Adapting to Different Poker Sites

There are a lot of online poker sites available nowadays, most of us start out on one site and learn the game there but sometime later we invariably look elsewhere for whatever reason. One factor that I think a lot of players fail to fully appreciate and understand is that there are often a number of differences in playing styles between these sites, which may require adjustments to our game (i.e. A certain way of playing on site A may not be suited to site B). This blog entry will look at why there are differences but I want to stress a word of caution here; this is my own personal opinion of some of the sites I have played based on the games I have played there, but I have very limited experience on some and the games I have played may not match those that you may play, so I am not going to talk about specific details but try and help give some concepts to think about if you are trying to adapt to new sites. 

Different demographic of players

Different poker sites and networks may well attract different markets of players, they may be targeting specific countries, or age ranges or abilities etc and as such if there is a substantial demographical difference this may well lead to different tendencies in play (For example Scandinavians are generally thought to be more aggressive).

Different software capabilities

Some software is easier to multi-table on than others, for example features such as 4 colour decks, resizable windows, ability to tile / cascade windows all help players to multi-table, the more of these features that a site has the more multi-tablers there are likely to be on that site. As a rule the more tables someone is playing the closer to standard ABC poker they are likely to be playing. Another good example of how the platform software can affect play is evident in PKR. On older versions of PKR the preset bet size buttons used to be 2xBB, 3xBB, 4xBB and 8xBB for every street regardless of the pot size, generally players are more likely to use the preset buttons than manually type bet amounts in and on the older versions it would be a common occurrence that a player would bet 8xBB into a 50bb pot on the river, now PKR have changed these preset buttons to 1/2 pot etc and so the same player might now bet ¾ pot (37.5bb) on the same 50bb pot. A more common difference is open bet sizing, where again the preset buttons often determine open raise sizes rather than player preferences (Stars allows customisable buttons so players can configure their own open raise sizes). Playing on party for example, I often see either a min raise or a 3x as an open, but less frequently 2.5xbb. These are just some examples of how playing styles can be dictated by the software alone.

Differences in MTT structures

Sites all have their own MTT structure; with differing starting stacks and increases in blind levels, some sites have smaller starting stacks, but gentler increases in blinds that generally means more room for play in the middle stages while not being extremely deep in the early levels. Also a subtle difference if you play full ring games is some sites have 9 seat as full ring and others 10 and this alone should have an effect on hand ranges.

Player Pools

If you play on Stars you will usually be sat a table full of random unknown players due to the huge playerbase, which can make it a lot harder to know what to do in certain situations, whereas on sites with much smaller player pools you will often seem familiar faces and if you take notes can make more informed decisions against players, these smaller sites will often have players taking unusual lines in order to deceive regular opponent’s whereas on Stars the most profitable line is usually the best to take as players are less likely to know you well enough to be able to adapt.

Player Tendencies

Different sites tend to yield players with different tendencies, for example a lot of online bookmakers now have poker sites and these players generally seem to call and gamble a lot more than on traditional sites. You can be sure that a lot of the players on Pokerstars will be multi-tabling and are using tracking software. Also Pokerstars is frequently full of players who will 3 and 4 bet a lot lighter than on PKR for example. This last point may well be because PKR has a higher proportion of recreational players. Knowing the generally tendencies of players on a site can help you make better decisions against unknowns.

Range of Stakes and Qualifiers

The range of stakes that a site offers can affect the way opponents will play, if $100 MTTs are the norm then the standard is usually going to be more aggressive and tougher than if a $100 MTT is dubbed a monthly high roller event. In addition to this generally the more qualifiers there are in an MTT the tighter the play will be, particularly around the bubble. If you are playing a MTT at a new site it is worth having a quick look beforehand at what satellites are offered and how many players are winning a seat and hence more likely to be playing tighter.

Associated Forums

If a poker site has a closely associated forum with it then this can heavily influence playing styles, particularly if there are one or two dominant posters on the forum. This is because their own playing style will come out in replies to posts and other people reading them will absorb this knowledge and are more likely to introduce it into their own game. If you are playing at a site you are unfamiliar with it is often worth browsing any forum they may have first and looking at strategy replies to see if there are any clues as to general playing styles, all this information may help you when making a marginal decision against an unknown.

Loyalty Program and Bonuses

A site is more likely to have a higher number of ABC grinders if it is has a good loyalty scheme and offers regular bonuses to players. These players will frequently be multi-tabling and are more likely to be playing as many hands as possible, often resulting in more basic poker in order to clear bonuses. It is always worth being aware if there are any big bonuses currently running on a site as this may have an impact on playing styles (although this is probably more common in cash games than MTTs).

