First, pick the right poker site.
There are a lot of poker sites out there. Many players will stay with the first site that they ever signed up with and never even look around at what else might be on offer.

Take some time to look around and see what other poker sites are offering prospective new players. You may be playing at a site that does not suit your particular strengths. Big sites like Poker Stars have thousands of players. Meeting the same players might be difficult at a site like that. Maybe you need to ‘know’ the people you are playing against, and a smaller room with less players might suit your style better.

The opposite might be true too. You may be at a small room where the other players know all your weak points. Playing against the same players may be detrimental to your profitability, and a larger, more anonymous site might be ideal for you.

Choose a good bonus
Poker sites give their new players deposit bonuses to encourage them to sign up. Some of these deals can be great for your bankroll. Playing the same amount of poker at a new site that you would have played anyway at your existing site could yield hundreds of dollars in bonus cash. Not all deposit bonuses are good ones though. Make sure that you can reach the requirements that are attached to whatever bonus you want to take before committing to it.

Choose the right table
Once you have picked your site and you have assured yourself that you will be able to release the full amount of the bonus that you are entitled to, take a moment to study the lobby.

If the cash tables are your game, then look at the stats for every table before joining. There will be a ‘viewed flop’ percentage listed for each table. This can be a great indicator of the style of play of the players at a given table. A high number here means that the players are ‘loose’ and a low number means they are playing ‘tight’. Always sit down at a table that is the opposite of how you play.

If you are a tight player, then a long session at a loose table might be very profitable for you, whereas athe same time at a tight table may be a real grind.

Those three simple poker hints could have an enormous impact on your game and your profitability.

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These ‘leaks’ can drain away a lot of money from both winning and losing players, but they can be easily managed if you know what to watch out for and what to avoid.

Some online poker rooms are even advertised as having a lot of loose casino gamblers that occasionally play at the poker tables and can be a good source of profit for the more professional poker player. Well, for poker players, the opposite of that situation is that they sometimes will sit in at a fast moving casino game and lose a lot more than they just spent the last few hours slowly accumulating at the poker tables.

Part of the reason for the large and unexpected losses can be that they are not able to switch their staking level properly across the different poker and casino games. Players used to betting into $100 dollar no limit cash pots find it hard to sit at a blackjack table and bet in single dollar amounts.

Different betting strategies apply for different games, and poker players will often times flounder when they make a sudden switch to the casino tables.

One easy way to avoid this is to find an online casino that has very low stakes available for the game that you want to play. For example, in some casinos you can play online roulette from as little as one penny. The best way to handle your online leak is find the lowest available stakes when you first sit in and play a few turns at that level before moving up to any thing higher.

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So, what is it exactly? Well, it is a lot of things. It includes a very comprehensive poker tuition course in a multimedia format, which is very cool. Plus it has a ‘clinic’ for finding and plugging your leaks.

Also included is a hand tracker, which a lot of players already pay good money for.

Another really useful section is the personalized report on your poker game, which can go a long way to identifying your problem areas and help you to overcome them.

Once you connect your PokerTime Poker account with your MyPokerLab account, you will be able to see everythig available in your MyPokerLab dashboard. From here you can easily access your poker lessons, strategy articles, and see the latest news from the forum, as well as the latest promotions that are available.

You can take the poker lessons step by step, or access each one individually in the order that suits you best.

From your dahboard you can easily generate a report on your poker play and see at a glance where you rate in different areas of the game, like the example on the right.

As it is free from PokerTime it will only work with your PokerTime account. This is a pretty great tool, and if you already have a PokerTime account then you can go ahead and download this software now. If you don’t already have a PokerTime account you can easily open one now and get access to this free software.

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So what strategy do you need to take to make sure that you get past the bubble and into the money? To the final table even?

If you have been playing your best game up to now then the best advice is to simply keep playing that way.  Use a little extra caution when evaluating any big calls if you are just before the bubble. A small risk is greatly increased here as most other players will have tightened up at this stage and are probably playing as slow as they can.

They are essentially giving other players more time to make a mistake – don’t let that be you.

