Transferring Your Playing Skills
From Social Poker To Online Poker

Key points you need to know to transfer your offline
poker playing skills to achieve online poker success

Here’s some genuine encouragement for all of you social poker players out there who are beginning to think about taking your skills online. Having done a thorough sweep through all of the big name branded poker sites we can say in the main the standard of poker on display is at best ordinary and in the main bordering on lousy. If you are a halfway decent player you have an extremely good chance of capitalising on that fact.
If you’re not, don’t fool yourself, take a good online tutorial and learn the proper basics of your craft. It’ll pay you back many times over. Here are the simple things to remember at the outset.

RUBBISH & WHEN TO BIN IT
If your hole cards are rubbish, do what you always do with rubbish: Throw it away.

FORGET LOW LIMIT BLUFFS
Don’t bother bluffing in low limit games because it doesn’t cost people anything much to see you: So they will. Bluffing works best when there’s intestine-twisting amounts of loot at stake, when people really face a bit of wallet damage if they call you. It doesn’t work at low limits.

WHEN TO INVEST
If you’re holding a potential premium hand invest in it and make sure you raise as much as you think the opposition are likely to call. When your premium hand is up against psychos with big stacks infront of them, you simply check and if they raise, you attack and go all-in.

NO MORE MR. MACHO
Remember at all times not to be Mr. Macho. Poker is not kick-boxing. Don’t go up against people just because you don’t like their attitude in the chat-box. Only go after them if you can crush them.

TOURNAMENTS ARE DIFFERENT
It’s never a good idea to throw good chips after a middling hand. Keeping to this discipline is even more necessary during the early stages of tournament play where the whole strategy has to be to stay in the contest by keeping your stack.

WATCH YOUR TELLS
Try to take roughly the same amount of time to make action decisions to prevent opposing players from getting a fix on your hands. Take the same amount of time to check as you do to re-raise. It messes with other peoples’ heads. You’re not a book, don’t let people read you.

LOOK FOR LOOSE PLAY
Think like a shark. Search out tables where there’s loose play. Be a railbird and just study other people at play for a while. Choose the right table at the ri