So there are a few reasons why there might be differences in playing styles at different sites, how you personally identify, adjust and ultimately take advantage of these differences will be down to your individual circumstances, such as which site you are moving from and to and what games you are playing, your own playing style etc. so I cannot give a nice easy formula to adapting to a new site, however the first step should be to consider the reasons above and any others you can think of, see which apply and to what degree and then decide in advance how you are going to adapt and then after a period of playing assess how this has or hasn’t worked, and re-evaluate frequently until you feel you have adjusted as well as you can.

I will finish by giving you one example of how I might play differently on PKR to on Pokerstars, let’s say we are deep in an MTT and on the button with 18bb and both blinds have 15bb and are complete unknowns to us. It is folded to us and we look down to see 22, now on Stars I would usually shove here as I expect random players on Stars to 3 bet jam a wider range than on PKR and I will be forced to call, however on PKR I may well elect to min raise and then fold if they jam as I believe they will fold enough to the min raise to make this the best play, clearly if I suspect the players on PKR to be aggressive and capable of 3 bet shoving a wider range than I will usually elect to open jam the deuces.

I hope this entry has given you some food for thought in differences between sites and I wish you every success no matter where you are playing!

Poker Rants - What's the Point?

Online poker has been around for years now but in more recent times social media has expanded, most players now have a Facebook and / or a twitter account and follow their peers, often providing updates on tournaments and giving support to others, however it appears that the vast majority of updates from amateurs are invariably rants about a lost hand or a particularly player being a ‘donkey’.

I see people constantly post one sided posts, such as “I just lost a huge pot with KK into AA I run so bad” yet the same person might have won a massive pot with aces versus kings earlier in the MTT to put them in that position, yet they don’t post this…why is that? I think it is mainly because we are less likely to accept good luck in our favour than bad luck that goes against us, we like to believe when we win it is mostly because of skill, but when we lose it is down to bad luck, we don’t need to post when we flop a set of deuces and stack AA but when we are on the reverse end we bemoan our luck and proclaim it as a cooler. I also see people continually post beat after beat after beat, claiming they are the unluckiest player in the world, yet they can’t all be the unluckiest can they!

I have been guilty in the past of posting bad beats and whinge posts, both on twitter and within forums, this is an area where I feel I have improved, certainly the number of these posts has dropped, but there is still room for improvement. To help me cut these posts out I have been thinking about why we, as poker players, post these type of posts at all and the reasons behind them and what benefits and drawbacks they may have. 

Venting

Sometimes we suffer a bad beat or a cooler in a crucial hand and we just want to get it out of our system, this is seemingly a natural human instinct, but it does not change the events of said hand and can only act as a reinforcement of the negative outcome which may lead to us making poor decisions later on during the session or subsequent sessions if we have a build up of these type of posts. It is usually better to try and push the hand out of your mind and focus on the current hands with a clear head in order to maximise your play in them and avoid making mistakes and / or going on tilt. 

Ego

The poker world is quite competitive and when we take a beat it is easy to feel hard done by, that our skills have not yielded the result they should have so we might make a post to make a statement that our results are not as good as they should be through no fault of our own, e.g. “I Just lost with AK to AQ for a massive pot on the FT bubble, I was going to crush for sure”. Again this only has negative impact; we cannot control the luck and should not be focused on short term results, only that we are playing hands as well as possible. Even if we have a long string of results and are going weeks or months of bad luck then posting about this run serves no productive purpose, it can only harm our mindset and focus for the sessions ahead, hence damaging any prospects of overturning the poor fortunes. 

Sympathy

We all joined social media sites to be able to interact with friends, so it is only natural to seek attention and sympathy when hands don’t go our way, sometimes it is good to share experiences and provide encouragement to each other, however overdosing on hands of a similar nature any may lead to indifference from our friends, after all they are probably playing themselves and are probably suffering similar woes. In my opinion it is more constructive to spend this time discussing hands where we might improve with each other rather than merely posting a beat looking for a simple “Unlucky” reply from a friend.

Another common occurrence I see is players berating another players’ play at the table, it may be that an opponent misplayed a hand and got lucky, so the loser of the hand (or even a third player not involved) will abuse the player and criticise their play. I can’t express how idiotic this is on so many levels in my opinion, any poker player who wants to be successful at the game should never criticise or abuse another player. Generally in a hand a player will have either made a good play or have made a mistake, neither of which should lead us to abuse a player as  I will briefly outline below.

If our opponent has made a mistake, either knowingly or not there is no reason to rub this fact in their face. Poker is about taking advantage of our opponent’s mistakes, the less errors they make against us the harder it us for us to make a profit, so by telling players they have made a mistake we give them the opportunity to learn and this will diminish our long term profitability in the game. They have paid their entry fee and they can play how they wish within the rules, it is our job to take advantage of opponents playing styles to maximise our edge on them. Sometimes their bad play will cut short our tournament but that is the nature of poker, anyone with any skill level can get lucky and beat anyone else. If you want to play a game where the best player wins everytime then go and play chess, otherwise accept the inevitable beats with good grace when they happen.

