Sign up bonuses are the key to survival

In my years as an online texas holdem poker player then I have been only too aware of how external financial incentives are vital for any online poker player. I have learned over the years that the key to making serious profits in online poker is to actually treat the entire thing like a business. This means that you are not essentially just concentrating on playing poker hands. You are concerned about reducing your costs of doing business but also you are also interested in getting as much external monetary assistance as you possibly can. This is done in two key areas and I will go into those shortly. I would also like to take this opportunity to inform regular readers that Pokerroom has opened its doors again for business.

Some years ago then this used to be my favourite poker room for cash poker for reasons that I will go into. However they have a sign up bonus of 100% up to $1000 and so this is a fantastic start up cushion for any new player looking to try and make poker a career. You will inevitably make mistakes as a novice poker player and this needs to be cushioned somewhat. So you are looking for the best sign up bonuses and rakeback which allow you to earn money without it having to come from the actual games themselves. So in this instance then the $1000 sign up bonus that you get on Pokerroom could just be the cushion that helps you make it as a winning poker player.

Let me put a scenario by you, imagine a poker player starts out playing micro-stakes levels and loses $500 as part of his education of learning. That $500 may be the catalyst that causes them to stop playing poker. However if you have taken advantage of a $1000 bonus then you are actually $500 ahead during that same period of learning! This will then really give you the confidence to move on and possibly play higher levels. I mentioned earlier about my reasons for playing on Pokerroom and they are as follows. Firstly the site has around 40,000 players at peak time and this is something that is key to being able to make money from the game.

Secondly I find the software to be pretty good and especially the lobby screen which is a vital source of information that needs to be tapped into for maximum effect. For example I need to see clearly how big my potential future opponent’s stacks are before I sit at the table. If they have middling size stacks or several of them do then I know that this game will be lucrative. This is because serious players in no limit holdem will tend to have either full stacks or minimum stacks. They either want to capitalise on their opponents deep stacked errors or they want to get all in as soon as possible. Both strategies are viable but good players do not play in between stacks.

Life is never dull…..or is it?

I wanted really to discuss my Texas Hold Em online poker and what my ideas and philosophies are in this blog but I also felt that discussing a little about my history would help readers to see me in the real light so to speak. After working as a croupier from 1990-1998 then I became a financial consultant for a while but hated that job and left. During the period from 1998-2002 then I played blackjack semi-professionally (don’t know if that is the right term) and I was asked to write a book about it which I later did. Blackjack although easier to get away with in the UK than the US also became played out with the arrival of the shuffling machines and the automated games.

But I had been playing online poker since 2000 when I was playing on a site called Planet Poker but the software was terrible and only about a couple of hundred people were online. Only yesterday I logged onto www.pokerstars.co.uk and there were nearly 200,000 people online and it wasn’t even peak time. But anyway I played limit hold’em back then. I wasn’t very good by today’s standards and I had read Sklansky’s books and a few by Ciaffone but that was enough to get me an edge up to and including $10-$20 limit games.

I made a decent living for a while but by 2005 then it was clear that the limit games were getting very tough and I had played relatively high stakes at $50-$100 for a while but I simply hated the financial swings at that level and moved back down. The game was the first to become theoretically solved and so by 2007 I had become extinct as it were as a limit player. In 2008 then this was my most eventful year to date as a poker player but it was also my least productive. I had switched to playing NLHE and was playing at levels as high as $25-$50 which looking back was clearly far too high.

I had managed to secure a financial backer and so the risk wasn’t mine. I suffered my worst ever dip as a full time player when I dropped twenty buy-ins at $5000 a throw. Being $100k in the whole was sobering but even now I don’t know how I clawed that back. I more or less got the money back with some high variance good fortune but the whole saga left mental scars and I found that I no longer wanted to play high stakes poker or had the stomach for it even if I had a backer.

So I eventually moved down to the level that I am now which is $0.50-1.00. I learned new skills and how to multi-table effectively and suddenly I was playing poker not like a “poker player” but far more automated that I had ever imagined. I had discovered that to make the most money in online poker for someone with limited poker ability but bags of heart and potential involved playing in an almost anti-poker style……..I hope you will find my exploits and diary informative and revealing.