Online poker is the game of poker played over the Internet. It has been a craze since the mid-nineties. Online poker draws a lot of comparisons to the old-fashioned poker of yesteryear, played in saloons in the old West. Online poker is the virtual, virtual equivalent of telephoning your old school bully, picking a fight with him after school, screaming at him after school, until he springs you, in short, the old bully keeps on bullying you just as he did you.
You can’t do that in online poker, which is a fact. You need a break, you can’t rebound, you can’t recover, you are under attack and as far as the old bully is concerned, you are nothing but a figure of fun, an entertainment.
Is that the whole truth? Maybe. But wouldn’t it be more reliable, more memorable, to pound the empty walls of an empty saloon, than to bang out a saloon conversation in print, seeing their backs?
Online poker provides a great forum for discovering why poker is so precious and why it is so popular. Perhaps, the top poker games are the most compelling:
- Bluffing, or deceptive betting practices,
- Or stingy betting,
- Or bluffing when holding obvious second best.
The pokerbo equivalent of pounding the enemy’s doorstop is the art of bluffing. Bluffing is the process of making some sort of deceptive play, whether it is that you have a strong hand when you do not, or persist with a weak hand when you have nothing, simply to fool your opponent into a hesitation and then a final fold.
Of course, the process of bluffing is not new. Early poker matches were all about who held the best hand. Betting wasrazy Bets done by both the pros and the amateurs.
But as poker adopted more and more of the Popular Games such as Texas Hold’em, then poker styles were being adapted which made it more attractive to the crowd:
- Raising or checking,
- Or if you had a weak hand and no one else checked,
- You bet or raised big pre-flop,
- Or you could check/raised big post-flop,
- Or you could bet big pre-flop and then bet or raised small post-flop.
But as poker moved to Las Vegas, then the game of bluff took a different turn. Players learned that they could not have it all their own way. You were not going to get paid off of a bluff unless you had something, people paid to see if you had more cards than you had, and any little thing, a call on the river, a permitting of a bet on the turn, had to be paid off.
But as poker began to take larger sums out of the Las Vegas card rooms, then the game of bluff took a new face altogether. The faces of bluffing are now:
- Playing loose preflop.
- Playing tight preflop.
- Play betting lines and connectors when your holding chips.
- Play straight bluffing when your holding chips.
- Play to control your opponent’s psychology.
- Playing heads up when you are short stacked.
- Playing multiple tables at once.
- Learning to control your own emotions.
- Gambling more in order to gain a bigger pot.
- Poker is gamble and when you are gambling you are usually trying to win.
- Money is the motivating factor.
- It’s not who you are, it’s how you play.
- In baseball, it’s not how you pitch, it’s how you play Storybook Brees.
- It’s not how you play quarterback, it’s how you play quarterback.
- In order to be a better baseball player, you must be able to prepare your mind to succeed.
Preparation can be of equal importance as talent. Of equal importance as luck. Of even more importance than psychology. This is the secret to setting yourself up for success. This is the secret to having fun and living life on the edge.
