hands get cracked all the time, its not rigged.....
i was at river rock playing 2-4 last night for about 4 hours..ended up down about $50 (no worries) but one hand i got QQ UTG, and of course i raised $2 to $4.....rest of the table folded, to the BB, who called saying, well it's my big blind...... flop came J 4 2 rainbow, he bet, i raised, and of course another J came on turn, and he cracked it......he has J6o....... does this mean casino poker is rigged? no, it means its full of fish......sure cracked once but ill win in the long run against these people who shouldnt be in the hand in the first place
To make money online on a consistant basis be prepared to grind it out... Online play is all about managing your Bankroll.
I only play limits where I have the 300 x BB covered or 20+ buy ins for nl reason being for the times when you hit lows...
I also spent 55$ USD on Pokertracker which was/is a wise investment for any serious online players..
With out seeing your stats for play I'll tell you mine: I try to avg around 18% flops seen and run around 9% Pre flop Raise... over 18000 hands I run around 3bb/100hands or 6bb/hour.. Some games give more or less then these stats.. Higher limit tougher stats...
I am always tight but very aggressive on hands and try to play strong position.....
There's no get rich quick way to do it.. You wanna make oney you gotta grind it out.. Cash games you can play multi tables but this lowers your hourly rate... per table...
Tournies are quick cash if done right..
Today for example I wanted to play the 100$ 100k on prima so I played cash games and made 250+ before entering the 100+10 tourny.. Net profit 140+$$$ Do this for every tourny.. wanna play a 30$ go make 50$ then play it.. that way your always Gaining in bankroll
By End of Week you got 7 days of gaining to play 1 big tourny... Any cashing along the way is Bonus....
To Mindtech, I think there is a LOT of great advice in the replies to your original post. I have to agree with the people that say you are playing an undisciplined, loose game. Read and re-read some of the better posts in this thread, and if you're serious about the game, invest in some books to learn more. If you play low limit (i.e. $1-2 up to $5-10), "Winning Low Limit Hold'Em" by Lee Jones is a good choice. But don't stop there...it's an ongoing learning process.
As already mentioned, low limit can be very profitable when played correctly. You need to play a focused, disciplined, and aggressive game. I don't mean this to be a stab at you in any way, but players with your mindset are what make the game profitable:). You are on the right track by being a member of this forum. There are a lot of solid players on this site who provide great advice.
So, learn as much as possible about this game, add some discipline to your routine, and keep reading this forum. I was once a bad player who played much, much too loose. I've made the adjustments I mentioned above, and I am now doing quite well at the $1-2 limit level online.
To Mindtech, I think there is a LOT of great advice in the replies to your original post. I have to agree with the people that say you are playing an undisciplined, loose game. Read and re-read some of the better posts in this thread, and if you're serious about the game, invest in some books to learn more. If you play low limit (i.e. $1-2 up to $5-10), "Winning Low Limit Hold'Em" by Lee Jones is a good choice. But don't stop there...it's an ongoing learning process.
As already mentioned, low limit can be very profitable when played correctly. You need to play a focused, disciplined, and aggressive game. I don't mean this to be a stab at you in any way, but players with your mindset are what make the game profitable:). You are on the right track by being a member of this forum. There are a lot of solid players on this site who provide great advice.
So, learn as much as possible about this game, add some discipline to your routine, and keep reading this forum. I was once a bad player who played much, much too loose. I've made the adjustments I mentioned above, and I am now doing quite well at the $1-2 limit level online.
Thank you for your reply Gordon. You're right. There are many excellent posts in this thread that I will learn from. With that said, I may infact look towards amazon.ca and do some research on that book.
As for myself being profitable to someone such as yourself, sometimes the truth is harsh and brutal, but if thats the way it is, I guess I have to change ways (or plays).
And to everyone else, thank you for your replies and opinions.
I've actually found that online games are easier to beat than B & M.
I play very low limits in both (usually $.50-$1 or $1-$2 online, and $2-$5 B&M), and I keep track of all my sessions in a spreadsheet, so I know my results. My average win rate is about 1.5 BB/hr online, and about 0.5 BB/hr in casino games.
Those differences are pretty close to what I would expect, given that you play about twice as many hands per hour online, and the rake is less. Still, it feels like I win more often online than B&M. There are two reasons I can think of for this:
1) Hands come slowly at a casino. If I take just one bad beat, and follow that up with two hours of garbage cards, it's really hard not to finish down that session. To make this even worse, I seem to feel some sort of urgency to finish up each session in a casino, so I sometimes start to chase when I'm down and need to leave soon.
