One of the most obvious online tells is your betting patterns. Most players won’t be able to see you sweat as you try to bluff them out of the pot, but how you bet when your bluffing may be different then how you bet when you have a legitimate hand.
The internet is a really big place that you can move around in very quickly. A person who has just discovered all that cyberspace has to offer must feel a lot like Zaphod Beeblebrox from the book “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” when he figured out the Infinite Improbability Drive could get him anywhere in the galaxy in just seconds.
Anybody who has wore a pair of shoes that were a few sizes too small for any length of time will know that even Regis Philbin on Prozac would be in a bad mood under these circumstances. Like the Grinch, whose discomfort caused him to strap a reindeer antler to a wiener dog and commit dozens of breaking and entering felonies; nobody is at their best when they are not comfy.
“I’ll quit while I’m ahead” is the battle cry of mediocrity. If you are playing well, you are playing well. Luck has less to do with it then you think, and there is no supreme being sitting next to a “smite” button waiting to push it the second you get to happy.
Player’s are very savvy today and lot of them will recognize slow playing. If they bet, and raise, and all you do is keep calling, they will start to get suspicious about what is going on with your hand. Your actions will fall under the heading of “Passive Aggressive”. Anybody who has ever dated someone with mother or father issues will be very familiar with that term.
A lot of poker players read a ton of books. You can’t swing a dead chicken in Barnes and Nobles without hitting a tome of poker tips telling you how to defeat the best plans of the mice and men at your table. These are all helpful and are priceless aids when crafting an overall strategy, but what most people discount is the fact that any strategy needs to have flexibility built into it to deal with X factors.
Usually the words “Taking Out the Trash” could be used to describe Michael Phelps dating life, but today’s poker tip is about trash cards and the donkeys who play them. The word “Donkey” is thrown around a lot at the poker table. While nobody outside of the Ozark Mountains would think this refers to someone who has brought the stubborn ungulate to the table, the name often does describe a certain amount of obstinate behavior.
At the table, your opponents are going to want to put you into a little box and hang a label on it. Life becomes easier for them if they can simply mark you as a loose player, a tight player, a tight aggressive, etc. At that point they can figure out by what you’re doing what your hole cards.
Poker is unique in the world of competition because it is the one sport where playing with no emotion puts you in the best circumstances. This is not a game where the rush of adrenalin that comes from some of the human conditions emotional responses is going to do you any good.
Only a fool believes that something is foolproof. Nothing is so pristine and perfect that a complete idiot can’t screw it up. This is why Phil Hellmuth and Mike the Mouth have so many tantrums; This is why good players get knocked out in the early goings of tournaments; and this is why poker sites like LuckyAcePoker.com need to have incentives like Bad Beat Jackpots. It is because there is no law that says stupid people can’t play poker.