Killer Poker Online/2: Advanced Strategies For Crushing The Internet Game. John Vorhaus

It takes long-term steady play and steely concentration to win any kind of serious coin online, but it takes only a momentary lapse of reason to lose it all back again. The blessing and the curse of online poker is that it’s available to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and, increasingly these days, through 360 degrees of global longitude, too. (Comes the day we can log on at 30,000 feet we’ll run the real risk of defunding entire travel budgets before the plane even lands.) With easy, immediate access to the game we love, it’s no wonder we enter play in almost every conceivable state of mind: sleepy, grumpy, dopey, and several other flavors of dwarf.

      I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, I know. If you’ve played even a small amount of internet poker, you’ve no doubt already encountered its common pitfalls. You know what it’s like to seduce yourself into playing the wrong game at the wrong time. You’ve seen your bankroll in catastrophic freefall. You’ve suffered through a string of bad beats so improbable that, logic and common sense notwithstanding, you’ve allowed yourself to believe that the online game is fixed, frozen solid, with the virtual deck stacked against you and you alone. You’ve staggered away from the computer feeling like the victim of alien possession, which alien’s nefarious agenda was to piss away as fast as possible all of your money to mokey23. You have learned, in other words, the fundamental truth of online play, a truth that countless players have learned in the scant years of internet poker’s existence:

      IT’S EASIER TO LOSE FAST THAN TO WIN FAST

      Why might this be true? For one thing, winning fast relies on the harmonic convergence of many good cards and many bad players, a convergence that’s relatively rare. Losing fast, though, requires only your bad play, and if you’re playing badly, you’re always there, hand after hand after miserable, execrable, disastrous hand. I can think of some other reasons for explosive bankroll decompression, and I’ll list them in a moment, but I’d like you to think of some, too. This book, like all my books, is intended to be interactive. You’ll only get out of it what you put into it, and what I specifically want you to put in is your own original thought, for reading a book is one thing, but participating in it is something altogether else. So I encourage you to embrace the idea of doing the mental exercises presented in these pages. You don’t have to do them all, and you don’t have to do them particularly well. No one will be looking over your shoulder grading your effort. But if you’re determined to get your money’s worth from this book’s cover price of seven bobby helmets (at current rates of exchange), you’ll make the effort not just to read the thing, but to engage it, involve yourself in it, make it your own. That’s how one’s practice of poker grows.

      So let’s think together, shall we, about why and how we find it easy to lose fast online. Here are some ways my bankroll bleeds:

      I play when I’m tired, when my judgment is soft. I play angry, or keep playing when I’ve been made angry. I distract myself with television, telephone or radio. I play in tough environments like pubs in British airports. I play in games too big for my bankroll. I play too many games at once. I play when I just don’t care. Once I played in a post-operative, Vicodin-addled haze, and man was that a crash-and-burn.

      And now here are some ways yours does:

      >>

      You’ll note that I’ve left you some jotting space on the pages, and any time you see the >> symbol, it means your thoughts here. Or you can keep a notebook, or open a computer file. It really doesn’t matter how you record your thoughts, so long as you do record your thoughts. As I said, that’s how the practice of poker grows.

      And it’s growing your practice of poker that really interests me. Whether you play online for fun or for profit, you naturally want to do the best you can. You naturally want to improve. So it’s reasonable to set the goal of improvement over even the goal of winning. Presumably if improvement happens, winning will follow. Of course, improvement requires tools, techniques, strategy, tactics, and deep understanding…all of which I confidently hope to bring you in this book. But improvement also requires the right state of mind: a state of mind that acknowledges setbacks and takes them in stride, that recognizes errors and moves to correct them and that notes without rancor past pitfalls and determines to avoid them in the future.

      This is not just a matter of saying, “I will play poker with discipline.” It’s fine to be disciplined—necessary, in fact—but discipline only squelches the urge, it doesn’t address the underlying cause. You might have the willpower to not smoke a cigarette all day, all week, or all month, but until you’ve actually quit smoking, you haven’t changed your state of mind. I might be “disciplined” enough not to play poker next time I’m killing time in Heathrow (or I might not) but until I confront my underlying cockiness, all I have is a fundamentally flawed state of mind that says, I can beat this game anywhere, any time, even at Heathrow, even under the influence of sleep debt and strong ale. From that p(o)int forward, it doesn’t matter if I play specific hands with discipline or not. I’ve already made the mistake of indiscipline, and disaster is the predictable result.

      The right state of mind for an online poker player, then, is attentive humility. Being attentive means simply bringing all of your concentration and focus to bear when you settle in for an online session. Humility means never imagining that you’ve got the game licked. You haven’t. I haven’t. The top pros haven’t. Nobody has. All any of us can do is strive to keep closing the gap between the players we are and the players we want to be. And that’s the “blessing” part of internet poker’s blessing-and-curse construction. While it’s possible to lose fast, it’s also possible to learn fast—faster than previous generations of poker players could ever have imagined. There are so many different sites offering so many different games, structures, limits, satellites, and tournaments (and speeds—regular, turbo, even ultra turbo) that excellence in poker is an achievable goal for he or she who has a mind to put his or her mind to it.

      While I’m stumbling through this thicket of awkward pronouns, let me take a moment to address the issue of awkward pronouns. In a perfect world, there would be a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun that we could use instead of his/her, he/she, or they. So far, this gift of language has not been bestowed upon English, nor is it likely to crop up between now and when I finish this book. Should I then use a stilted construction, nod to political correctness and use she, or bow to convenience and use he?

      I’m gonna go with convenience. Though women are entering poker in record numbers (and, from Annie Duke and Jennifer Harmon to anonymous distaff winners of cash games and tournaments worldwide, proving themselves capable of waxing any man’s keister), the fact yet remains that the vast majority of poker players, both online and in the realworld realm, are male. It’s changing, but it has a long way to go. With that in mind, then, I’m going to use he as the default personal pronoun in this book, and take it as given that, whether you pee standing up or sitting down, you’ll cut me some slack.

      Further to the subject of cutting slack, I hope you won’t mind if you find in this text one or two things borrowed from my earlier Killer Poker books. If this is your first visit to Killer Poker Land, I urge you to spend some time in your local bookstore skimming some of the other titles and bringing yourself up to speed, for much of what we talk about here will be based on, and built from, much of what we talked about there. Or skip all that and just absorb the core Killer Poker philosophy, “Go big or go home.” In any case, there’s bound to be a certain amount of repetition, and that’s by design. It’s not that I can’t count on you to remember having read it, or that I can’t count on me to remember having written it. It’s just that some points bear repeating, and I won’t be shy about repeating them as necessary.

      One big difference between those books and this: the form of poker under consideration here is exclusively no limit Texas hold’em. Since I wrote the first Killer Poker book (or even since I wrote the last one), no limit hold’em (NLHE) has taken over, both online and in the realworld. Other types of poker endure, for sure, but NLHE is the 800-pound gorilla in poker’s living room right now. You can’t ignore it and you can’t avoid it, so you might as well invite it to sit on the sofa and offer it a banana. The situations I will speak to in this book, then, are those of NLHE. If you favor Omaha,