand the rigors of paying attention on every hand.
It is not easy to pay close attention to every hand. It is especially difficult given that if you are playing smart, you will fold about 70% to 80% of your hands before the flop.
We are all aware of many situations where we have to pay close attention and it is very hard to do so. M. Scott Peck spoke about this in an anecdote in his great book “The Road Less Travelled”. He spoke about being at a keynote lecture at a symposium and he worked so hard taking notes at the lecture that he broke out into a massive sweat.
After the lecture, he heard many others in attendance comment that the lecture was not so good and he couldn’t believe his ears. Clearly, those people had not been able to pay close attention to what he considered to be a landmark lecture.
Tip #7: Play short sessions.
This is good advice generally, but it is even more important for new players. There is so much you have to learn when you advance from playing poker with pals to playing poker with people who will be only too happy to take your money. In order to review what you have learned in a session, we advise keeping the sessions relatively short.
That will leave you with the time and energy you will need to go over the highlights and lowlights of that particular session.
Tip #8: Understand that online poker is not a time filler until you can go back to a land-based poker room.
We feel that online poker has all of the advantages over land-based poker that online casinos have over land-based casinos. We feel that no one should feel a need to travel to play poker. Juicy Stakes offers excellent poker in several games and at many different stakes. Our take on any hand is quite small so you can keep almost all of your winnings.
There is a palpable intimidation factor in land-based poker that should not exist at an online poker room. This is especially good for new players who are often intimidated into leaving poker altogether!
You may not be aware of this, but Juicy Stakes Poker has a sister site called Juicy Stakes Casino. You will have one account for both sites so you can leave a poker game and unwind a bit with a few casino games!
