Let us begin by looking at a hand example taken from $1-$2 online no limit Texas hold’em. It is folded around to you in the cut-off and you have the 7d-5c. You raise to $7 but what is your reason for raising with this hand and what is your underlying poker strategy here?
If you do not know why you are raising then you have something of a problem. If you find that you are raising because you crave some action then that is not the proper reason to raise. Likewise if you are raising because you have just taken a series of beats, this too is a bad reason to be raising and is often referred to as tilt.
Folding is the secret weapon
In online poker then patience is often the secret weapon that underpins success. Many players in online poker are able to win big pots but not many players are capable of losing the minimum in the pots that they lose. Quite often the hands that you fold make the hands that you win even more powerful. It is often a long series of tiny amounts that you haemorrhage away……a limp here…..calling a raise there that really kill your earn rate and profit potential.
At the end of the day then the game of online poker will only allow you to make so much money. If you try to force it by getting involved in highly marginal or even –EV situations then your earn rate will end up going backwards. You will find that patience in online poker knocks on into other areas as well and one of those areas is your emotional control.
For example when you are going through a bad run or you have experienced a string of really negative beats and outdraws then emotionally you are probably not at your best. This is when some players can be at their most vulnerable psychologically. However when you fold more then you avoid many of the situations in which you will lose money.
Tight aggressive poker is the way
All of the best online poker players in all forms of poker play in a style that can be deemed as tight-aggressive. You will no doubt have heard of this terminology at some stage. There are four main broad generic styles in poker and these are tight-aggressive, tight-passive, loose-aggressive and loose-passive. The first part of that description refers to how often you play your hands and the second part refers to how you play them. If you play too many poker hands then you are merely no better than the weak poker players and the novice recreational players who play for fun and lose their money.
What should really separate you from these losing players is how often you play your hands. Playing too many poker hands means that you will be playing too many hands that have poor profit making potential! By sheer definition then if your hand has poor profit making potential then your results will suffer.
So what really underpins all of this is in how much patience you have and this applies especially to your hand selection strategy before the flop. Patience ultimately makes money in online poker and this means that folding more than your opponents is often the proper poker strategy.
Carl Sampson is a professional poker player who plays online at www.888poker.com
