Chris Dean’s Personal Website

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Having played online poker for quite a while now (with varying successes) and having tried most if not all main poker providers software I had settled on playing with betfair.com

I like betfair a lot as uses cryptologic’s software, which I find visually appealing (much better than that provided by 888.com, pacific poker and similar) and they appear to be the only service provider who really cares about their client’s gambling patterns.

I’m glad to say I’m not an addict, but I do like playing the games from time to time and I can see how someone could become very easily addicted or loose a lot of money gambling online.

The most dangerous part, in my opinion is the ease at which you can top up your account with a pre-registered card with more or less just the click of a button and when on a loosing streak someone could quite easily top up and more and more, in the vein hope they’ll win the next game but in reality loosing more and more each time as they take more and more silly risks.

Betfair allows you to limit how much money you can spend per week and or loose per month if you don’t trust yourself in this regard and this simple service makes one of the most responsible internet gambling companies around in my opinion.

That said they have, today stopped using Wagerlogic’s (Cryptologic’s) software by the look of things and are now using some in house built beast which I feel is much less appealing to play on and use, so I may move back to interpoker (they sent me a free t-shirt last xmas so are my second favourite ) if this turns out to be a crock.

In my mind there are a number of different online poker players.

Those like myself who play occasionally more for the fun of it than anything serious but for real money none the less
Those who play to gamble alone and as such care little for the graphical interface
Those who play to win and like to use some kind of statistical overlay or hack or bot to try and scam the providers and other players.

In general online poker is so random that there’s no real gut feeling you can get of what your opponents cards may be other than from the way that they bet so it basically comes down to playing the numbers, but even this isn’t strictly the best way to play as likely winning hands can be easilyy beat with very unlikely winning hands due to the excess randomness.

To win at online poker is easy generally. Play a long slow game on a fast table only playing hands with a value of 20 or more i.e. only bet when you have 2 cards of value > 9. Simple as that. I have won much more money than I’ve lost on a game by game basis by playing in this way.

That said also keep an eye on your opponents betting patterns as it is usually quite easy after a few hands to tell if they are bluffing or not or to what level their hands may be good. Some of this comes with experience so if you are a new player then play a lot of the cheaper tables to get a feel for this.

In my opinion the best tables to play are single table tornament (STT’s) – Multitable tornaments (MTT’s) are attractive as they offer higher returns for smaller outlay but you have to be prepared to play a very long game to win one of these and not get cocky anywhere along the way just have confidence that your time will come.

STT’s are the best as you get to know your opponents each game so you can actually play them – there is no seat swapping or anything to confuse your game.

I have experimented with using stats aggregators and similar – but for me these take all the fun out of the game and aren’t that reliable anyway, again due to the random nature of the game – they can be a guide, but I’d rather use intuition than figures in this regard.

The real issue with online poker are the other type of player not mentioned yet – the illegal cheating syndicate groups of players or an advanced bot network that play as multiple players on the same tables.

So if none of this has put you off I would recommend signing up to betfair.co.uk or interpoker.com