Everyone wants to be a winner in just about everything – not just online poker. After all, regardless of the name of the game, no one plays to lose. The sad truth is though, there are always fewer winners than losers, – that's what makes the whole experience so special – and in online poker this is especially true.
Most people who play online are losers. Certainly, if you hit a forum, you'll see everyone bragging on about their accomplishments. Always bear in mind though, that a good percentage of those claiming to be excellent players are but mere losers themselves. Why exactly are there more losers then winners?
1.) It's the nature of the game. The money the winners pocket has to come from somewhere, and rest assured it's not coming from the poker room. As a matter of fact, the poker room makes its money off players too, so you do the math.
2.) Most people are just too darn ignorant to pay attention to detail, and to take the time to understand what they're getting themselves into. There are a few things about online poker that can radically improve one's performance, if only he/she took the time to find out about them. Here are some of those factors:
The differences between online and offline poker. Everyone goes on about how different the two variants are, yet amazingly few people stop to ponder whether those differences could benefit them in any way.
Sure, online poker is faster, which means you can lose more per hour if you're a loser, but in the same time it also means you can attempt to exploit smaller edges than you normally would in live poker, because your hourly rate gets a face-lift.
There are far more fish in online poker than in live poker. You can multi-table in online poker and – I left the best for last intentionally – there are bonuses and various other promotions that can help your overall effort greatly.
Everyone knows about bonuses. They see a large sum advertised somewhere, rookies take it as free cash and flock to it like there's no tomorrow. Very few people know how to evaluate a bonus though. Offers can be very tricky, and they're not always designed to serve the best interests of the player. Learn how to assess the value of a bonus offer.
There are special bonuses (re-occurring bonuses) that you'd laugh yourself silly if you knew how few of those playing online know about. Such bonuses provide the best value and yet only a small fraction of players ever take advantage of them. I'm talking about deals like poker rakeback, cashback and prop deals. Such deals represent cold hard cash often shoved right into people's faces, yet too many of them just brush the offer off and move on. You think that's outrageously ignorant? It is, but that ignorance is real.
Learning about proper starting hand selection is another important early performance-enhancing factor. Do not learn the charts by heart. Learn why you have to do a certain thing under certain circumstances and how you have to follow it up. Learn about pot odds. They're the heart and soul of the positive mathematical expectation-chase that winning online poker is supposed to be about. Don't know what EV value is? What are you doing at the poker table then? Take the time to learn about it first; you'll do yourself a huge favor.
The basics of knowing when to fold a hand is the relation between the pot odds and the likeliness of you making your – potentially winner hand. If the latter are better than the former, you should call, if not you should fold. If the latter is overwhelmingly better than the former, you should raise.
Don't let the tiniest of edges escape you, and let your edges work time and time again. Pot odds and effective odds (sometimes implied odds too) are at the basis of every poker strategy, advanced or basic.
Playing successful poker is not about luck. There's a luck element in it, which you'll have to learn to deal with, but it's not mainly about that. Take the above named factors into consideration before join the populous camp of the losers, and give yourself a fair shot at becoming a winner.
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