Some Things I've Learned About Online Poker (with a spotlight on 6max LHE)

I've mentioned previously in my blog how I have been a serious winning live player for several years but up until this year had never taken online poker seriously. I'm a live grinder who's specialized in limit holdem. I've played as high as $100/200, but have only been consistently successful playing $40/80 and below. This article will chronicle my shift from live to online poker, and I've included some general notes on the current landscape of limit holdem online at the bottom.

The reasons I never popped it and moved up confidently to the high stakes arena are very clear to me. A complete lack bankroll management skills, no table or seat selection and playing too long of sessions are the major factors. Even though I've always felt confident playing limit holdem at any limit, heavy swings are intrinsic to the nature of the high stakes game and I've never gotten used to that. In the smaller games that have been my bread and butter, there's a lot more passive play in multi-way pots where many players get involved in protected pots with light values. If you play good cards and your opponents play crap and every hand goes to showdown you will destroy them.

I don't want to make it sound like the $30/60 at Bellagio is a joke of a poker game that just anyone can beat. I'm just trying to get across the point that if you are more skilled than your opponents in this type of game you will only extremely rarely, if ever, experience massive downswings in the neighborhood of 200 big bets. If you want to play as high as $200/400 you really do need a bankroll of at least 500 big bets or more ($200k) because you WILL experience frequent 200 big bet or worse downswings. When your edge is much smaller and the play is tough instead of passive, the swings of limit holdem manifest themselves in a very different and more brutal way. It took me 7 years to fully understand this concept.

So, I never allowed myself the chance to naturally adjust to the tougher landscape of live high stakes limit holdem. I've jumped in the big game with literally my whole bankroll in jeopardy in that very session. Totally idiotic, maybe that's why I'm broke even though I've actually done quite well for myself playing low.

Anyways, the point of this article wasn't to spew off on my personal experience with live limit holdem, the point was to spew off about my experiences over the past 7 months playing online 6MAX limit holdem. At some point I realized that even though I did enjoy online poker, I had never given it a shot. I always won a little, but played so small and so inconsistently that I never made any real money. My hourly rate was terrible. I knew something was passing me by because I kept hearing about all of these young pros who were making big money online. I knew in my heart that I could be in that mix of young pros who were crushing it, but I had to make the conscious decision to switch my focus from live to online grinding. I made that decision in January of this year and started right at the bottom.

My hourly rate the first couple months was less than minimum wage. I felt like I should be doing well and I wasn't. I felt like it was rigged, but the truth is that I just wasn't any good and I probably ran slightly below EV. The rake is absolutely brutal. I was winning enough before factoring in the rake that I proved myself to be far better than the average player, but it was really frustrating to see most of my winnings get sunk into rake. I plowed through this phase even though my confidence was shaken.

The next phase was a little sunnier. My results improved to where I was making more than minimum wage. Woohoo! Horrible. In this phase I started to realize how much I needed to learn and how weak a player I really was. Part of the reason I wasn't learning quite as fast as I could have through these months was that I am a mass multi-tabler who chose to trade focusing on the finer points of the game in exchange for getting in tons of hands. Mass multi-tabling is good if you are already a very good player who doesn't mind stepping down a few limits. It's not that good a system if you are a mediocre player who is just scraping by. It's important to hone your skills and I knew this was what was holding me back. I joined a training site at the end of this phase.

These past 2 months have been much better. I'm still not making the kind of money I could make playing live, but I'm in the ballpark. The trade off is that there is hardly any variance online when you're playing a ton of tables. When I head over to my regular game here in town, $20/40 full kill limit holdem, I never know if I gonna get blasted for $2000 in one session. That's a little more stress than I need considering I can earn online with hardly any risk.

I've improved all aspects of my game, fundamentals, bankroll management, table and seat selection, tilt control, ability to stay focused in front of the computer for longer hours, note taking, reading stats and HUD, and even motivation. It's funny that I can consider a seven month run where I'm making less money than ever before a renaissance in my poker career, but it really is. Everything I've learned playing online does carry over to live poker and will serve me well regardless of what forms of the game I chose to play in the future. It's nice to be able to say that I am an online pro, even though I'm just a small-timer for now.

Here are a few notes on what 6MAX limit holdem is like online at the different stakes:

$0.50/1.00 LHE: You can only make real money in these games if you can play a ton of tables at once. The rake is really bad and you have to adjust to it by sticking to situations where you have higher winning chances. The players are the worst of the lot, this means that you assume no risk playing this low. It's a good experimentation ground for multi-tabling and should reward the skillful player at least a little money for their time.

$1/2 LHE: People used to say that $10/20 limit holdem live was the first serious limit, where a person can actually make a decent living playing. $1/2 online is kinda like that. You need to play a lot of tables to show a healthy profit per hour, and the rake is still really bad and unfortunately still factors in to marginal decisions. There are some good players here, but they're few and far between.

$2/4 LHE: This limit is where the rake is generally a little less significant. While it's much tougher than $1/2, there are still plenty of good spots and a multi-tabler can definitely increase their rate by playing more and more tables. This limit has the benefit of being low enough that you'll avoid any truly great players. The regular grinder ratio goes up considerably, but at least you can counter nitty play by opening wider ranges due to the more favorable rake.

$3/6 LHE: On more than one site the rake actually gets worse at this stake. It's an odd limit for a few reasons: 1- you encounter a fair amount great players who are mass multi-tabling or just stepping down for the time being and/or messing around. That's no fun. 2- On Pokerstars it's the first limit where players may choose to play to chase Supernova elite (because the rake is so shitty you earn a lot of their VPP points), so you encounter a cruddy mix of nitty regs and tough pros on many tables. This is the first limit where table selection becomes crucial to being able to even turn a profit. Personally I consider this limit a middle ground between big games and little games, it's a training ground for higher stakes play where you can play a similar style of game without assuming much risk.

$5/10 LHE & $10/20: I played these games a bit but decided against continuing because I want to build my roll up first. Also, I'm not interested in playing way fewer tables, something you need to do to survive here. To beat these games you have to really hang on every decision and be VERY fundamentally sound. I image that once you can beat 6-12 of these tables simultaneously you have 'arrived' in terms of a high level online pro. This is my goal for 2011.

$15/30 & $30/60: Although I haven't played any hands at these stakes I think that they offer a few benefits to players: 1- You can much more easily achieve Supernova Elite if you play on Pokerstars 2- The rake structures on all sites are much more favorable and allow you to 'play the real game' without any concern for the rake. This is the first limit where this would be true in my opinion. It's unfortunate for us that the rake online is so ridiculously high that it effectively ruins the game, but sadly this is the case. The only way to ever learn how to beat $100/200 and higher online would be to play these tables, so while they may not always be the most profitable games they are the gateway to the big-time and I hope to be playing these limits at some point in the future.