2) After a few hours, people in a B&M game notice that I play tight, and seem to play tighter against me. This means that I can buy the odd pot, which I rarely do online, but it also means that the "bingo" hands don't pay off as well as they do online. Some casinos will let you change tables every once in a while, which helps, but others don't.
I make quite a bit online. I think the key is to have as many "big name" online rooms as possible. I shop around for a table and sit down at what I deem a weaker table. I'm usually play 5-10 limit, on Pacific or Empire (very weak competition) or I'll play the 25NL or 50NL on Party. Stay away from the UB ring games. Royal Vegas, Empire, Pacific, and Party have some pretty good sit n gos. I tend to stay away from Stars because it seems that the competition there is a lot stiffer than anywhere else. Must be the WSOP thing. Again, always shop a table before you sit down. Take a few minutes and watch how many people avg see the flop and what avg pot size is. There are so many showdowns in the ring games that you can easily put players on cards. Just watch for a bit first. Oh and you can see a mucked showdown hand in the hand history.
There is alot of good advice so far in this post. The only thing that I would add is not only pick a game that you can beat, but be selective about the tables you play within that game. Choose tables that better suit your play (ie loose-aggressive, tight-passive, etc). If you don't like big swings, a loose aggressive table is going to put you on tilt...
That's one of the good points about online poker, it's really easy to switch tables if you want...
To answer the original question, I'm up to about 20x my original buyin in about 5 months (averaging an hour or 2 per day), but it seems to have stalled for about a month now. Very frustrating sometimes. :banghead: I play mostly low blind NL, and NL SnG's.
To make money online on a consistant basis be prepared to grind it out... Online play is all about managing your Bankroll.
I only play limits where I have the 300 x BB covered or 20+ buy ins for nl reason being for the times when you hit lows...
I also spent 55$ USD on Pokertracker which was/is a wise investment for any serious online players..
With out seeing your stats for play I'll tell you mine: I try to avg around 18% flops seen and run around 9% Pre flop Raise... over 18000 hands I run around 3bb/100hands or 6bb/hour.. Â Some games give more or less then these stats.. Higher limit tougher stats...
I am always tight but very aggressive on hands and try to play strong position.....
There's no get rich quick way to do it.. You wanna make oney you gotta grind it out.. Cash games you can play multi tables but this lowers your hourly rate... per table...
Tournies are quick cash if done right..
Today for example I wanted to play the 100$ 100k on prima so I played cash games and made 250+ before entering the 100+10 tourny.. Net profit 140+$$$ Â Do this for every tourny.. wanna play a 30$ go make 50$ then play it.. Â that way your always Gaining in bankroll
By End of Week you got 7 days of gaining to play 1 big tourny... Â Any cashing along the way is Bonus....
Just reading through old threads, and wanted to say I quite enjoyed your post, as well as this thread in general.
1. its very brave of the initial poster to come forward and announce that hes not a winning player...thats probably the best and hardest step towards becoming a winning player
2. online games are much tougher then their B&M counterparts of the same limit. players are tighter and make fewer postflop mistakes. alot of players that have only played B&M feel online is rigged because they are used to playing against very very soft competition at higher limits when the simple answer is that they are outmatched when they jump into a tougher online enviroment. never assume malice when complete ineptitude will suffice.
This post actually reminds me of a time at the B&M awhile back while waiting for a table a friend of mine and I got talking with a player waiting on a 10-20 table who had asked us if either of us had played online yet and how it was like? We both said yes and that the game was beatable. He asked us what limits we usually had played online and both of us at the time were playing .50-1 limit. He sort of snickered but didn't hold anything against us playing such low limits. We told him that the avg. .50-1 game online was tougher than any 2-5 table we had ever seen at Brantford. I clearly remembered the shocked look on his face trying to gauge whether we were bluffing or not. Of course we weren't and I think this generally shows how a traditional B&M player would probably scoff at the skill level of an online player and figure that there are multitudes of weaker games online than in the local casino. The fact is the truly recreational players will flock to the lowest limits available, and due to the multitude of microlimit games online there is definitely an online to B&M conversion factor for games with similar skill levels.
Congrats to the IP....brave to say you can't beat a game.
Here are my actual B&M stats....horrible as they are. Obviously, I should try to avoid NL, but I love the game, if not my extreme bad luck to the suck out.
I play poker because I love the game. Sometimes I win. Often I lose. In the end, I am paying for my hobby. But my friends who go play hockey, at $30-$50 a shot, love their hobby and pay for it too. Try to get better so you can get out of poker what you want (money!) but if you can't, play because you love the game.
1st If you are playing on line and don't have poker tracker get it.