So what happens here if you have a premium hand, say AA, and a bigger stack than you pushes all in?  Call? Fold? Is it unthinkable to fold pocket aces? Ever?

I’m not going to say that the right move here is to fold. Or to play. The right move here is to evaluate how your whole game has been so far. How long did it take you to get this far, what was the buy in, how much do you stand to gain if you get to the cash,  how important is it to you to get there, and would you be willing to go out now happy that you had played your best game?

It could really come down to whether you feel lucky or not.

All tournament play, in fact all poker play (if you want to make money playing poker), comes down to making the right calls.  That doesn’t mean winning all the time, but calling when the odds are in your favor. Coming up to the bubble re-evaluate your odds to factor in the extra risk inherent in this stage of the game.

Finally, if you are in the unlucky situation where you definitely will have to make a move before the tourney is into the money stage, the only real advice here is that you should be pushing, and not calling.

Pushing against a monster chip leader may not be the way to go here.  Pushing with position against an opponent with a similar sized stack to your own is preferable here as opposed to having the goods.

Having a premium starting hand but being out of position can mean that you are called by a larger stack and get outdrawn. If you have to go, and I really mean have to, then it’s Position, Opponent, and then the cards.

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This is especially true in tourneys that have very large fields.  It is a reasonable strategy, but it has one glaring flaw.

Many players will be familiar with the marginal hands that they are happy to go all-in on.  Say that you have AKoff and you are up against one other player who is all-in.  You have the guy on a low pair.  You probably already know that your odds are roughly 50/50, depending on the pair.

So you might be used to making a call here for a fifty fifty shot with two over cards.  In cash games that is ok depending on how you play and your bankroll management abilities.

But in a tourney situation you have to reassess what you stand to gain against what you potentially stand to lose.  A win here doubles you up, yes, but essentially it just keeps you in the game.

Whereas a loss here finishes your tourney life.  If you take enough of these 50/50 shots you are guaranteed to be out, sooner or later.

Obviously this is similar to saying that you should only play premium hands, and stick rigidly to the top 20 starting hands.  But the difference here is that even if you are not put in for all your chips, but instead are up against a short stack and only need to risk half your stack, you are still not getting good odds on this type of hand. Losing half your stack early on can cripple you just as easily as if you were in for all your chips.

And the upside of that is that you did not even double up.  Longer tourneys require that you re-evaluate your potential losses against your potential gains, and adjust accordingly.

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The bigger the field the longer this middle period will be.

By this stage many of the lesser skilled players will have been eliminated.  Of course some of them will have doubled or tripled up.

But the majority of the field now will be playing in a style similar to your own, that is, in a potentially winning strategy.

What you need to do right now is play only the premium hands that come to you, remembering all the time that in poker how to win is really how not to lose.  This will be quite boring of course, but you can spend you time studying your opponents.

Bearing in mind that any decent player will be doing exactly the same, you will need to switch your play up a bit.  One approach here is to play uber tight in early position, playing super strong with only premium hands, but to loosen up completely when in later position.

When in position against a small early raise you will want to smooth call with the nuts, but come over the top with half your stack with any lesser hand.

That is a fairly simplified appraoch, and you will need to fill it out a bit by using what you have learned in your down time against your opponents when you can.  Also, don’t stick too rigidly with this as it will be soon spotted by an experienced tourney player, who will take you out by simply small raising something like pocket aces.

This is a nice strategy for stealing the blinds but getting a decent amount of chips instead of just the blinds.

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That is to say, you are expected to follow a pre-flop raise with a continuation bet after the flop.  Failure to do so is a glaring sign of missing the flop.

Of course you can use that to your advantage by checking when your hole cards hit the flop. Assuming that you are in position the bet will be checked round to you, and a check from you here with a strong hand will probably induce a bluff from one or more opponents after the turn.

But can you still check the flop even though you missed?

Another big factor in deciding when and or if to make a c-bet is the type of game you are playing.  Tournament c-betting can be a whole lot different to cash game continuation betting.

Before we get into the specifics of each type of game we can say in general that checking early with a strong hand and taking down an inflated pot after inducing a bluff should set you up nicely later on to be able to c-bet or not at your discretion.

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