The (Second) Biggest Mistake You Can Make Playing Poker Online by Any Glazer

The (Second) Biggest Mistake You Can Make Playing Poker Online by Andy Glazer

I was tempted to call this article “The Biggest Mistake You Can Make Playing Poker Online,” but I realized that the biggest mistake you can make in ANY form of gambling (making a bet when you’re not sure you’re going to get paid if you win) applied to poker if your poker room took your money and went out of business. That scenario, which fortunately has not happened much in the poker world, is worse than the error I’ll discuss momentarily.

I mean, really now — if you can’t cash out when you win, it really doesn’t matter how good the games are, does it? That’s one reason I didn’t consider some cardroom offers (and BOY am I glad about one of them!). I was not going to associate my name with any cardroom unless either I knew and completely trusted the owners, or unless the company was publicly traded, which would mean an “open book” level of fiscal responsibility and scrutiny by investment analysts. Although the Enron disaster proved that even public status doesn’t provide any guarantees, it certainly helps.

Boss Media AB, which owns http://www.TotalPoker.com/ , is a publicly traded Swedish corporation.

I’m NOT saying your money is automatically unsafe with any online poker room that is not publicly traded. I have real money accounts with a number of them and wouldn’t if I didn’t consider it safe. I know and like a lot of the owners.

Ideally, I wanted a parent company that had a reputation and assets of its own to protect, because it would have to treat players fairly. Such a company couldn’t build up a nice pool of player assets and decide to vanish. Because Boss Media’s primary business is developing some of the world’s best Internet casino software, I felt secure with TotalPoker.

ON TO THAT SECOND-BIGGEST MISTAKE

There are a number of candidates for second-biggest mistake. All the classic poker cautions still apply: don’t play with money you can’t afford to lose, don’t stay in games with players who prove to be clearly better than you, don’t play a new game for high stakes, don’t play too may hands…. All of those, and more, could be candidates for “second-biggest.”

I’m going to vote for a different one, though, one that is unique to online poker and the ease of jumping in and out of games it offers: Don’t play online when you know in advance you only have a short time (like 10-20 minutes) to play.

Why should this seemingly innocuous decision be such a big mistake? It’s because it almost inevitably leads to a violation of one of those classic poker cautions, “don’t play too many hands.”

PATIENCE, YOUNG SKYWALKER!

Winning poker, or even losing-slowly-enough-so-that-it’s-worth-it-for-the-entertainment-value poker, requires patience. You have to be able to throw away rotten starting hand after rotten starting hand. One of the single most difficult concepts for beginning players to grasp is that everything is relative in poker. Your own hand might improve, but opponent hands can improve, too.

To oversimplify, let’s suppose you and I are the only players in the hand, and that I start out with the better hand. There are four possible scenarios: 1) Your hand improves, mine doesn’t. You win. 2) Your hand improves, but mine does also. I win. 3) Your hand doesn’t improve, and mine does. I win. 4) Your hand doesn’t improve, and neither does mine. I win. In other words, if you start out trailing, you can win only when you improve AND your competition doesn’t. That’s the main reason why playing too many starting hands is disastrous.

If you sit down for a 15-minute poker session, you’d have to be one player in a million not to succumb to the desire to play more hands than you should. When you’ve only got 15 minutes, what fun is it to fold, fold, fold? You jumped into the game because you wanted some quick ACTION before you had to go do something. You certainly didn’t jump in for a short session because you wanted to practice your patience.

It is true that you’re unlikely to lose enough in 15 minutes to really hurt your bankroll. You could even get lucky and win…which could be even worse than losing in your 15-minute session, because it could lead you to think that playing lots and lots of hands can be a winning form of poker. If THAT happens, you could lose a fortune in your longer sessions.

Online poker’s easy access is one of the points in its favor. If you indulge too much in this “good thing,” you’ll probably either lose a little money or develop habits that will lead to you losing a lot of money. Play casino poker when the time and place are right, and play online poker when the time is right. No matter what time of day it is, if you only have 15 minutes, it’s not the right time to play poker.