College Poker Tips

How To Be A Long Term Winning Poker Player

1. Study Your Playing History To Find And Fix Leaks - After you play for a while, whether it is once every week or once every 5000 hands, you should review your playing stats in Poker Tracker to find and fix leaks in your game.  Put a filter on the hands to only show hands since you have last reviewed you game and see exactly how you have done.  Is your hourly rate improving from week to week ?  You should be learning and getting better as you play poker.  Studying your game will help you improve faster.  Look over some of your best and worst hands, the ones where you won or lost a lot of money.  Was there anything that you could have done to make more money in your winning hands ?  Could you have gotten another bet in by playing more aggressively, or trapped an opponent for their entire stack by slow playing ?   In the hands that you lost, was there anything that you could have done to save some money ?   After review, was there anyway you could have exercised better pot control or folded the hand to save your chips ?  Another thing that you should do when you review your stats is look for any opponents you have played a lot of pots against.  Are there any players who you have played against multiple times ?   Take a quick look some hands they have played and take notes on that player so you have more information the next time you play.  Many sites store your player notes on your hard drive, so you can quickly review your poker tracker hands and then edit the text files when you have seen something to take note of.
 
2. Take Advantage Of Bonuses And Rakeback - If you are a serious poker player, you should always be taking advantage of either online poker bonuses, rakeback, or both.  When you have a small bankroll that you are looking to build, a poker bonus can be a godsend.  You can get a bonus at some sites like Full Tilt Poker or Bodog which can double your bankroll from $600 to $1200.  If you have a large bankroll and are playing higher stakes games, the bonuses are not as important, but rakeback can become key.  The reason there is so much potential money for you to get is that you are playing so many hands.  If you play, on average, 4 full ring games at a time, you will see approximately 250 hands every hour.  The average pot size at many games is around 10 big blinds, and the average rake is 5%.   So 250 * 10 * .05 = 125.    The poker room will rake 125 big blinds from your tables every hour.   Since many poker sites clear their bonuses at a rate of 1 point awarded to you per dollar of table rake, and 10 points clears $1 of bonus, it means that the 125 big blinds raked from your tables every hour could clear 12.5 big blinds of bonuses for you.  If you play $.5-$1 poker, that is the equivalent of winning an extra $12.50 per hour, which is substantial and may be as much as half the amount of money you won just playing poker.   If you sign up for rakeback, you can usually get around 25% of your rake back to you.  If you play at 4 full tables where they took 125 big blinds, 12.5 big blinds of rake will be credit to you.  That means with rakeback you can get an extra 3 big blinds into your account every hour you play.
 
3. Play Within Your Bankroll - Even the best poker players lose some of the times they sit down at the poker table.  Sometimes you will play bad, sometimes you will get an extremely unlucky hand and lose your entire stack.  If you are consistently playing at too high stakes, then these unlucky chances can decimate your bankroll.  Although you may be a better player than your opponents, you are not guaranteed to win any particular session, you are just more likely to win over the long run.  The way to keep bad sessions from bankrupting you is to only play with a low percentage of your poker budget at any one time.  The general rule of thumb is that for no limit Texas holdem you need at least 15 buy ins for whatever stakes you are playing, and that is only if you are playing a single game.   Since multi-tabling puts you at risk of playing on tilt one night and losing money at all of your tables, you need to have a larger bankroll if you multi-table.  You should have 15 buy ins * the square root of the number of tables you play at once.    So if you play 1 table you should have 15 buy in, 4 tables you should have 30 buy ins, 10 tables you should have 47 buy ins.    What that means is that if you play $.5-$1 No limit holdem, and you play 4 tables at a time, you need 30 buy ins * $100 buy in = $3000 to minimize your chance of going bankrupt.

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