Deal and Dealer

Fun and excitement – you may define Poker thus. But do you know that it is possible to make a fulltime living with it? And you don’t even need to go outside for that! You can play online poker. Good poker players can make significant cash playing online poker. The best players play often, and win enough money to live well. It’s not totally impossible to live off of poker earnings; anyone can do it if they are good enough.

Here are some tips:

• Play poker against people worse than you.
• Enter into the lower stakes games.
• Play a large amount of low stakes games.
• Very occasionally enter into a high stakes games.
• Entering tournaments is another great way to make a living off of online poker.
• Patience is a virtue in the game of poker. In order to make money, it is important to play calmly.
• Don’t go on tilt. Knowing when to walk away is the key to making a living playing online poker.

If you are trying to make a living with online poker, you need to play constantly. Some people who live off of online poker play more than 12 hours a day. If that is too much time consuming for you, then you might not want to make your living playing online poker.

Online poker can be a great way for someone to make money casually. However, for someone wanting to make a living, they need to be serious about their online poker. Playing low stakes games and playing against those worse than you is a great way to slowly make money. High stakes games should be limited, but if you are good enough, they can help you make money. Finally, playing in tournaments and playing many hours a day can help you make a full time living while playing online poker. Not everyone can be Money maker (the accountant who won the world series of poker and makes a living playing online poker), but if you play enough, you just might be.

But remember, the gains for online poker can be enormous, but the losses can be even greater!

When you are playing poker en linea, you may notice when you buy in to a tournament that there is an added fee that does not go in to the prize pool.  You may also have seen a hand won in a cash game and the player does not win the entire pot, a percentage has been taken out and mysteriously disappears.  For those who have not been playing online poker for very long, this can be confusing, you may wonder why when you just won a hand that had ten dollars in the pot you are only winning nine dollars and change?  This is because the house or online poker room gets a cut of the action called a rake.  This is also true for the portion you pay in to a tournament that does not get included in the prize pool.

No matter where you play, online poker room, live poker room or at a brick and mortar casino, you will have to pay a rake to the house.  This is how these establishments pay their bills.  With out taking this amount out of the pot each hand, they would not be able to afford to stay in business and you would not have a place to play poker.  This money may also be raked for a bonus or jack pot of some type.  Some online poker rooms offer a bad beat jack pot that gives the winner of this jack pot thousands of dollars for holding a losing hand.  This would be the only instance in poker where a losing hand would win money so most players do not mind a rake that goes in to a bad beat jack pot.  I have seen these jack pots hit the million dollar mark and the losing hand walks away with around sixty five percent of the pot total on average.  Not only does the losing hand win money, but the rest is shared out between the person who had the winning hand, usually around twenty percent and the rest of the players at the table get a cut as well.

When playing poker, one must always be aware of cheats. When playing online, the number of people that don’t play fair is significantly reduced. The dealer can’t be bought because the dealer is a program, that randomly deals the cards and programs don’t care about money, they can’t cheat or have preferences. Unlike real life poker, online poker doesn’t have real cards, so no one can trick you by hiding them down their sleeves or swapping them somehow. Those abilities mean zero here.

Let’s talk a little about hackers, the ones that are so feared amongst some online poker players. In the past, way back there were hacker’s attacks. But many years passed since then and all technologies have improved. If a hacker should try to somehow turn the odds in his favor or influence the program, he wouldn’t be able pass all the way through the poker rooms. Like thieves are stopped in real casinos by security, so are harmful programs stopped by the protection software every online poker room has.

But there is a form of online cheating and it is manifested by players talking to each other, it is a type of player conspiracy. The players involved would tell each other what cards they have and evaluate together the odds, trying to make one of them win. The winnings will be eventually split between them. In real poker rooms this is impossible, but online they can talk on the phone or be sited at adjacent computers.

Luckily the majority of these players are beginners and they are not doing it to cheat the others, but simply because they don’t know how to play or what to do. They don’t know the power they are holding, so they pose no real threat. Anyway there are ways to stop them. Online poker sites usually check players that use the same IP or play at the same time every time in the same poker rooms. If spotted in any of these situations they are either banner or warned or even kicked from the rooms. As this can only be a coincidence, sites do not ban payers before really looking into the situation.

So, here are some thinks to spot when you want to see if you are cheated.

1. Some players that try to get the others players to leave the game. They will raise each other so that they can be left alone in the game.

2. Players that don’t play quick pre-flop. They might be having someone to protect or someone they are teamed with.

But it is very rare to met real online cheaters. If you think they cheat, do not under any circumstance accuse them directly of cheating. Just follow their actions and contact the webmaster, he will deal with this. Or, if you don’t want to get into any complications, just leave that room and enter another one.