Playing Online Poker (Beginners)

If you are new to poker or just new to online poker the best advice is DON’T PLAY FOR REAL MONEY! At least not at first. You should spend quite some time getting familiar with your site and your game before you actually invest real money. Since every online site is slightly different even a seasoned playing would be well advised to practice before they take the real money plunge. Luckily there are many sites online where you can play and any site worth playing on offers you the option of playing for ‘play money.’

Some people might ask what is the point of playing poker if not for real money, and the answer is a simple one. In poker you are not playing against the house as with casino games you are playing against other players just like you. However, if you are new to online poker you will be playing against players who might have been playing poker online for many years. The experience the other players have will ultimately eat your bankroll.

If you have played poker in the real world you will soon get the hang of online playing. The major difference is that online you cannot physically see the other players, so reading their tells (give away body language) is not possible. This is not to say that there are no tells, they are just different.

Choosing A Place To Play There are many places you can play poker online, with each of them trying to make their particular brand of poker sexy or stand out from the others. Some use sexy images to sell their game, some have special sign up offers or bonuses, some try to get celebrity player endorsements. As a beginner it is not always easy to decide where to begin. If you do an internet search for poker you will certainly see how big the game has become. At the time of writing a search for the term "online poker" on yahoo.com gave us 1,240,000 pages.

Our recommendation is PokerStars.com. It is a very easy site to get started on and has players ranging from the wildly incompetent all the way up to the 2003 World Champion of poker Chris Moneymaker. There are usually several thousand people playing online so you will certainly find a game.

When you visit the site you will be asked to download the software. Most sites require this but even the most basic PC will support the software. Follow the simple instructions and install the program on your computer.

When you sign up you will be asked to give yourself a nickname or alias. People do not use their real names at the table. It is important to give some thought to your name. Some people might try to use a name to give a false table image. For example you might call yourself BigBluffer to try and give the impression that you make lots of bluff attempts. But perhaps the best advice on a name is to choose one that is fairly meaningless. In online poker you are afforded a reasonable amount of anonymity and this is really a good thing. The less people know about you the better. Spend some time thinking about your screen name because most sites do not allow you to open more than one account or change your name once you have set it up for the first time.

What To Play

Once you have set up your account and logged in for the first time you will see the different game options available. On PokerStars.com the options are: Holdem, Stud, and Omaha. There are also H/L versions of Stud and Omaha.

Your choice of game is, of course, up to you. You can read about the game variations by clicking here. Beginners would do well to stay away from H/L games since winning hands are more complicated to predict, there are split pots and hands like A 3 5 6 8 can win half of the main pot. It would be better to get used to the more straightforward games.

Omaha is fairly simple to play, but very hard to play well. You are given four personal cards that only you see and five community cards are placed in the middle for all to play. You make your best five card poker hand from two and ONLY TWO of your cards plus any three of the community cards. However since you have four cards to begin with unlike the two personal cards you are dealt in Holdem, this game is probably best left to players with a little more experience. The calculation of possible winning hands and when to play and when to fold are all more complicated for a beginner in this game. The only real advantage to playing Omaha as a beginner is that there are so many players who play the game very badly so with a little practice you should be able to beat other players. The bad players play too many weak hands and bet very heavily on them. If you get drawn into such a loose game your bankroll will go through big swings up and down. You can end up broke very quickly in this game, especially the H/L version.

Stud is the least popular of all the games offered on PokerStars.com. In this game you are dealt seven cards and you must make your best five card poker hand from any five of your cards. There are no community cards. Your first two and final card (total of three cards) are hidden from the other players but the rest of your cards can be seen by other players. Because there are no community cards it is not as easy to predict other players hands in this game you might think you have a good hand only to find your opponent has three hidden aces when his cards are revealed. However, stud is played at fairly low limits on PokerStars.com and most players are fairly conservative. Your wins are unlikely to be huge but your losses should not be that bad either.

The game that everyone wants to learn to play well is No Limit Texas Holdem. This is the game featured in poker movies such as Rounders, it is the game played at the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour. Most of the major competitions in the world surround this game. It is considered the ‘Cadillac of Poker.’ Out of all of the games available this is the one you should learn to play well. Since this is probably the most famous variation of poker right now there are a lot of wannabe world champions out there. With a little skill and a little practice you should soon be able to help yourself to their money.

On PokerStars.com there are three flavors of Holdem. Limit (Fixed), No Limit (NL) and Pot Limit (PL). When you look down the list of virtual poker tables you will see each of these three kinds of table at various different stakes. The lowest table on this site is 5/10. This is where you should begin. You are given $1000 in play money when you sign up and when you lose it all you can get another $1000. However if you lose $1000 three times in an hour you will have to wait an hour to get more chips. This mechanism is in place to stop people betting like idiots all the time. This gives the play money some value in that if you lose it all eventually you will have to stop playing before you can get more.

Limit Holdem is the most conservative form of Holdem offered. You are restricted in the amounts you can bet or raise. This keeps the size of the pot smaller and losses more manageable.

Pot Limit Holdem is like Limit except you can increase your bet or raise up to the total amount of money in the pot at the time of your bet. This stops very large bets early in each hand but the pot can still get quite big if two or more players have good hands.

No Limit Holdem is pretty exciting because at any time any player can go all in and bet all of the chips they have at the table. This can mean some monster pots, but one wrong move can be very costly.

Once you have picked a game you can click on a blank seat and ‘sit down’ to play. You are represented by a gold disc with your user name under it. If you want you can upload an image to represent yourself at the table. Choose it carefully because you can only ever change it once. If you are a good looking girl/woman and you put your picture on it, expect to get lots of comments which may distract you from your play.

Final Thoughts

It is strongly recommended that you play for several hours with your play money before you consider ‘buying in’ for some real money. Do not consider the play money a waste of time though. As you build your bankroll up you will eventually save enough to play on some of the higher stakes play money tables. Once you reach this point you will be playing some fairly good players.

It is a good idea to set yourself a target: “When I get to $50,000 in play money I’ll buy in for a real $50.” The advantage here is that you play your best because you want to achieve your goal and in the process the practice will serve you well later. Just remember, when you invest real money online it is REAL MONEY. Often because you are sitting at a computer screen as opposed to a real poker room the game can seem less real. Consider each bet as seriously as you would in a real life game.

Read the other beginner articles on this site and perhaps invest in a couple of books to understand what you should be doing.

Good luck.