In your impatience to work towards your big, fat bonus, you will of course start playing with real cash. Never mind that a bit of finger trouble operating an unfamiliar interface may push you all-in on a beer hand. Or you don't notice that one raise and a call has already happened as you try to steal the blinds with your K2, off-suit.
You'll get the hang of it after the first few losses. And, boy, that bonus is... just as far away as it ever was.
(Hey, this is post number 150. Yay!)
You’ve identified the guy who’s in every hand and who bets every flop. Time to give him the LAG label. Loose-aggressive. You’ve got his number. And you’ve finally got a good hand, better than top pair anyway. Call him all the way to the river, or the end of your stack, whichever is sooner. They'll not beat you this time.
Trouble is: they have a tendency only to stick around when they do have a chance of winning or if they can bully you out of the pot. If you start picking and choosing the hands to stand on, they'll out-guess you every time.
THEY'RE NOT STUPID.
But it’s so much easier to believe that they are.
Every poker-room lets you take notes. But how easy is it? And how easy is it to read those notes? Can you float the mouse to do the latter? Click once, to start the former? A bare minimum, surely, given the speed of online games.
Who’s worrying? We're not taking notes anyway. It’s far too much effort. Who needs to know if the latest pre-flop raise or bet from mrfish, or some such innocent sounding name, is part of a long line. Or whether sharky has been limping into way too many pots. Or mthrfkr (do all online poker players have the imagination of a two-year-old?) will never shift off a hand.
God knows it’s hard enough to put opponents on a range of hands without muddying the waters with their tendencies. You don't need a casino’s note-taking ability.
That's right. There are loads of online casinos out there, all desperate to fleece – er, sorry, establish a meaningful customer relationship with you; and they all offer humungous cash bonuses to reel you in. It makes sense to pick the biggest one and deposit to the max. So you have to play a bit to earn points, and what do points mean? Points mean unlocking the bonus.
Then you start grinding away at the tables. And probably losing. Still, you're earning all those points towards your bonus, so you check them just to make you feel better. Uh-oh.
Unless you're playing at ridiculously high stakes for a tyro (and I’ll have something to say about that too!), it'll take you the rest of the century just to release the first five dollars.
Never mind: it is a big bonus.
With apologies to Simon Barnes, but this does not even intend to turn you into any sort of poker player. It should warn you off by listing all the traps I've fallen into on my way to becoming a poor poker player. If it doesn't, then follow my advice to play a worse game than I do. And, please, end up playing on my table. Please.
OK, so you're not listening and the first mistake you must make is your choice of poker room. Or even whether to play live or online.
Play live. It’s so much more expensive and you can lose far more than you ever could online, quite apart from having to spend on travel, drinks and food. Still, for a night out with the lads, it beats a strip club. And if you're a girl – yes, even girls get tempted by poker – it definitely beats a strip club.
Now we're sitting nice and comfortable at home in front of the Web, still reading this, I hope. And I’m going to make you wait for the next nugget. And the next. And so on.
Watch this space.
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