| Playing Poker Online - And Winning!
 By richard submitted 6 months, 1 week agoRichard is the music whiz at Music-Whiz.com and also provides free poker tips and strategies at PokerTip.in
Licence Type: This article can be reproduced in full (Author must be credited)
Poker is perhaps the world's most popular card game at the moment, so it's no surprise that many people are making a lot of money playing poker both online and offline. But where do you play, and how do you win the big bucks? |
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Poker is perhaps the world's most popular card game at the moment, so it's no surprise that many people are making a lot of money playing poker both online and offline. But where do you play, and how do you win the big bucks?
Where Do I Play Poker Online?
There was a time where playing any sort of card games online was a very risky business. First you had to send money to a virtually unknown web site, and hope that the game play was adequate, praying that your internet connection would not drop out in the middle of a great hand. Finally, when it came to getting your winnings back in real cash, you had to hope that the website still existed and would promptly post you a cheque.
Fortunately, with so many people playing poker today, most of the untrustworthy poker websites have disappeared and only the most reliable, trustworthy and efficient sites are left.
One such site is FullTiltPoker.com. FullTilt is one of the most successful and popular online poker websites around. In terms of game play, FullTilt is far better than it's main competitors. FullTilt allows you to play in tournaments or single tables, allows a number of different poker variants (including the popular Texas Hold'em variant) and allows you to play using real money or play money. The key game play difference at FullTilt is the speed. FullTilt's software is designed to make game play very fast without sacrificing quality.
If you're looking for something a little more innovative, you can't go past PKR.com. PKR's unique 'Emote control' technology, combined with a number of other one-of-a-kind game features mean players on PKR can interact and engage with the game and each other in a way that's personal, involving and highly entertaining.
Finally, if it's security you're looking for, Pacific Poker is probably your best option. Pacific Poker provides some fairly stock standard features, but financially, it's backed by 888.com, one of the largest online casino. Obviously, the benefit of this is that you know that any money you put into your online account will be retrievable.
But How Do I Win?
Unfortunately, there's no one rule to follow to ensure that you win every hand of poker. In fact, it's impossible to win every hand in a poker game.
The reason for this is simple: In a game of poker, you always want your opponents to play differently to how they would play if they could see your cards. For example, when you have a hand that will win, you want you want your opponents to bet more, when you have a not-so-good hand, you want your opponents to fold.
To enable you to achieve this, you will inevitably have to lose or fold some hands, to fool your opponents into thinking you are playing a certain way.
But in the same way that your opponents will be reading you, you must learn to read your opponents.
There are a number of common strategies across most variants of poker, and understanding how these work will help you to understand how your opponents are playing, and the hand that they could very well have. Some strategies and theories which are essential to your winning are:
- Fundamentals
- Odds and Probabilities
- Deception
- Position
- Reasons To Raise
- Reasons To Call
- Gap Concept
- Sandwich Effect
- Loose/Tight Play
- Aggressive/Passive
- Hand Reading & Tells
- Table Image
- Short-Handed Tables
- Structure
You can find out more about these strategies on PokerTip.in. Familiarising yourself with these key strategies will give you a much higher chance of winning even the worst hands possible.
And How Do I Win Money?
Once you've got the basic strategies down, it's time to put them into practice. Many people assume that the easiest way to win on poker is to get a good hand and go all-in. If you have the patients to wait for that hand to come along you can make some nice pocket money, but the secret to winning big on poker is by playing in tournaments.
Online poker tournaments work just the same as real-life poker tournaments. A tournament will be open for registrations, with all seats in the tournament usually filling quickly (within minutes). Each player in the tournament will pay a buy-in fee, which could be anywhere between one dollar and tens of thousands of dollars. The buy-in fees from all players are distributed as winnings to the top players in the tournament. In small tournaments, only the top 3 places may receive winnings, however in larger tournaments, the top 50 or 100 players may receive winnings.
Occasionally, tournaments come up where the prize for winning is more than just cash. In addition to a cash prize, the winner might receive a free seat at a more important tournament. This new tournament will carry a higher prize and possibly a seat in yet another tournament. This is where you make the big bucks.
Amateurs who anted up as little as $1 in online satellite play have finished at one of the WPT tournament final tables and walked away tens of thousands of dollars richer. For example, Dan Rentzer, a business student from Santa Monica, CA, placed second to pro Gus Hansen at the Commerce Casino's L.A. Poker Classic season one tournament and won $253,595.