I play low limit NL on both party and prima and the variance is HUGE. My poker tracker data shows my best hand in winning percentage to be AA followed by KK followed by AKs then QQ. Both my QQ and JJ however are showing a net loss. Both basically of one all in hand like where the QQ flopped top set to a flush draw which hit. On line is far far far looser. It is far easier to click a button or move your mouse and not be looking at anything but the monitor. For some it's a quick easy entertainment. Where as you really have to want to play poker to drive to the casino put your name on a waiting list then get in. I routinely play at least 5 10 in a casino and would not consider that on line at all just because of the variance. I don't win lots of coin but withdrawing $500 us to cover expenses as they come up is an added bonus.
Lots of good stuff here. I'm not going to analyze the orginal poster's intent, but he does bring up some good points.
I'll state the obvious, even thought it's not so obvious. Online is different than live. One of my biggest weapons is speed. That part of my game is very ineffective in B&M play. Online, I can vary how quickly I make my decisions and get my opponents to make horrible decisions. The worse the player, the more likely they won't change their mind about what I could hold. So, if they put me on an overpair, and my flush hits, they pay off very nicely. However, in B&M play my oppoenents have to pick up their chips and put them in play -- this causes them to think more about what I could hold. And, they make fewer horrible errors, even though they still pay off.
One of my favourite topics at B&M is online play. Usually, folks say online is rigged, or players are colluding or some other reason why they can't win. I really just want to say that they are horrible players, and that if I could get 100+ hands an hour with them, they wouldn't have a stack in front of them.
In B&M play, you're less likely to spew multiple big bets when you lose, and there will be more players playing you off. The multiple player payoff, hides so many mistakes. For instance you may open limp with J8 suited in middle position and you get three more players calling, and of course the small blind comes in. Now there's six players in the pot, and someone with 98, and another player with bottom pair will pay you off to the river. Online, you don't have as many players paying you off, and you usually have some aggressive guy weeding out the players, so you only get paid by one player, if that -- which kills your odds.
Yes you examine your play. However, try and examine ALL your hands for a complete week or month by position. Find out which hands you're playing which you should be folding. Find out how many times you got caught out of position and spewed multiple big bets on the turn/river. Find out how many times you should have folded AA or KK. Bad players with bad cards make good hands. No sense in paying them off. Get them to pay you off.
Hi
Like 13cards i play because i love the game. I started playing for free 2 years ago at partypoker and only last 3 months did i ever put real money into play on pokerstars. It is players like " poker lance" ( i hope he reads this ) at absolute poker who have fueled me to make this more about just having fun. Now with his remarks to me and others too about how bad i played. I went out and picked up super sytem and ss2. i remember reading you should not critize bad players because it makes them become better or draws them away.
Well i will admit i am losing at this point but still having fun as i am only down a few hundred. But i do not see this trend continuing as i am learning more ever day from this forum. Thanks to you all for the help
The only other thing that I could mention is that there are no bots in a B&M game (although some people have as much personality as a bot). I don't really play online so I wouldn't know how much of a difference this makes and I have no idea how many bots populate the online games but it's just an additional thing to think about. Chances are that the reason you are suffering so many bad beats is that you are upset that they beat you. Now every time I suffer a bad beat I remind myselft that these are the people I make money off. I almost enjoy losing sometimes(ok that was a lie but you get the point). And I agree with the poster who recommended playing more tournies, I've made the money without even playing a hand. After 3 rounds more than half a table is out.
Apparently only 5% of people playing online are long-term winning players. Where this number came from--and whether or not it's true--is beyond me, but I've heard it said a few times. Â I suspect that 80% of that 5% is comprised of people who actively read books and forums, and post about poker, but who can say.
lookin at 60k hands from stars 100/200 we had just over 35% winning.
I play online at Party at the low limits and am up a few hundred by playing straight-ahead-Fred poker...sure my great hands AA KK etc. get cracked but one must also learn when to let them go when the board is bad
My wife started with $2 won in a freeroll at Tiger and has run that up to $500 playing mostly $.10/.20 but now with the larger bankroll she is 4 tabling .25/.50 and .50/1.00 (when she can get a table). Party players are bad but Tiger has the worst :fish:, unfortunately just not as many as Party.
I am hitting just around 2 BB/hr playing mostly $1/2 at Pokerroom and Absolute. Pokerroom has looser players and a good player point system but Absolute has better reloads and their software is much improved since the latest upgrade. Pokertracker now works seamlessly with Absolute and the new hand review feature is the best I've seen for reviewing what kind of cards your opponents are playing.
