party poker

I have seen many changes in Online Texas Hold em poker during my time as an active player. I first started to play online in around 2000 which was not long after online poker became a new craze. My first experience back then was at $3-$6 limit holdem and I was making what then was very good money at around 3 big bets per hour. Online poker was nothing more than extra pocket money for me until I started playing $10-$20 and very good money could be made for a while.

This was up until about 2005 when the games started to get far tougher and that increased until about 2009 when that peaked and many previously higher limit players were multi-tabling at lower levels. So what did this do to online poker and the serious players who were looking to make a career out of it? Well it certainly left players in a situation where they had to become far more serious than they had ever been in order to make money.

Online Texas Holdem both in limit and no-limit became a far more mathematical and statistics orientated game. Tracker programs like PokerTracker were starting to become prominent and players could get their hands on some very accurate data about their opponents over some very large sample sizes. In fact players these days can get their hands on ready made databases which are not legal on some sites and networks but they are being used all the same.

This means that you could sit at a table with players that you had never encountered before and yet some of these players could quite easily know how you play. They could know your habits, how often you raise, how often you try to steal with position, how often you re-raise and also more crucially how often you like certain lines of play. For example there will be certain biases with how you play that you may or may not be aware of.

If there are certain patterns in how you bluff then tracking software will pick this up. For example you may like to float an opponent looking to mimic a slow play and then raise the turn. Unobservant opponents may miss this but good players certainly will not. This is your biggest problem in online poker these days and it can often appear like certain players are literally seeing your cards face up and in a roundabout way they are.

If players know what range of hands you are betting and raising and making certain plays with then this is the next best thing with regards to see your cards. In no way am I saying that a player cannot make money in online poker these days but what I am saying is that you need to have a far higher average skill level at all levels than you did a few years ago. Online poker these days is more about data collection and usage than actually playing poker.