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Online poker got a huge boost when Chris Moneymaker won a seat at the World Series of Poker back in 2003 by winning an online poker tournament and then proceeded to win the entire tournament. A lot of online poker sites came aboard as a result of the boom in online poker at that time.
Online poker is the same as land-based poker in many aspects such as hand hierarchy, player types, the need to stay calm, the need to understand the game you are playing, and much more.
So, here we will talk about online poker here at Everygame Poker. Players who sign up to play poker or casino games at Everygame Casino have a single account.
There is No Single Most Important Element in Online Poker
Online poker players, like poker players on land, have to be devious to win. You have to mislead your opponents. A poker player who only plays when he or she has a solid hand will lose far too much to ever hope to profit from poker.
Misleading an opponent comes in many forms. One such form is to stay in a hand from an early position with a weak hand. Even at this point, poker strategy can get very complex.
In our example of misleading opponents, you also have to know if your opponents can be misled! There is a poker player type called Loose. This player simply bets without consideration of all of the complicated parameters that non-loose players consider. This kind of player cannot be misled!
How Many Player Types Are There?
There are four player types with a lot of overlap among them. The types are:
- Passive
- Aggressive
- Loose
- Tight
There is a fifth kind of player who fits into all of the categories and yet occupies their own category. These are the complainers. A complainer might be a great player but they are usually poor players who blame luck or outside forces for their mistakes and losses. It is possible to take advantage of a complainer but it requires care and being careful in doing so.
Which Player Type is Best?
Most poker players and writers say that the loose and the passive types are the least desirable while aggressive and tight are better. However, it is possible to be too tight and it is possible to be too aggressive. An overly aggressive player falls into the loose category while an overly tight player falls into the passive category.
There needs to be a balance between the types for a well-rounded poker personality. A tight player should sometimes play aggressively even from an early position simply to send the opponents a confusing message.
Know Thyself and Thine Opponents
If a player knows that he or she is a certain player type, it stands to reason that they should also be able to put a player type on every opponent in the game. This means learning how to read opponents. There are two very good ways to learn to read people: read fiction and watch people in general situations.
Identifying an opponent’s player type will take many hands. However, we can get a read on an opponent in less time. In online poker, all of the physical nuances people communicate are missing. So, we have to concentrate on non-physical indications.
Chatterbox or Silent
The first is whether the player talks in the chat room. If they do, you can learn a lot from the way they communicate. If they use modern social media abbreviations or slang you might place them as being between 21 and 35.
Talk about your spouse even if you aren’t married and pay attention to how they deal with that line of communication. An empathetic response will indicate a non-aggressive personality. If they say that they will never get married, you can bet that they are aggressive in poker.
How Does Reading Fiction Help to Read People?
Fiction is all about two things: the plot and the people. The people are descriptions and dialogue. Pay attention to the dialogue in good fiction and you can learn a lot about people. You don’t have to read entire novels to get this benefit from reading fiction.
Get books by acknowledged great writers and read in their books.
Take Notes
It is also a good idea to take notes on every hand. Since you will fold about 70% of all hands before the flop, you will have a lot of time to take notes and to study your opponents.
It is also a good idea to take off as few hands as possible. You will want to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. Taking off hands for other than these proper and understandable reasons is undesirable from the standpoint of getting better at poker.
Tilt, on the other hand, may require a short break.
Control Yourself
Poker is a game of wins and losses. Some of the losses will be considered bad beats. The ability to control yourself after a bad beat is paramount in becoming a better poker player.
In online poker, you can talk to yourself out loud to calm yourself after a bad beat. You would never do that in a live poker room. You can get up and walk around. On the next hand, if you have a marginal hand and you need some time to control your emotions, you can simply fold.
Controlling yourself in poker means developing mental toughness.
Learn Poker by Studying and by Playing
There are a lot of excellent poker books. They help players get better. But no one gets better by strictly following what a book says. You have to play and learn from every hand.
Poker players are in control of their own destiny even as luck plays a large role in success. We can say that luck plays a large role in many other areas of life and still we say that destiny for the most part is in our hands.
In poker, as in life in general, we should recognize the importance of luck and the importance of making your own luck.
A Word about YouTube Poker
The clips we see on YouTube are super entertaining. Still, we have to recognize that they are not real in the sense of being accurate depictions of poker. A player might call in early position with 6-4 suited and get a great hand but these are by far and away the exceptions - which explains why the video has been put up on YouTube.
Be very, very judicious when you think about calling with 6-4 suited!
Everygame Poker and Casino Are Two Great Online Gaming Venues
Everygame offers great online casino gaming and online poker all under one roof. We offer great bonuses to poker players and casino gamers alike. Banking at Everygame is safe at both the poker room and the casino.