Playing .50/1.00 on UB, Absolute, Party/Paradise, PT has me coming out at .5BB/100. Barely breakeven.
Add the whoring that was done during the 25000 hands, I'm up ~ $2000.00 in 16 months.
I'm off the SNG's completely for the time being (~ 40% ROI). concentrating 100% on ring games.
With my Trip to Vegas/kids XBOX and some personal expenses paid for thanks to online play...I'm now down to $40.00 left online and back at Party playing .50/1.00, beginning another quest to play that up to something manageable.
I am down about $1000 online since I started playing poker in January. I was down about $1500 but have won $500 back playing limit SNG the past few weeks.
In live play I am up about $4000 at casinos and home games.
Comments
i was at river rock playing 2-4 last night for about 4 hours..ended up down about $50 (no worries) but one hand i got QQ UTG, and of course i raised $2 to $4.....rest of the table folded, to the BB, who called saying, well it's my big blind...... flop came J 4 2 rainbow, he bet, i raised, and of course another J came on turn, and he cracked it......he has J6o....... does this mean casino poker is rigged? no, it means its full of fish......sure cracked once but ill win in the long run against these people who shouldnt be in the hand in the first place
To make money online on a consistant basis be prepared to grind it out... Online play is all about managing your Bankroll.
I only play limits where I have the 300 x BB covered or 20+ buy ins for nl reason being for the times when you hit lows...
I also spent 55$ USD on Pokertracker which was/is a wise investment for any serious online players..
With out seeing your stats for play I'll tell you mine: I try to avg around 18% flops seen and run around 9% Pre flop Raise... over 18000 hands I run around 3bb/100hands or 6bb/hour.. Some games give more or less then these stats.. Higher limit tougher stats...
I am always tight but very aggressive on hands and try to play strong position.....
There's no get rich quick way to do it.. You wanna make oney you gotta grind it out.. Cash games you can play multi tables but this lowers your hourly rate... per table...
Tournies are quick cash if done right..
Today for example I wanted to play the 100$ 100k on prima so I played cash games and made 250+ before entering the 100+10 tourny.. Net profit 140+$$$ Do this for every tourny.. wanna play a 30$ go make 50$ then play it.. that way your always Gaining in bankroll
By End of Week you got 7 days of gaining to play 1 big tourny... Any cashing along the way is Bonus....
As already mentioned, low limit can be very profitable when played correctly. You need to play a focused, disciplined, and aggressive game. I don't mean this to be a stab at you in any way, but players with your mindset are what make the game profitable:). You are on the right track by being a member of this forum. There are a lot of solid players on this site who provide great advice.
So, learn as much as possible about this game, add some discipline to your routine, and keep reading this forum. I was once a bad player who played much, much too loose. I've made the adjustments I mentioned above, and I am now doing quite well at the $1-2 limit level online.
Thank you for your reply Gordon. You're right. There are many excellent posts in this thread that I will learn from. With that said, I may infact look towards amazon.ca and do some research on that book.
As for myself being profitable to someone such as yourself, sometimes the truth is harsh and brutal, but if thats the way it is, I guess I have to change ways (or plays).
And to everyone else, thank you for your replies and opinions.
I play very low limits in both (usually $.50-$1 or $1-$2 online, and $2-$5 B&M), and I keep track of all my sessions in a spreadsheet, so I know my results. My average win rate is about 1.5 BB/hr online, and about 0.5 BB/hr in casino games.
Those differences are pretty close to what I would expect, given that you play about twice as many hands per hour online, and the rake is less. Still, it feels like I win more often online than B&M. There are two reasons I can think of for this:
1) Hands come slowly at a casino. If I take just one bad beat, and follow that up with two hours of garbage cards, it's really hard not to finish down that session. To make this even worse, I seem to feel some sort of urgency to finish up each session in a casino, so I sometimes start to chase when I'm down and need to leave soon.
2) After a few hours, people in a B&M game notice that I play tight, and seem to play tighter against me. This means that I can buy the odd pot, which I rarely do online, but it also means that the "bingo" hands don't pay off as well as they do online. Some casinos will let you change tables every once in a while, which helps, but others don't.
That's one of the good points about online poker, it's really easy to switch tables if you want...
To answer the original question, I'm up to about 20x my original buyin in about 5 months (averaging an hour or 2 per day), but it seems to have stalled for about a month now. Very frustrating sometimes. :banghead: I play mostly low blind NL, and NL SnG's.
Just reading through old threads, and wanted to say I quite enjoyed your post, as well as this thread in general.