Why couldn't you do the same? You can. Practice online a little bit, use the strategies suggested above, and with a little patients you could take home tens of thousands of dollars, or even more!
Where Do I Play Poker Online?
There was a time where playing any sort of card games online was a very risky business. First you had to send money to a virtually unknown web site, and hope that the game play was adequate, praying that your internet connection would not drop out in the middle of a great hand. Finally, when it came to getting your winnings back in real cash, you had to hope that the website still existed and would promptly post you a cheque.
Fortunately, with so many people playing poker today, most of the untrustworthy poker websites have disappeared and only the most reliable, trustworthy and efficient sites are left.
One such site is FullTiltPoker.com. FullTilt is one of the most successful and popular online poker websites around. In terms of game play, FullTilt is far better than it's main competitors. FullTilt allows you to play in tournaments or single tables, allows a number of different poker variants (including the popular Texas Hold'em variant) and allows you to play using real money or play money. The key game play difference at FullTilt is the speed. FullTilt's software is designed to make game play very fast without sacrificing quality.
If you're looking for something a little more innovative, you can't go past PKR.com. PKR's unique 'Emote control' technology, combined with a number of other one-of-a-kind game features mean players on PKR can interact and engage with the game and each other in a way that's personal, involving and highly entertaining.
Finally, if it's security you're looking for, Pacific Poker is probably your best option. Pacific Poker provides some fairly stock standard features, but financially, it's backed by 888.com, one of the largest online casino. Obviously, the benefit of this is that you know that any money you put into your online account will be retrievable.
But How Do I Win?
Unfortunately, there's no one rule to follow to ensure that you win every hand of poker. In fact, it's impossible to win every hand in a poker game.
The reason for this is simple: In a game of poker, you always want your opponents to play differently to how they would play if they could see your cards. For example, when you have a hand that will win, you want you want your opponents to bet more, when you have a not-so-good hand, you want your opponents to fold.
To enable you to achieve this, you will inevitably have to lose or fold some hands, to fool your opponents into thinking you are playing a certain way.
But in the same way that your opponents will be reading you, you must learn to read your opponents.
There are a number of common strategies across most variants of poker, and understanding how these work will help you to understand how your opponents are playing, and the hand that they could very well have. Some strategies and theories which are essential to your winning are:
- Fundamentals
- Odds and Probabilities
- Deception
- Position
- Reasons To Raise
- Reasons To Call
- Gap Concept
- Sandwich Effect
- Loose/Tight Play
- Aggressive/Passive
- Hand Reading & Tells
- Table Image
- Short-Handed Tables
- Structure
You can find out more about these strategies on PokerTip.in. Familiarising yourself with these key strategies will give you a much higher chance of winning even the worst hands possible.
And How Do I Win Money?
Once you've got the basic strategies down, it's time to put them into practice. Many people assume that the easiest way to win on poker is to get a good hand and go all-in. If you have the patients to wait for that hand to come along you can make some nice pocket money, but the secret to winning big on poker is by playing in tournaments.
Online poker tournaments work just the same as real-life poker tournaments. A tournament will be open for registrations, with all seats in the tournament usually filling quickly (within minutes). Each player in the tournament will pay a buy-in fee, which could be anywhere between one dollar and tens of thousands of dollars. The buy-in fees from all players are distributed as winnings to the top players in the tournament. In small tournaments, only the top 3 places may receive winnings, however in larger tournaments, the top 50 or 100 players may receive winnings.
Occasionally, tournaments come up where the prize for winning is more than just cash. In addition to a cash prize, the winner might receive a free seat at a more important tournament. This new tournament will carry a higher prize and possibly a seat in yet another tournament. This is where you make the big bucks.
Amateurs who anted up as little as $1 in online satellite play have finished at one of the WPT tournament final tables and walked away tens of thousands of dollars richer. For example, Dan Rentzer, a business student from Santa Monica, CA, placed second to pro Gus Hansen at the Commerce Casino's L.A. Poker Classic season one tournament and won $253,595.
Why couldn't you do the same? You can. Practice online a little bit, use the strategies suggested above, and with a little patients you could take home tens of thousands of dollars, or even more!
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