Thoughts to a new online LLHE player

1) Bank Roll…This is probably the most important thing a low limit Hold’em player can remember…Watch your bank roll and don’t play above it. You should have at least 200bb (big bets) in your bank roll before taking on a new limit.

2) Read. Read books, forums, articles, and anything else you can get your hands on. Poker, in any form, is a constantly changing game. The more you read the better chance you have of winning. If you don’t understand what you’re reading, find somebody (or something) to help you understand. Information, applied in the wrong way, can hurt you instead of help you.

3) Multi-Tabling. Don’t try it (yet). When you’re moving up a level, or moving to a new site, play a bunch of hands (I recommend at least 1000) before you try to play more then one table at a time. Each level has a different type of “typical” player. You have to be very comfortable with that type of player. If after 1k hands, you are winning, then it may be time to start multi-tabling. Each site has its own GUI. In my opinion, it’s more important to get a lot of hands in on a new site then a new level. It sucks when you start a new site and are multi-tabling and hit raise instead of fold because you’re more familiar with your old GUI. This can (and has) cost people money, avoid this mistake.

4) If you find yourself getting bored, focus (or leave). I find it useful to start guessing everybody’s hands. This keeps my mind active (while I’m folding ~80% of my hands) and helps me tone my card reading skills. I’m not very good, and it’s difficult to get good at LLHE games because people can and will call/bet with anything, but the more practice you get, the better you get. This gets extremely useful when you’re multi-tabling. If you can put a typical player on a typical range based on how he plays, then you won’t have to think about it when you have 4 tables open and are trying to decide the best play.

5) Post. Find a good online forum for a home (or a couple) and post HH (hand histories) for comments by more experienced players. Post your own comments on others hands. If your comments are wrong, people will let you know and this is how we learn and change or mistaken though process. This is very important (see #2).

6) Discipline. LLHE takes a lot of discipline. If you’re looking to throw your money way, that’s fine too…, there is an “entertainment” value to playing poker. If you want to be a winner, you need to be disciplined in several aspects. How you play and constantly learning are probably the two biggest.

7) Time: Don’t sit down to play if you only have 10-20min to play. The odds of getting thrown a winning hand in that short period of time is slim and what will happen is you lose a little money (to the blinds) each time you sit down and not have a chance to win it back. This goes back to discipline. If you don’t have it in you to sit for a couple hours staring at a computer screen, online poker probably isn’t for you.

8) Distractions: Don’t play if there are any. It’s tough to concentrate on poker if you have kids running around screaming, wife is nagging, or the dog is barking because it needs to be let out. Pick your moments to play when you will be distraction free. This can be tough but the payoff is worth it.

9) Tournaments: A lot of people like to play tournaments. They are fun, they get the blood boiling and winning is a great way to increase your BR. They are also very tough for a new player to beat consistently. Tournament poker has a lot of nuances that LLHE doesn’t have. By the same token, if you’re crushing your current level of LLHE, it doesn’t mean you’ll be a decent tournament player.

10) NL: No Limit Hold’em is a very different game then LLHE. It takes a different skill set (that has to be learned like anything else) and takes a different type of bank roll then LLHE. Again, don’t confuse the two. I’m not saying it’s a bad game, just make sure if you start playing, you go into it with eyes wide open.

11) Table selection: Most players will tell you that table selection is very important. I don’t think it is at LLHE. You can take your time to pick the loosest tables, but I tend to pick tables that are close to being full and tables that will allow me to see each seat I’m sitting at regardless of which one is on top. To me (if I’m 4 tabling) it’s much more important to see which tables are ready for my action and what my hole cards are (while I’m at another table) so I can have my actions already planned out and not hold up the table.

12) Position: Read a book to get this explained. Much too difficult to explain in this short article, but VERY VERY important. Understand it, it can save your BR.

13) If you start (or start a new level) and you are crushing it (winning lots of hands and money), DO NOT let this affect your play. It’s very easy to get dealt some really good hands within 1000 hands dealt. This means that you can, and will, go on winning (and conversely loseing) streaks that are 1000 hands (or larger, I’ve heard horror stories of people on losing streaks for 80k hands). Keep your focus on you’re ‘A’ Game.

a. As a side note, this is incredibly important. A lot of people tend to say things like “Online Poker is Rigged, it’ll help you win money the first 500-1000 hands at a site, then reverse it”. Usually, what has happened is that somebody will move up a level (or move to a new site) and play “better” then usual causing this winning streak. By better, I mean tighter (which is why it’s in quotes). Tighter isn’t always better, but for a nervous player, it feels that way. They may not even realize that they tighten up their starting hand selection, they just do. Once they’ve played 500-1000 hands and they see they are crushing the game, they loosen back up to their normal standards and all of a sudden they start “losing”. Odds are, they aren’t losing, it’s just their WR (win rate or how many BB you win per 100 hands) is leveling out to their normal WR. This can be confusing, but make sure you don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re a better player then you are just because you tend to crush a game for 500-1000 hands.

b. A personal story: This has happened to me more then once which is why I kept using the figure 500-1000 hands. This tends to be the point where I start feeling like I’m king of the poker table and I tend to start donking off my chips. I have played at the tables for a year str8 and still fell into this trap. It wasn’t till I took a break for a while and came back AND it happened to me again that I realized what was going on. This last time it happened, I was up 12bb/100 for about 1000 hands and loving life. It seemed like every time I sat down I was winning. Then my money started going to other players. I got worried. I started looking at my hands and I finally came to the conclusion that it was my play that was sending my chips away, not my opponents that were taking them. I was calling and betting with cards I should have been mucking. Once I realized what was going on, I started to fix it. (I’m still in this process right now).

14) Notes: I find notes on players to be helpful. It can be rough when starting out because it seems like just as soon as you get a “read” on a player, or even something noteworthy, they leave the table. The thing is, if you’re at that level for any length of time, you’ll see that person again, only this time you’ll remember them 


Anybody, feel free to add

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