Building a Bankroll Playing Online Poker

If there is one thing that is common among poker players, it is that they all want to win.  Everyone wants to go to the felt and come back with a lot more money.  Everyone wants the thrill of defeating their opponents.  The difference between players, is how they going about doing it.

If you are good poker player, you probably aspire to move up from playing low limit poker into higher limits so that you can make more money.  You may even get good enough to start playing Texas Holdem with the celebrities that you see on televised poker tournaments.  So what is the best way to build you poker bankroll so that you are able to move up in the limits?  Below are several tried and true methods of making more money in online poker, so that you can move up faster.

1) Be a bonus whore.         If you are playing very low limit games at any number of poker sites, i.e. Party Poker, Poker Stars, Poker Room, etc.  They all offer redeposit bonuses that can be very significant in terms of the stakes that you are playing at.  Party poker often offers a reload bonus ever month that you can make $100 off of.  All of the other sites offer good reload bonuses in order to retain players.  Since it is such a buyer's market for online poker, you can take unfair advantage of the sites.  The trick is just to keep shifting your bankroll between 4 or 5 different sites.  There are so many out there, you never have to be playing without clearing a bonus.  Whenever you clear a bonus, take your money out and move on to the next site, until another bonus is offered.

What is important for this to work is that you only play at sites that let you deposit and cash out using virtual checking.  Neteller and Firepay are fine and good in their own way, but if you are withdrawing and redepositing money into your accounts 5-10 times a month, it can be murder to pay 1% every time you do it.  However since many sites allow you to deposit and withdraw directly from your checking account, you can avoid paying any fees what so ever.

Personally one of my favorite sites for working the bonuses is Bodog.  They have a continuous reload bonus system set at 10%.  Which means you are effectively able to put money in, get the 10% bonus, take it out and repeat.  Best of all is that if you play tournaments or sit n go's on Bodog, the bonus money clears at exactly the same rate as you buy into the tournament for.  Therefore, say you have a $500 bankroll that you move between online poker sites, if you put it into Bodog, you can play $50 worth of tournaments without risking a dime of your own money.

2) Multi-table.     If you are a winning poker player who doesn't have enough money to move up to the next level, there is no better way to increase your winnings faster than to multi-table.  If you can win $8 / hour playing at one table, then it stands to reason that you can win $32 / hour playing at 4 tables.   In fact this is generally not the case.  Clearly as you play more tables the ability to focus on any one poker table decreases.  However it generally decreases at a slower rate than the tables you add.   So if you win $8 at one table, you are more likely to be able to win $22 / hour at 4 tables.    By judiciously using programs such as Poker Tracker, you can help offset the negative results of increasing tables.   Trying to read tells online is less important when, at the click of the mouse, you know exactly how a player has played his last 150 hands.

However, if you are a winning one table player than by no means should you jump right into 4 tables or even more.  You should always start by adding one more table at a time and getting a decent number of hands playing that many to see if you are still a winning player, and how much you are winning.

Additionally, if you are going to be heavy on multi-tabling, use thought onto where you want to play at.  Good sites for multi-tabling are ones such as Party Poker, where you can open many independent windows and see them all at one time.  You can even resize them to make them fit better on your screen.   Bad sites to multi-table at are ones such at Sun Poker, where you can only see one table at a time, so you have to constantly flip back and forth.

3) Learn to play a game other than NL Holdem well.  The proliferation of Holdem on tv has driven an increase not only in that game, but in many other games such as Stud or Omaha.  This is, in a large part, due to Holdem Players deciding to try their luck at a different game.  Many of the players who do this are losing Holdem players who think that there won't be as many bad beats if they change games, and that the poker site won't be able to cheat them as much.  If you learn how to play another game well, you should be able to make money a lot faster than you can at holdem.  Most players, even low limit players, have a good idea of what makes up a good hand in Holdem, tv has shown what are good plays and what are bad plays, so there are hardly any Holdem players who are stupendously bad.  There are some that are over aggressive, or overly passive, or call too often, and that is how people make their money, but they are still better than the bad players at other games.   

Take Omaha Hi/Low for instance.  On the face of it, it seems a lot like Holdem. The only difference is that you get four cards instead of two.  No big deal, and the play should be about the same, many holdem players think.  This is not the case.  There misconception as to what constitutes a good hand leads many low limit Omaha players to call down all the way with top pair or any two pair, and not just play when they have the nuts or a draw at the nuts.  this causes them to lose money at a great rate, hopefully into your pocket.