Basic Online Play

During the opening levels of low-limit, freeroll and sweepstakes tournaments, players keep their starting cards for much longer than probability, odds and poker sense says they should. When poker legend Doyle Brunson remarked, "If I had position on a player, I wouldn't even need to look at my cards," he did not have today's modern online players in mind. Today's online players play a much looser and more aggressive style of poker than their brick and mortar counter parts, with far less reliance on position. Typical online players do not rely on what other players are doing, so they are less vulnerable to what other players are holding.

Strategically, online players are more likely to play less than premium starting hands and stick with hands longer. They like to see the flop with weak Aces, low suited connectors and one-gap starting hands. After the flop, the looser players often use continuation bets trying to make runner-runner hands with three-card draws, hoping to reap great rewards if they hit.

Weaker players are less likely to lay down huge premium hole cards, even when they become threatened, continuing in the hand past the time they should have sent the cards to the muck pile. Robert DuVal, playing poker professional L.C. Cheever in Lucky You said, "Sometimes it pays to be prudent." Unfortunately, by staying in a hand rather than folding when it would have been prudent, loose players see more flops, turns and rivers, thus upping the probability that bad beats become more common.

Though you may have a premium starting hand, since the play online is often looser than when playing live, these opponents decrease your chance of winning the hand, since there are usually more than a couple of maniacal players at every table early in a tournament.

One point statistics confirm is that play is much faster online, allowing players to see considerably more hands in a shorter period than their brick and mortar counterparts do. Because of the faster play, players see more hands in a shorter amount of time. Add playing on multiple tables (more than three dozen in some cases) and you can see how some people claim that Tom 'Durrrr' Dwan has seen more hands in his five years as a professional than Doyle Brunson has in the last half-century.

Unfortunately, most people misinterpret this statistic, since simply playing so many hands does not make someone a better player. The speed of play means there is often a faster learning curve. Seeing the hands and being able to process the information are two different things. Additionally, while playing on so many tables, players cannot play optimally on each one. Multi-table players take numerous short cuts when in a hand. The increased speed of online play, with each hand timed, forces quicker, less reliable actions. Players cannot take into consideration important aspects of playing poker. These include player tells, use of position and how each card hitting the board influences their hand.

In online cash games and tournaments (above the micro-limit level), where the money on the table is large enough to matter, you have fewer players adopting the 'Any Two Cards' (A2C) philosophy, so you have what is normally termed 'Good Poker.'

The best way to play these hyper-aggressive players is to maintain a tight aggressive stance and take care of the maniacs when you have the superior hand. Try to stay out of the fray during the early levels of sweeps tournaments and let the aggressive players get themselves in trouble with other players. Though the A2C players may build a huge stack early in a tournament with hands that statistically should lose, their stacks will slowly be chipped away as the tournament progresses.

A well-known pokerism is "Lucky players get chips early in a tournament; skilled players have them at the end." There are many inexperienced players competing on sweepstakes sites and just as many players do not care if they lose all of their chips early in a tournament. Most of these players feel they will not continue to play the same way for real money. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you are playing against them), the habits that are ingrained as you learn the game do stay with you.