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Poker Magazine providing reviews of popular online poker rooms, Poker Tips, |
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Online Poker TellsAny serious poker player will tell you that the ability to read your opponents is a necessary skill. Players that make the transition to the virtual felt sometimes panic when they realize that they can't rely on facial expressions, but there are many other ways to read online players; some of them are carried over from live poker and others are unique to the online poker environment. While some online players will tell you that chatter can reveal a lot about your opponents, don't bet on it. Many players are intentionally obnoxious all the time, and others blatantly lie about both their feelings and their cards. When you're trying to read other players online, you have to rely on concrete clues. One area where a player can never fib is with their chips. Their stack is out there for everyone to see, and every bet they make is public. For that reason, bets and betting patterns are generally the best way to read online players. Some bets tell an obvious story, while others are more obscure. That's why it's important to get to know your opponents, whether you're at a ring game or an MTT. Be sure to utilize the player notes feature, that way if you come across a player again you've already got them pegged. Knowing if a player is prone to bluffing can be invaluable when the blinds get big and the temptation to steal them is high. So how can you read a player's bets? Here's a clue: there's a lot more to it than size. First of all, it's important to watch your opponents even when you're not active in a hand. Whenever possible, you want to see what they were holding and consider how that relates to their bets throughout the hand. Knowing how and when their bet changes (if it changes) will help you to identify tight players, calling stations and maniacs easily. For example, calling stations play as many hands as possible. As a result, they're big fans of the auto-call button. They see a lot of flops and then drop off quickly once the betting gets more aggressive. Alternately, tight players see very few flops and then bet more aggressively after the flop. Maniacs (loose-aggressive players) like to control the action. A lack of a pattern is the only pattern you'll see in their betting, but once you've seen them win on the river a couple times with terrible hole cards after betting wildly the whole hand, it's pretty clear what you're dealing with. Whether your preference is ring games or tournaments, you'll soon discover that multi-tablers make very straightforward reads. To manage all their games, most of them use go-to betting patterns and also utilize auto-bet options that make the strength of their hand pretty clear. Be sure to avoid the same mistakes, or the same will be true of you. While betting moderately is an important part of protecting your stack, increasing or decreasing your standard bet every couple hands will make you a more enigmatic player |
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