1. its very brave of the initial poster to come forward and announce that hes not a winning player...thats probably the best and hardest step towards becoming a winning player
2. online games are much tougher then their B&M counterparts of the same limit. players are tighter and make fewer postflop mistakes. alot of players that have only played B&M feel online is rigged because they are used to playing against very very soft competition at higher limits when the simple answer is that they are outmatched when they jump into a tougher online enviroment. never assume malice when complete ineptitude will suffice.
"It's not whether you win or lose, but how you lay the blame."
Here are my actual B&M stats....horrible as they are. Obviously, I should try to avoid NL, but I love the game, if not my extreme bad luck to the suck out.
I play poker because I love the game. Sometimes I win. Often I lose. In the end, I am paying for my hobby. But my friends who go play hockey, at $30-$50 a shot, love their hobby and pay for it too. Try to get better so you can get out of poker what you want (money!) but if you can't, play because you love the game.
I play low limit NL on both party and prima and the variance is HUGE. My poker tracker data shows my best hand in winning percentage to be AA followed by KK followed by AKs then QQ. Both my QQ and JJ however are showing a net loss. Both basically of one all in hand like where the QQ flopped top set to a flush draw which hit. On line is far far far looser. It is far easier to click a button or move your mouse and not be looking at anything but the monitor. For some it's a quick easy entertainment. Where as you really have to want to play poker to drive to the casino put your name on a waiting list then get in. I routinely play at least 5 10 in a casino and would not consider that on line at all just because of the variance. I don't win lots of coin but withdrawing $500 us to cover expenses as they come up is an added bonus.
I'll state the obvious, even thought it's not so obvious. Online is different than live. One of my biggest weapons is speed. That part of my game is very ineffective in B&M play. Online, I can vary how quickly I make my decisions and get my opponents to make horrible decisions. The worse the player, the more likely they won't change their mind about what I could hold. So, if they put me on an overpair, and my flush hits, they pay off very nicely. However, in B&M play my oppoenents have to pick up their chips and put them in play -- this causes them to think more about what I could hold. And, they make fewer horrible errors, even though they still pay off.
One of my favourite topics at B&M is online play. Usually, folks say online is rigged, or players are colluding or some other reason why they can't win. I really just want to say that they are horrible players, and that if I could get 100+ hands an hour with them, they wouldn't have a stack in front of them.
In B&M play, you're less likely to spew multiple big bets when you lose, and there will be more players playing you off. The multiple player payoff, hides so many mistakes. For instance you may open limp with J8 suited in middle position and you get three more players calling, and of course the small blind comes in. Now there's six players in the pot, and someone with 98, and another player with bottom pair will pay you off to the river. Online, you don't have as many players paying you off, and you usually have some aggressive guy weeding out the players, so you only get paid by one player, if that -- which kills your odds.
Yes you examine your play. However, try and examine ALL your hands for a complete week or month by position. Find out which hands you're playing which you should be folding. Find out how many times you got caught out of position and spewed multiple big bets on the turn/river. Find out how many times you should have folded AA or KK. Bad players with bad cards make good hands. No sense in paying them off. Get them to pay you off.
Cheers
Magi
Like 13cards i play because i love the game. I started playing for free 2 years ago at partypoker and only last 3 months did i ever put real money into play on pokerstars. It is players like " poker lance" ( i hope he reads this ) at absolute poker who have fueled me to make this more about just having fun. Now with his remarks to me and others too about how bad i played. I went out and picked up super sytem and ss2. i remember reading you should not critize bad players because it makes them become better or draws them away.
Well i will admit i am losing at this point but still having fun as i am only down a few hundred. But i do not see this trend continuing as i am learning more ever day from this forum. Thanks to you all for the help
lookin at 60k hands from stars 100/200 we had just over 35% winning.
I am hitting just around 2 BB/hr playing mostly $1/2 at Pokerroom and Absolute. Pokerroom has looser players and a good player point system but Absolute has better reloads and their software is much improved since the latest upgrade. Pokertracker now works seamlessly with Absolute and the new hand review feature is the best I've seen for reviewing what kind of cards your opponents are playing.
Playing .50/1.00 on UB, Absolute, Party/Paradise, PT has me coming out at .5BB/100. Barely breakeven.
Add the whoring that was done during the 25000 hands, I'm up ~ $2000.00 in 16 months.
I'm off the SNG's completely for the time being (~ 40% ROI). concentrating 100% on ring games.
With my Trip to Vegas/kids XBOX and some personal expenses paid for thanks to online play...I'm now down to $40.00 left online and back at Party playing .50/1.00, beginning another quest to play that up to something manageable.
In live play I am up about $4000 at casinos and home games.