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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Trons
JstTrons
Toyotatruck

thats some good stuff...but I have a question

IMO the swings are bigger if you play Limit holdem then NL I mean the NL swings arent as bad as Limit poker..why is this ?

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Poker

Due to the odds you get to chase draws in limit. You're often getting 10:1 to chase a draw so there will be a lot more 'suckouts' so to speak. In NLHE you can vary bet sizes to deny people odds to draw, hence controlling the pot.

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I've never been a decent NL player so I've never played a lot. I figured (probably wrongly) that swings would be greater in NL. When it's possible to lose your whole buy-in in one hand (and if it's the second hand of the session, you're buying back in) then I figured your potential to lose more was greater.

I can count on one hand the amount of times I've lost my whole buy in (I buy in for 30BB) and It's always been to mistakes made by me (over playing hands, playing too many hands yada yada yada)...

Is there anybody else who can chime in with this?

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Trons
JstTrons
Toyotatruck

15) Don't worry about the times you folded and feel like you shouldn't have...just because the flop came QQ3 doesn't mean it wasn't correct to fold that Q3o from UTG. Your brain will so those and it will feel like it happens everytime...Instead, train your brain to see when you folded and it was a good fold (it happens much more often and will help you see the +side of of folding). A bet saved is almost as good as a bet won

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Trons
JstTrons
Toyotatruck

I like #15 I get that alot, and I have printed this out to read it as I go to the mall with some friends, oh well my turn to study

if anyone considers themself a good player, can u pm me or let me know if I can pm u, or add me on aim I just have a few questions to ask if its fine, trons I think you can still help with NL even if you arent a NL player really, and NL players would help amensly(sp?)

Some repeats, but same principle:

#1 - Bankroll. This is number one for a reason. If you lose your money, you're gone. Playing Limit Hold 'em, your bankroll should consist of at least 300 big bets. So if you play $1/$2 Hold 'em, have $600. Some people like even more, and would need $1000 to play comfortably at that level. For No Limit, it's recommended you have 2,000 Big Blinds, and play with 100 at a time.

#2 - Play tight. The fewer starting hands you play, the less money you lose. It's that simple. If you only play AA, KK, QQ and AK, you will win more than you lose. But astute players will see what you're up to, so mix it up. However, that doesn't mean raising with 93o after people say you're tight. There's about 35 hands I'll play, consisting of all the pocket pairs, Ax, any cards that add up to 20 in Blackjack and suited connectors 65 or higher. Disregarding suits, there are 169 possible hands you can make with two cards. This means that I play less than 25% of my hands, and I'll only consistently play about 7%. Also, there's only one hand I'll always play from any position, AA. This means that of the 169 starting hands, I play less than 1% of them 100% of the time!

#3 - Play aggressive. Raise. Re-raise. Put all your money on the line. Don't EVER be afraid to move all-in if you think you have the best of it. If you're obeying rules #1 and #2, you've got a decent hand and you're not risking all your bankroll. So what if he sucks out on you? You still have 95% of your roll left. So what if your read was wrong? It's a learning experience. You know now what sort of cards he'll play when. That's information, and it's worth paying 5% of your roll for.

#4 - Focus. If you're playing online, don't be on forums, MSN Messenger and watching TV at the same time. Have music on. That's it. You need to take in information- betting patterns can't be observed if you're watching Eastenders.

#5 - Position. This is so important when playing that if I were a politician, I'd bang my fist on the podium and say "position, position, position." Your hand selection is wider as you move toward the button. And you can conceivably raise with anything on the button in the right sort of pot. Knowing what people have done before you have to act is a tremendous advantage- the equivilant of serving in tennis or the opposition being down to 10 men in football. POSITION.

#6 - If you make mistakes, learn from them. OK, you folded JJ preflop and it turns out your two raisers had AJ and 44. Don't beat yourself up about it. The point is, you're capable of folding a big hand. Next time when you're against AA and QQ, this fold will pay off. NB: Folding Q2o and having the flop come QQ2 is NOT a mistake. That's just plain annoying. Deal out a flop ten times- see how many times Q2o has the best of it. Not many, huh? A correct fold is ALWAYS a correct fold, regardless of whether you would have won or not. If you fold A4 vs AQ on a board of AQ4 and the river brings a 4, it was STILL a good fold.

#7 - If playing online, take player notes. This is one of the best things online poker has to offer. I once took notes on a player in a tourney, noting that he made pot-sized bets when he had cards, and slightly-below pot sized bets when bluffing. I then came up against him in a cash game, and after reading my notes on him, I won $32 off him in a pot when he bluffed a board of 2s 3s 2c 6s 3d with 8d-9d. To add insult to injury, what was my hand? King high. Not even 2233A! If I hadn't taken notes, I'd have never ever won that pot- In fact, I'd have folded to his betting $4 into a $6 pot on the flop. But because I knew he was on a bluff, I was able to move all-in on the river when he bet big, confident that my KQ would stand up.

#8 - Read. Read, read, read, read, read. Not just people, either. Read books. Read internet articles. Join a forum, read hand histories. Never stop learning.

#9 - Table selection. Online, it helps that you can see stats, like % of players to see a flop and average pot size. I tend to go for a decent-sized pot and a high % of flop players. This means it's an action-filled table with a lot of loose
players. If you're playing tight-aggressive you should clean up.

#10 - Enjoy yourself. If the limits you play are too stressful, or the game is causing you undue upset, don't play. It's that simple. No hobby should be detrimental to your life.

id agree with them all except this one.

the hands u get in that 20 minutes only add to the "long-run" that ur playing towards so it doesnt matter whether u play in 20 minute spells or in 3 hour spells.

also, it doesnt matter whether u recover ur losses in this session, the next session or a session that u play next week....its all heading towards the "long-run".......if ur not willing to think in terms of the long-run, then dont play at all.

nice post tho.

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id like to add which most smart people would know

Don't sit down to play if you have a headache or your eyes hurt, or anything that will maybe distract you, it will hurt you in the long run and decisions can be altered

I agree almost completely...The exception would be that this was to new LLHE players and therefore, they probably don't think long term (I know I didn't when I started ). The psychological disadvantage to playing in 20 spurts where you may just lose you blinds and fold everything can be hard for some to take...

This was based on things I wished people had told me (some may have tried ) when I started. I would sit down to play, even if I knew I only had 10min before leaving for work...the result was fairly pronounced on my play...It seemed like I was constantly having losing sessions...and that just sucks. I was trying to help people avoid that mistake when they are learning.

Obviously, we know that statistically, the amount of time you sit at a table is cumlatitive so it doesn't matter whether you do it in 20min sittings or 3 hours sittings (as you stated above), but I found it easier to have winning sessions if i stayed longer and that made me feel better

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Trons
JstTrons
Toyotatruck