Doing Nothing
My favorite way to start a online poker tournament is to do nothing at all. When you start out a tournament by folding a bunch of hands and sitting back and observing your opponents, you place yourself at a huge advantage over them-the more you play, the more they’ll be able to see how you play and before long, they’ll know how you tend to play, and you really want to keep them in the dark as long as possible.
If you fold the majority of your hands in the beginning of a online poker tournament, you’ll be able to observe how your opponents play without the distraction of having to play against them. Since most of your opponents won’t be taking this approach, you’ll have a distinct advantage when it comes to knowing how they play.
Inversely, your opponents can’t read you if you don’t play. By sitting out the first few hands, your opponents won’t be able to see how you play and get any kind of decent read on you. By the time you have them figured out and start playing, they won’t have any idea of what you’re doing or how to play against you.
This is one of the few times in life where you gain an edge by sitting back and doing nothing. If you take the first round or two and just watch your opponents, you’ll get to start with a distinct informational advantage. Try it out at your next online poker game. e=’ms� ae(�`G� The obvious thought process is a trap. He doesn’t want to scare me away but wants to keep getting paid. But he didn’t seem confident to me, he just seemed like he was trying to steal from late position but wavered in his commitment to the idea. I called this tiny bet.
The river was a 9. Now a j-10 could make a straight, but holding two jacks made this less likely for the jack to be out there. I make a pitiful check once again. My opponent now bets 1000 on the river. I call time and think about things.
Usually when a player bets big on the river it’s a bluff or the nuts. When they bet small along the way, it suggests a draw. A king or queen would not be so confident to rope me in with these tiny massaging bets. Especially the descending bet on the turn. If he had a good one pair hand, he’d be betting more to make sure I folded. This huge river bet is again either a missed draw/total bluff or a small set or something. I would imagine his bet to be smaller on the river if he wanted a call, being that I called all of his small bets throughout the hand and showed no signed of desire to commit a lot of chips to the pot.