The online poker sites would have you believe that their software is fair for all players. In fact many of the online poker sites are required to submit their software for rigorous testing to prove it is a fair for all players game for all players. But is the software really fair? On the other hand is there something that the online poker rooms could be hiding?
Many of the poker sites would agree to have a fair game for all players. For example Party Poker, Poker Stars, Full Tilt, Ultimate Bet, Absolute Poker, Titan Poker, PKR, World Poker Exchange, Paradise Poker, PokerRoom, PKR. One of the big names in online poker is PokerStars. They have a reputation for not paying out on time also affecting their game quality.
Also check out the software for these poker sites:
- Full Tilt Poker
- Party Poker
- Ultimate Bet
- Absolute Poker
- Titan Poker
- AfaPoker Room
- Micon Secrets
On the face of it you would think that these websites have nearly the same poker rules and payouts as other websites. In fact they do have some similar rules for the most part, but not all of it is exactly the same. Look at the bottom of the website to make sure you know what they are talking about.
Most of the bad beats you will encounter are because of two main reasons. Firstly, you probably are playing too many hands and if you are playing good poker you will outplay and outdraw your opponents, so bad beats are a result of that.
The second, is bad beats are enabled by the software, So although you can have the best hand and a fair chance of winning pre-flop, you can still lose by the river. The software used by poker sites does attempt to ‘draw’ the poker cards to maximize the chances of a bad beat.
However, it is not necessarily the bad beats that will make you a better player, it is the odds and variance and just plain bad beats, which will in the long run make you a worse player.
Another major risk to playing online poker is the lack of feedback. Although there is live interaction through chatting and playing with other players, you are statistically moving to a worse position than your opponents. The one time I played in a $2-$4 sit and go tournament for about 30 minutes, I left the table as a nearly raiser (a player who rarely plays a hand and plays a lot of raises and some hands). I got knocked out of the tournament when I hit a pair of 4’s to my 8’s (naturally I had AA).
The reason I finished second was because I could have played the hand better, I was heads up with the player who called me in position after the flop, and gave me some decent pot odds to make a cheap call. The call made no sense to me at all, but I was nursing an AK in the small blind, so I figured I might as well give him one I had, especially since I head the board was a rag. He turns over pocket 5’s!
I’ve been playing cash games online for a while now, and it never ceases to make me realize how many fish are out there waiting to suck out on you. The object of the sit and go is not to sit and play, but to hang around until the blinds get so large you have no money in, yet your making a push to start an all-in, pre-flop war with the big stacks.
My advice for those of you who are a bit shorter in stacks and still want to be a competitive player, is to make a pre-flop raise of around 4x the big blind or 2.5x the big blind, depending on your stack size in relation to the blind. For example, if you have $1000 chips and the blinds are $200-$100, your raise is $30 or 2.5x $200, thus you need $6 in your stack to make the call. Once you make the raise it is still only $6, but if you fail to hit a big hand, you can easily lose all your chips to the big stack, especially in a cash game, where it is common to hit a flop of all-in, a hand such as pocket 7’s or even some hands like A-J. This move will work against any player who is likely to have a big stack, as long as they have not taken a lot of chips off you, and also against any player, which may have a short stack of less than you.
In the part that follows this, please consider, that the whole point of the exercise is to make the big stack in as inexpensive a manner as possible.