Ok, before we go head first into reviews, I wanted to make a note about what I look for in poker venues. As a player who thinks it’s more fun to walk away up than it is simply to play, I generally look for a venue - online poker - that has easy, inexperienced players. I’d like to start by letting you in on the sites and casinos that have the softest games. I’d like to, but I can’t. It’s a matter of simple economics.
Chris Moneymaker - a hero of the online poker generation
Chris Moneymaker, a no-name in the brick-and-mortar poker world, won the WSOP Main Event and World Championship in 2003. Do you know who won the 2002 Main Event (Robert Varkonyi)? So why do you know who won the 2003 title and not the 2002 title? Because the World Poker Tour debuted in 2002 and changed the way poker was televised and consequentially popularized the sport.
Are they really working on their pristine Mac laptops? or are they playing online poker
I told you that to tell you this: we’ve had six full years of high-schoolers coming of age already sharp, six years of people hunkering down in front of computers and getting in more hands than most professionals had in their lifetime, six years for people to tighten, loosen, and adapt. Especially in the Texas Hold’em games, there is no such thing as an easy game. All of the easy games have been set upon by the sharks, psychologists, bots, and game theorists. Individual players may be bad, individual players are certainly bad, but every table, at every level, is already covered by experts.
So then, what’s left to do? Abandon poker and never look back? You could do that, sure, and probably be better off for it. But if you’re like me and love to play regardless of the hostile environment, what you have to do is simple—be a better player. That rant was simply to inform you that there are no tables where the fish will jump into your boat. In fact, the majority of highly populated casinos and sites are about average (give or take) in difficulty for any particular game. So to win, you have to be better than average.
Preaching is all well and good, but specifics are better:
- Fundamentals
- Yes, of course get your fundamentals down. No matter what game you’re playing someone’s already played it and played better than you, but they’ve also written about it. Buy a book and learn the basics. That way, when you deviate from the basics, you’ll know why you’re doing it and not just deviating because you don’t know any better.
- Take Notes
- By keeping track of your competition, you can find out which are the ATMs and which are the bottomless pits. If you have all the fish in the same table, in the same barrel, all you need is to grab a pistol. The more attentive you are, the more specific you can get, the more likely you are to be able to make your own luck, regardless of the cards you’re dealt.
- Records
- By keeping a ledger and following your progress in different games, you can find out what levels, what games, what venues are most conducive to filling your wallets. Don’t be so involved in everyone else’s game that you forget about your own.
If you can act on these points, you’ll find that even the toughest sites have quite a bit of yield to them.
