If you’re going to earn the hard bucks online, says Barry Carter, you’ll have to be prepared to go for those less well-known sites.
One universal comment I keep hearing (and saying myself) among the entire poker community is “the games are getting much tougher”.
Anyone who has been around poker a long time has long realised that the days of making a regular profit simply through good hand selection and aggressive play will have said this recently to emphasise just how cultured the typical poker player is nowadays. Most regular players are aggressive, understand position, subscribe to training sites, use Poker Tracker and play multiple tables at once.
The poker rooms are aware of this and accommodate for this new breed of player accordingly. Most poker sites have resizable tables to let you grind as many games as possible at once, state-of-the-art software to make playing 4000 hands a day easy and competitive loyalty or rakeback schemes to ensure you receive a handsome monthly figure at the end of the month, regardless of your performance at the tables. The top poker rooms are set up make it as easy for the new school of professional online poker players to make a living as possible.
Which is precisely why you should avoid them.
Vegas Nights
To illustrate my point before I make it, let me give you a few little pointers about a little place called Las Vegas. I’ve played in some of the best poker rooms in Las Vegas like the Wynn, the Venetian, the Mirage, the Rio and Caesars Palace (I’m yet to play in the Bellagio). They look great, are run impeccably and have superb free drinks services from hot-looking cocktail waitresses on tap. The dealers are brilliant, as are the cardroom managers.
The games, however, are very tough. The cash games are full of pros and young American kids whom you would assume are the face behind the shark avatars that crush the mid-stakes games online and the conversations at the tables wouldn’t be out of place on the forums of 2+2. It’s very hard to find a good game in these casinos and although you might feel like a big time player while you are sat there, you rarely would come out of these games a big winner.
Contrast these with some of the casinos that could best be described as ‘Old School’, the venues that haven’t changed much over the last 15 years like the Flamingo, the Sahara, Hooters and anywhere off the strip; the shitholes, for want of a better expression.
Here you are unlikely to see high rollers playing baccarat, the cocktail waitresses look like Judy Finnegan and the dealers are clumsy and inexperienced. The place is dingy and the chairs rickety...but the games are gooooood. You will be surrounded by so many more players who basically don’t have a clue about the game: the guys that are just gambling and getting free drinks and the players that don’t realise yet just how important a good dealer, economical rake structure and table etiquette is in the game; precisely the people you want to play poker against.
If you had a $500 hold’em game at the Flamingo, the standard of the players would be light years worse than the standard in the same game at Venetian. In fact, a $200 Hold’em game would probably be a lot tougher at the Venetian than the $500 game at the Flamingo.
Homeward Bound
I have a similar dilemma here in the UK. My local casino is Napoleons in Sheffield, but I’m just 40 minutes away from Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham.
DTD is without doubt the best place to play poker in the UK. the customer service is amazing, the dealers and staff are amazing, the cash game and tournament structures and rake is amazing, the food is amazing, the place looks amazing [yeah, we get it – Ed] – but the games are often very tough and full of UK circuit pros. Contrast this with Napoleons with its knackered old tables, 10 year old playing cards, archaic rules nobody uses and - until recently - smoking at the tables – this is a truly awful place to play poker but the majority of locals haven’t got the first clue about the game, think that the internet is a ‘fad’ and regularly use the expression ‘but it was suited’, and not as an ironic joke. As it goes, I choose DTD every time and have vowed never to go back to Naps, but do as I say, not as I do.
By now I have probably illustrated today’s point, which is if you want to find profitable mid-stakes games on the internet you have to look beyond the big popular poker rooms. I don’t have a bad word to say about any of the market leaders - they provide the ultimate poker experience; their customer service is world class, their loyalty programmes impeccable, their software amazing and their choice of games superb. Unfortunately, this attracts all the good players to their tables (not to mention the vast majority of American players whom the bigger rooms still accept who are all better than your average European).
To find the profitable games online these days, you have to be prepared to slum it, you have to be prepared to give up the few liberties that you have become accustomed to at the bigger poker rooms. You have to make a few sacrifices and ask yourself, “Would a good online pro put up with this?” If the answer is ‘no’ then you might have found a new home.
In the Market
One key thing to consider is who the poker rooms market themselves to. If you can find networks with skins that are linked to sports betting or casino gambling, you are on the right tracks. Poker rooms that advertise in non-poker outlets are another good avenue to pursue. Basically, anywhere that attracts non-poker players to play at the tables, rather than marketing to serious poker players, is where the soft games are. A few years ago, William Hill had some really soft games for this reason, as did PartyPoker back in the day when they heavily marketed in the non-poker media.
Rakeback and loyalty bonuses are another big consideration. You have to make the most of good loyalty incentives these days because everyone else is and it can really improve your earn rate, but be careful if the deal is too good. Some poker rooms offer 40%+ rakeback which is amazing but think about who this is going to attract to the tables: essentially an army of multi-tabling grinders.
This was demonstrated this year when NoIQ, a skin of iPoker, was booted from the network largely because the rakeback deals they offered were so good (and against the network’s rules) that their player base was made up of all the big winning players who were fleecing the fish on the other skins and taking lots of rakeback money out of the network. The iPoker network was becoming completely unplayable for a while last year as the mid-stakes tables were full of pros.
Slumming It
Probably the most successful way to ‘slum it’ is to pick the poker rooms where it is difficult to play multiple tables at once. If you can’t resize the tables or use a heads-up poker tracker display easily, this really will put off the tough regulars from sticking around. Multi-tabling is such a vital part of today’s online game that not many players will be able to play without their HUDs or be able to digest lots of information quickly. That’s not to say don’t multi-table, just learn to get along with the software and invest in a really big monitor to take the edge off.
The online poker room that I play at (which I will refrain from naming - that’s another rule of slumming it, you do not talk about slumming it, etc) has terrible graphics and it’s hard to see when the action is on you. This also makes it very hard to multi-table and it took me a long time to get used to not timing out on some tables. The rakeback scheme is OK, but not brilliant, and the rake you pay is actually a bit steep. The software is clumsy, slow and sometimes tables just disappear for no reason. Also, the skins under the network it’s on are mainly linked to online casinos and bookmakers, rather than them being standalone poker enterprises.
I put up with all of this (and even make a point of not suggesting improvements to them to keep them this bad) because I know that 95% of the professional poker player community wouldn’t. The games are softer, the tough regulars are few and far between and I know exactly which tables to avoid – and I’m not planning on telling anyone where I play.
As poker players we have a dilemma. Do we want superb customer service and the most pleasurable experience possible at the tables, with the strong risk of having to sit in the toughest games around? Or do we want to find the easiest games at the expense of all the perks and privileges we have come to expect in the modern online game?
The glory days are over. If you want to make money in online poker, you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty. |
