Talking of young and talking of legal, there’s a fairly good chance that you’re below legal gambling age. You have discovered in online poker a way to play poker for real even though technically you’re not allowed. At this point I should issue a disclaimer: If you’re not street legal where you live, please use the information in this book on play money sites only, will you? Thanks. Glad we got that out of the way.
You may be in college; so many online players are. If you’re not there now, you most likely were, for internet poker requires smarts across a broad range of subjects—math, computers, psychology—plus, people who buy and read books of any kind are much more likely to be higher educated than, you know, not. You and your friends might consider it the height of good fun to spend a Friday or Saturday evening immersed in the online poker experience. I could tell you and your friends that you need to get a life, but I’m not your dorm mother, so no.
If cardroom poker is not readily available in your neck of the weeds, you consider online poker to be a godsend. Even if casinos are legion and close, you spend a hunk of your budgeted poker time online because it’s just so damn convenient. No traffic, no parking problems, no boho with bad breath sitting next to you. You probably play at least a little online poker every day. You find the puzzle of poker to be endlessly fascinating and utterly compelling. You’ve tried various sites, but over time you’ve made one or two your home. Likewise, you’ve experimented with a wide variety of cash games, sitngos (sit and go tournaments), and scheduled tournaments, and have settled on your favorites. Though you mix it up from time to time, you play what you play—mostly, as noted, no limit hold’em. Furthermore, you play within a “comfort zone” of limits and/or buy ins, unless the tidal ebb or flow of your bankroll dictates a shift down or up.
You have experienced the pitfalls of online poker, including unexpected disconnects, untimely interruptions, sites going south (and taking your money with them), and unbelievable suckouts. Despite all that talk of collusion, you haven’t seen any, nor have you seen any evidence of bots, either independent or site sponsored. It crosses your mind that you might not know the difference, but even viewed through the narrow prism of an avatar or a screen name, all of your online foes strike you as all too human. Besides, if they’re bots, they’re not all that good, so who cares?
You’ve met your share of angerbots, though: people who lose their temper online and use the protective anonymity of a screen name to launch testosterone-and rage-fueled chatbox screeds:
How could you call with that sh*t?
You’re the worst player ever!
aaaaasssssshhhhhooooollllleeeee!!!!!
Perhaps you’ve even lost your temper in this way, though you know enough, one hopes, not to let such sentiment bleed out your chat window, or, indeed, affect your play. One hopes. Still, you know what it’s like to be pissed off online. Maybe it pisses you off that people get pissed off. Certainly, there’s something that pisses you off about online poker. Probably several somethings. These include…
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In writing that list, you discovered one or two things you didn’t even know bugged you that much. Such is the power of the list.
In sum, then: You’re no newbie. You’ve played enough online poker to be well past questions of site functionality and game mechanics. You’ve got basic strategy down pat. You don’t know all your odds inside out, but you know enough not to draw slim into a small pot, and you know not to play crap hands (even if sometimes you do). You’ve read many poker books, and you’ve learned at least a little something from all of them. You have high hopes for this book. You’d like to take your internet game to the next level, or at least get your money’s worth in terms of tools for profit on the virtual felt. I have high hopes, too, and feel safe in promising that you’ll learn enough at least to cover the cover price. But check back with me in about 85,000 words and we’ll both know.
Now, let’s get started, shall we? We’ve got a lot of work to do.
2
SHARPS AND FLATS
On my worst days of online poker, I willfully distract myself to a ridiculous degree. I might be playing in a scheduled tournament, a sitngo, and a cash game, all at the same time. The radio is on, or maybe a podcast. I’ve got the TV showing a baseball game with the sound down, and I’m scratching my dog behind his ears because my dog insists. I’m also answering emails, taking phone calls, and beating my head against the word processor—and it’s still not enough to occupy my restless mind. As you can imagine, this is not the best way to play internet poker, letting it engage so small a sliver of my interest. And guess what? I know it, too. Not that this stops me from doing it…nor ruing it when, inevitably, the telephone, the television, or my own purple prose causes me to miss critical information on the poker screen or hit raise when I meant to hit fold.
On my best days of online poker, I turn off everything: all the music, sound, and pictures. I close Word and Outlook Express. I close the door, which can annoy the dog, but I explain it to him in terms he can understand: Daddy’s winning kibble money now. I lay a single game screen against my computer desktop—a soothing picture of poppies—and give a single cash game or tournament table my full and undivided attention. I may or may not be taking notes, but I’m certainly taking everything in. Seat one likes to reraise from the small blind. Seat three will bet the turn if no one bets the flop. Seat six likes to drag (slow play) his big hands. I am acquiring, as I described it in The Killer Poker Hold’em Handbook, the clear gestalt of the game. I’m in tune with what’s going on, because I’m fully focused. As Mrs. Malaprop might put it, I’m dilated in.
Then again I have this friend, screen name WiggleTooth, on whose monstrously large LCD monitor he plays four games at once. He plays big, too, $500 buy in NLHE x 4, for hour after hour, and insists that playing four games at once not only maximizes his hourly win rate but keeps him from playing too loose through impatience or boredom, because with so much going on onscreen, he has no time to be impatient or bored. This guy keeps meticulous records, and I’ve seen them. Literally, the only time he doesn’t perform well is when he’s playing just one game: His mind wanders, his play degrades, and he loses money. Incredibly enough, single dipping is a gaping hole in his game.
All of which is to say that everyone has a best and a worst way to play online. I used to think that double dipping—playing even so much as two games at once—was a recipe for sure disaster. Having seen evidence to the contrary, from WiggleTooth and others, I’m now prepared only to say that I know one person who should never double dip, and that’s, well, me.
Every time we sit down to play online, we’re faced with variables, choices not just of game type and betting limit, or tournament versus cash play, but also of environment: music or no music; phone or no phone; rats gnawing at our feet or no rats gnawing at our feet. How you sort and select these variables is up to you, but one thing you must do is sort and select. To play online consistently effectively, you have to give some thought to, and honest inspection of, when and how you play poorly or well. More to the point, you have to figure out what’s going on when you don’t play well, and then see to it that it never happens again.
I’m trusting that you have enough experience of online play, and enough personal frankness, to address this question in a meaningful way. Do you drink when you play online? How does that work out for you? Do you go for that one extra cash game rebuy or that one last sitngo when things haven’t been going your way? Do things continue not to go your way? Do you play when you’re tired? This one’s particularly insidious, because we poker players get tired and wired at the same time. We’re so wound up from playing poker that the only thing we imagine winding