It might be that our opponent actually made a good play and we do not understand why it was a good play, in this case we are likely to think it was a mistake, although we may not be sure it was, in which case we should use the same common sense in the previous paragraph but also attempt to use it as a learning exercise to see why it might be a good play to help improve our own game.

It may also be that our opponent made a good play and we know it was the correct play, but we just happened to get unlucky (or maybe made a mistake ourselves which the villain took advantage of) in this case it is no fault of our opponent and so there is no need for any abuse either.

I don’t believe there is ever a justifiable reason for abusing players, further to this, new players can be immediately put off by getting their play ridiculed and this will cut the number of new players entering the poker economy, which is bad for us all in the long term, we need all the players we can in the current economic climate! Poker rants and abuse are indicative of leaks in our own game and usually do far more harm than good, try to spend that energy on something positive, like reviewing hands or doing some exercise (going to the off license definitely classes as exercise in my opinion!). Thanks for reading, as ever feedback and comments are welcome! J

Vegas

First off, apologies for a lack of any posts since June, I have been a little busy and haven’t had much time to dedicate to writing, but finally I have finished a short account of my Vegas voyage from a few weeks back (although it seems years ago now!)

I was hoping to be able to write a blog about some successes during my recent trip to Vegas, but alas there were none, I had a solitary cash in the all tournaments I played during my 12 day stay, this was a 9^th place in a $125 re-entry tournament at the Aria which only yielded a min cash. I took a notepad with me hoping to jot down some notable hands for inclusion in this blog but quite frankly there were none and any that were vaguely interesting would involve a bad beat story, I am not one to encourage the posting of bad beat stories anymore so will not discuss any specific hands in this blog in any great detail.

I will however give a typical example of the kind of play I found myself up against, this happened in the WSOP Event # 53, a $1500 buyin with a starting stack of 4,500 chips. We were in the 1^st level so the blinds were 25/25 and I get dealt JTcc in mid position and open to 75 and pick up two callers, at this point we had only played an orbit or two and this was only the 2^nd or 3 hand I played. The flop comes down with a rainbow 2 3 9, the SB checks and I bet about half the pot and get one fold behind but the SB calls, I had seen him call continuation bets before then give up on the turn so I planned to fire any turn which was a 7 giving me a gutshot. He checks and I bet around half pot again and he calls me again, the river brings an ace and he checks to me, I think at this point I should have given up but I bet another half pot and he called and showed K3 and I lost a chunk of chips triple barrelling into a calling station.

As we played more hands it became apparent that the 3 guys to my immediate left were good but the rest of the table was weak but it was difficult for me to isolate the weak players and I was out of position in pots with substandard holdings so I quickly decided that I was going to have to play value hands only, which was a distinct problem as I had very few hands at all, while I looked on in horror as opponents failed to value bet 3 streets with hands such as 2 pair and sets against the calling stations. I eventually bust in level 5 losing AK to AQ and 88 to AJ, both were standard plays for both players due to the short starting stacks, most players were by this time having to 3 bet shove. The other WSOP event I played in (59b, a $1000 buyin which I qualified for via PKR) followed a similar pattern.

The standard of play throughout my trip was pretty poor, with the majority of players being calling stations and very little 3 betting going on. This means it can be difficult to put players on a range of hands a lot of the time but in general against stations the best approach is usually to bluff infrequently and value bet thinly. The main problem I had here was that I rarely had any hands to value bet with, in the middle of my trip I went over a week without seeing AA or KK, and only had queens once, the times I had medium type hands I often ended up value owning myself by betting 2^nd pair for example against a calling station who happened to have top pair, or who rivered a second pair and checked / called the river. I could count the number of flopped sets I had out there on one hand so I found a lot of my time was spent folding which invariably left me having to play shove / fold poker a lot of the time and the various races I got into rarely fell my way.

During the latter part of the trip I picked up a cold and this put me off playing some of the bigger events at the Venetian (by this time it was apparent that the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza was better value than the shallow stacks at the WSOP) so my poker plans didn’t go to plan. Regardless of this (and feeling under the weather) I still had a great time and am eagerly looking forward to returning again but with more of a focus on some of the deep structured games that allow some play early on without putting a large proportion of your stack at risk.

Aside from the poker I had already done the tourist side of Vegas but still enjoyed evening walks and watching the Bellagio fountains and the like. I attended PKR parties and met friends, both old and new, although I didn’t feel up to a couple of them and had to miss them out I did catch the latter part of the Wet Republic Pool Party, I was delayed due to railing Eleanor on the final table of the Venetian $1,100 Deep Stack, which she finished 8^th for a very tidy $9k, well done Elz J.

Overall, despite the poor results on the poker tables and my cold, I enjoyed myself and hope to return next year, in the meantime the online grind is my main focus with some live tournaments thrown in during the year.