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The GameMaster's Secrets:
Internet Advantage Play: Poker

There are three primary ways that I make $$$ from online Poker. One is fairly easy and offers relatively consistent income; another is much less consistent in its money-making abilities, but the opportunity for serious $$$ is undeniable and the third is, in my not-so-humble opinion, The Best way of making $$$ at online Poker. I'll discuss each in its turn but as a general point, you need to remember that Poker is a game of skill and while I don't know everything about it, you cannot duplicate what I do just because you're somewhat familiar with the game. I'm constantly learning through experience, plus books and videos or DVDs, so my style of play is still evolving. A technique I may be using today might not work tomorrow - one definitely needs to be flexible when playing Poker in a serious way, so don't think that what's written here has been etched in stone.

Cash Games

This is the place to increase your bankroll or, if I were paying my bills via Poker, this is where I'd get the $$$. Once you've established some mastery of the game, the cash arena produces the most consistent income. This doesn't mean I win every time I play, but it's a rare week that sees me finishing with a net loss and, for what it's worth, I haven't had a losing month in a long, long time. Of course, as I was learning I had many losing months but the losses were relatively small, so once I figured out how to win, the flow of $$$ reversed.

To me, the most important trait one must have to succeed at online Poker is self-discipline. You need to not only play the hands in a disciplined way, but also need to accept so-called bad beats, which can put many players "on tilt", plus you must have the discipline to continue to play properly, even though it appears that's not working at the moment.

My years of playing Blackjack were the perfect background for playing a winning game of Poker. For example, I always double 11 vs. 10 in a Blackjack game - assuming the count warrants such a play - even if I lost by doing so on the last five hands played. The book says "double", so I double. The "book" in Poker says to play only certain hands from early position, so for the most part, that's what I do. Admittedly, Poker is different than Blackjack in that regard - sometimes you can have a positive expected value by raising with 7-8s UTG - but 99.9% of the time, it's a losing play, so I do it only when I perceive a long-term gain will result.

At Blackjack, you will never have a long-term positive expectation by standing with A-6 vs. a dealer's 10, for example, even though you might actually win the hand from time-to-time. The same is true in Poker. You'll see players raising with trash hands and actually winning with them in some of the televised tournaments, but you need to remember that such a move is basically a "snapshot" taken from a 2-hour movie. In the context of an entire match, such a move may be profitable, but to do it all the time is a losing proposition. Yet, there are plenty of players who think that's how one should play, which is what makes the game so wickedly profitable.

Naturally you're wondering just how profitable it is. I play $1-$2 No-limit Hold'em (NLHE) cash games at places that allow the players to bring only a fixed amount of $$$ to the table - usually no more than $200. This is done to stop someone coming to the table with $5000 and just steamrolling everyone else. You are allowed to keep any profits at the table, too, so if you see such a table where most of the players have about $200, but someone has, say, $700, then that's a table you should watch for a while. One of two things has happened here: 1) the "big stack" has been exceedingly lucky, or 2) the big stack is a darn good player. If it's # 1, you want to get a seat at that table because luck doesn't last forever and sooner or later this player will start dumping chips. If it's # 2, you want to learn from this player, so watching him or her play is an inexpensive lesson of real substance. It'll take you a while to figure out which is which, but any time spent at it is worthwhile. You just have to hope that the "lucky" version of the big stack doesn't call it quits before you can get some of his or her $$$. Okay, back to the profits. I have averaged over $25 an hour at these games for the past year. Now understand, I don't play cash games full time, so it may be that I'm on the upside of variance ("lucky") because my sample size is in the hundreds of hours, not thousands of hours of play. Still, I feel comfortable with my play and, as I mentioned earlier, losing sessions are few, which is not something that would happen were I not playing with a long-term edge over the game.

Now of course you want the "where". Most of my cash game play is at Intercasino and Party Poker. At InterPoker, it can sometimes be hard to find a $1-$2 NLHE game, so I'll often play $.50-$1 NLHE, at which I average about $15 per hour. (Yes, the 50-cent game is softer, so I make more on a percentage basis than an equivalent $1-$2 game.) But in terms of absolute $$$ return, nothing beats the $1-$2 NLHE games, at least for me. I'm not ready for $5-$10 NLHE games with a $2000 maximum buy-in and I know it.

That's really an important point: Self-discipline also means being patient with your progress. Just because you won $500 in a $1-$ NLHE game last night, it doesn't mean you should now go play a $3-$6 game. Sure, you might win there, too, but want to bet on it? Experience - the most important part of a well-rounded game - comes slowly, darn it! The basic tools are here on this site, but I cannot instill the self-discipline I've talked about here; you're on your own with that one. Try my NLHE Basic Strategy matrix for starters; say 100 hours of play, minimum. Combined with a bankroll of five buy-ins (i.e., $1000 for a $200 buy-in game), you'll have a good shot at making some $$$. They won't come right away for most of you, but hang in there and you'll gradually see the winning sessions starting to overtake the losing sessions. I did it and so can you.

Multi-table Tournaments

Known as "MTTs", these are the toughest games to beat, but in the long-run, have the most potential for making huge quantities of $$$. It's hard to imagine, but the Main Event at the 2006 World Series of Poker will likely have a total prize pool of nearly $80,000,000 with ten million$ of that going to the winner. Of course, online tournaments aren't that big (yet), but just the number of events that are available on a weekly basis with top prizes in the $100,000 range is significant. Unless you're some sort of high-roller, you only need to win one $100,000 event a year to consider Poker as being worth the time and effort. And you can compete in such an event on almost a weekly basis, right from the comfort of your own home!

