The Psychology of Online Poker

By HHA

Online Poker has usually taken a low profile in the recent poker explosion. With poker tournaments getting broadcast recently, the popularity of the World Poker Series and stories like Chris the moneymaker take all the hype, but one of the major reasons of the development of this new poker Wave is online poker. It's not necessary to travel great distances to play; you now have any kind of poker table, multiple variants of poker and any kind of stakes to play on at your disposition. Another hidden benefit from the online game is that the learning curve is accelerating for beginners because the number of hands dealt per hour is higher.

Online poker offers the comfort of playing from your own house at any time of day, for how long you want to. The speeds you get your hands dealt increase the number of hands you can play, so now you could get a lot of experience in matter of weeks. It is true that you lose some of the aspects of the card room, like the psychological component or the feel of playing face to face, but you also get the advantage of checking hand histories and statistics. You can make sure you aren't giving any kind of hints to your opponents while you are learning, or when you become really upset (you should try to avoid this).

While you play online you can practice the basic strategies and the fundamentals of the game. If you keep playing solid hands and stick to the basic strategies no matter what you will be ok, but this is only the beginning. You can also get the psychological factor into the mix and get a lot more of experience, and chips, out of your opponents.

The perfect example is Heads-up; this kind of table is a battle of will and cunning, with a little of deception. You can't just wait for the good cards; you should battle any hand, even without good cards, and learn to read your opponent. Just hitting any combination in the flop is really hard, so your "post-flop" and "pot" strategies will have a pivotal importance. You don't have to play every time you hit something in the flop, but on the other hand you sometimes have to play when you have nothing. This requires practice and breaks with the idea that your opponents always hit the flop when you don't.

Playing Heads-up will give you the idea of how hard it is to hit the flop, and also how hard is to get a good pocket hand. If you play in a ring-game you’ll never have the same amount of practice that you will get in Heads-up to develop your post-flop strategy. Position is always a good starting point, but getting to know your opponent is critical for your game. In an online game you can't see your opponent, but when you play Heads-up every move and play you face is directly against you, and that will include a lot of information of the player facing you and trying to outplay you. You have to look for weakness to exploit and be careful of not letting your own game crack.

If you play every hand you will have to calculate pot odds and make raises according to every hand. Since you have the anonymity of online gaming you can take your time to do it, but in time this will become a second nature to you.

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