Sure, it takes a lot of luck to end up first in a tournament with 5000 entries - I won't deny it for a second. But unlike the lotteries to which these events are sometimes compared, once a MTT starts, there will be a winner before it ends. You can't say that about Powerball; it can go for weeks before some one hits it. But somebody truly does have to win a MTT; be it one with 50 entries or 5000 entries and that person can be you.

The important thing to remember about MTTs is that they are what we call "high-variance" games of skill. Lotteries, Keno and Slots are, for the most part, high-variance games of luck - skill is not part of the equation. But the nice thing about a lottery is that you can win a life-changing amount of money for only a $1 bet. Of course, the odds are about 147 million to 1 against that happening, which is not the way most people view it. For all practical purposes, you and I, plus all of the people we know who play the game are throwing away our dollars when we make that bet. But, it's only a buck, right? Well, for just a few bucks more, you can cut down the odds to maybe 5000 to 1. It won't win you $200 million, but wouldn't $50,000 or $100,000 change your life, too?

Speaking realistically, a beginner at NLHE MTTs probably has less than a one-half of one percent chance of winning one. But as your experience at the game grows, the odds against you winning drop rapidly. Plus, MTTs don't pay just one person - usually, about 10% of all the competitors get "in the money" (ITM), which at least offers a return of your entry fee, if not a small profit. That's where you'll begin - losing most of the time, sometimes just barely making it ITM; then one fine day you'll find yourself at the Final Table, which is where the big $$$ are. At this point in time, I'm still a net loser at MTTs, but in 2005, I finished ITM 42 times in the 266 MTTs I entered.

Here's the secret for playing MTTs. They are high-variance events, so you have to play a lot of them to give your skills a chance to take effect. I don't play as many as I'd like - they usually take 4 or 5 hours to complete - but I make sure I play at least five a week. I want to give myself a chance to win one and, just like the lotteries, "you can't win if you don't play." Right now, I feel I have about a 2% chance of winning a large (1000+ entries) MTT, which means I should win one in my next 50 attempts. However, I don't ignore smaller MTTs because I've done pretty well at those. In 2005, I won four MTTs, each of which had between 40 and 150 entries, with entry fees ranging from $22 to $109. If the Final Table is 10 players, I made it to 27 of them, which includes the four I won. As I said earlier, I'm still a net loser at MTTs - my other Poker play finances this aspect - but it'll take only a modest win to move me to the plus side.

The Best Way to Make Money at Online Poker

The third way I make a profit at online Poker is an interesting form of single-table tournaments (typically known as Sit & Go tourneys or SnGs), that I call "progressive" tournaments. The idea is that you pay an entry fee like any other SnG, but instead of cash prizes, those who place in the money either move up to a higher level SnG, get to replay the current level or move down to replay a lower one. In practice, it's possible to enter at the lowest level for maybe a $5.00 + $.50 entry fee and move up, at no additional cost, to a 10-player match where the entry fee is $550 + $55 and the top prize is $3000. Win that and you've booked a $2994 profit. Along the way, you had to place first or second (and sometimes third or fourth) in "only" five SnGs.

When you combine the relatively low entry fees with the fact that you'll never face more than 9 opponents, this type of tournament offers the beginning player the best opportunity to make serious $$$ from a small bankroll, while at the same time offering the more experienced player a consistency of income that rivals the cash games. If you've stayed with me this far, you can see that I try to take a balanced approach to earning $$$ at online Poker and this third way fits beautifully. It has the high payout to entry fee ratio of a MTT, but because you never face more than nine opponents, it's a relatively low-variance game of skill.

These tournaments have different names at different card rooms. The one I play the most is called "Rounders" at Royal Vegas Poker , which can be found under the Sit & Go Tournaments heading of their games menu. Round 1 has a $5 + $.50 entry fee and it goes up from there. I'll show you a complete chart of entry fees, prizes, etc. in a bit. I usually buy in directly at Round 3 for a $112.50 + $11.25 entry fee, rather than try to work my way up from Round 1. That's the beauty of these events - you can either pay the freight and get in at a higher level or substitute "sweat equity" for $$$ and enter at the lower levels. The advantage of buying in at a higher level is that more players move up to the next level - four move to Round 4 from Round 3, but only two move to Round 2 from Round 1, as you'll see on my chart.

But there's another reason why I buy in directly at the $123.75 level. I'm used to playing in $100+ entry fee SnGs, but a lot of the players I face in Round 3 began at the lowest level and they're typically more experienced at the $10 or $20 SnG tourneys. Yes, it is a different game at the $100+ level and, because a lot of "pros" also enter at Round 3, most of the less experienced players get caught in a squeeze between the pros and the other experienced players. Now understand, that's not to say a player who won Round 1 and Round 2 can't win at Round 3, but it's just that they'll have a harder time of it. Of course, they'll have invested a lot less $$$ in the attempt, so it goes back to the "sweat equity" concept - they're trading playing time for lower financial risk.

Anyway, here's a chart of entry fees and prizes for the Rounders SnGs:

Hopefully this chart is self-explanatory, but here are some clarifications. The "entry fee" is the total one must pay to get in a particular Round. The "Move up" means you win a "token" that gets you a free entry to the next higher Round. As far as I know, there's no time limit on using these; you may play the next higher Round at your convenience. If it says "Replay", you get a token for another shot at that level. If it shows a lower Round, you're being "sent back", but you get a free play at that level. As you can see, the $$$ are paid out in Round 5, with fourth place getting $500, third $800, second $1200 and the winner receiving $3000. I've been fortunate enough to snag a few of those and I don't mind telling you it's a thrill.

I'll see you here next time when I cover Video Poker.