Every poker site that I know of has built in capabilities to take notes on players. So do the major poker tracking softwares. If the site is one that allows screenname changes but carries the notes over through screenname changes, definitely use the built in software. Otherwise, using the tracking software note taking is better, because it can be accessed more easily while reviewing hands, as well as the potential to track players using the same screenname on multiple sites.

So what should you write in a note about another player?

• Specific actions that expose the thought process of another player
• Use abbreviations and shorthand that you will understand in the future. Something like RR3x = reraised to 3x initial raise size, BLF = bluff, SWPY = slowplay, and so on.
• Make note of odd actions (overbets, very small bets, unusual lines, etc) even if you don’t get to see your opponent’s cards. This way when it happens again, you will have an idea of how frequently these actions occur.
• Differentiate between hands that involve you and those that don’t involve you. If the hand doesn’t involve you, make note of the basic stats of the other player in the hand.
• Dates. I can’t stress this one enough. When I first took notes I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that I might be playing the same guys 3 years later. Sure enough, I ended up playing against players at 1000nl with notes that may have been from 50nl. Both you and the other player will have likely changed greatly. If you label your notes (month and year is good enough), you will know how relevant your notes are.
• If you have a battle with another player, whether in the chat box or through targeted aggressive play, you should make note of this. Forgetting a contentious history with another player could cost you a lot of money if you don’t realize you are getting bluffed more frequently than normal.

I was never good at note taking. I played way too many tables to take good notes and if you’ve found a way to play a lot of tables and make money without doing much more than looking at a heads up display, there’s not much reason to fix it. At the beginning, you will struggle just to be making a profit, so your focus should be on making as many quality decision on very few tables to ensure that you play winning poker. Taking good notes will absolutely boost your winrate, at a small sacrifice to how fast you can play.

Here’s a quick Seth Godin-esque nugget of wisdom, since I haven’t posted in 15 days somehow (I have 5 drafts that need some finishing touches).

Once you have the basics down and are winning at say 25nl, try something different. Pick a modification or two and apply it to your game for a day. Be biased towards aggressive modifications, because playing every hand passively is going to be lighting money on fire. You can do more than one modification in a session, just be sure that there is no overlap between the modifications. For example, 3-betting every button open would work well with raising every river bet but not flat calling all open raises when you are on the button. If multiple modifications could trigger adjustments in the same area of your opponents’ strategy, it will be very hard to determine what modification is causing what change.

• Raise to a different size preflop all of the time. Or some of the time.

• Limp reraise from time to time.

• Raise every continuation bet.

• Float every continuation bet where you have overcards and raise on the turn when draws complete.

• Make all of your postflop raises minraises (double the betsize).

• Use your imagination.

Small sample size will limit the ability to actually see how profitable these strategy adjustments are, but the goal is not to see if these are good long term strategies.  Almost all of them won’t be profitable, but what you will see is that it is very effective to do things that are non-standard and deviate from your normal strategy.  Some players will start playing crazy once you start doing things out of the ordinary and will take some time to adjust.

The other important takeaway is to learn how the average regular reacts to a specific play. I’ll illustrate this with an example.

Let’s say your adjustment for the session is to slightly overbet (bet larger than the size of the pot) the flop when you are the preflop raiser. If you do this 30 times against regulars and get folds 23 times, you will see that the default reaction to your large bet is to fold. Sure, making a larger bet will deprive them of odds to call with some hands, but you are likely to be folding out some hands that should be continuing if your opponent knew how wide of a range you were betting with.

If you kept it up, eventually thinking players would start to call and raise your bets and see that you frequently have nothing with your large bets and would begin to adjust to how you play. But there is no reason you can’t do this play against a poker player that you have very little history with, now that you know how the average player reacts to your bet. Or you could just do this infrequently, just often enough to make money from the play, but not often enough that your unusual play sticks out in your opponent’s mind and receives special attention.

It doesn’t matter if you are watching poker on ESPN, Sky Sports or anywhere else. All televised poker is bad for your development as a winning poker player. Here are some reasons why you should stop.

• The games are typically high stakes live games populated by many professional poker players. Any information gleaned from those games does not transfer well to small stakes online poker games.
• Nearly all hands are viewed and discussed out of context. It is often very hard to figure out what structure of the tournament or cash game is, how many chips players have or what positions the players are in. Not to mention the lack of history, table image and other relevant factors.
• The commentators are awful. With some exceptions, the commentators are not advanced poker players and make comments that contradict basic gambling principles. The analysis should be completely ignored.
• Players make decisions that hinge on the fact that they are being watched and recorded. Again, this will not transfer well.
• Anyone who has a marketable personality and a lucky score under their belt is considered a professional poker player. Chris Moneymaker and Phil Ivey are discussed in the same breath as formidable pros. This is not reality.
• It is very tempting to replicate something that a successful multi-millionaire poker player does on TV, despite the knowledge that it isn’t a good idea.

If you have the ability to completely block things you see on TV from entering the strategy part of your brain and only watch for entertainment, more power to you. You probably can’t though.

And yes, the fact that TV poker is like this is great for the games and makes all of us richer. I’m not suggesting that TV poker turn into a Cardrunners sweat session video.

There are many reasons that poker players aren’t able to win. All of these reasons have solutions. Like I have said in my guide, I think that a very large segment of the population is capable of making a decent amount of money playing online poker. If you have made it to this site and are capable of using the Internet, have the motivation to search out poker strategy websites and can read this, you probably are capable of winning at some level of online poker. A little bit of basic math and some low level logic skills are all that is necessary in the raw talent category. Only people with very low levels of intelligence or other mental limitations, such as the lack of a short term memory, are inherently unable to win at poker.

Two Types of Winning

The first type of winning is being capable of executing a strategy that wins in the long run at some form and stake of poker. Some poker players in this category are in fact losers. A player who wins at 10NL cash games but loses all of his money playing high stakes tournaments is a loser, despite the fact that he knows how to play winning poker.

The second type of winning is being capable of showing a profit from all poker play combined in the long run. This is the kind of winning that makes poker a rewarding pursuit. It combines the ability to execute a profitable strategy with self control, bankroll management, game selection and other smart decision making that is necessary to survive in the poker world. Remember that winning can mean playing one table of 2nl. This post isn’t about making tons of money from poker. It is about winning at poker. Winning simply means greater than zero.

Reasons You Might Be a Losing Poker Player

• You don’t know the proper strategy - This is probably the most common problem and luckily the fix isn’t terribly hard, at least at microstakes. Lots of strategy content is coming soon here, but for now read my poker strategy page. Links to all the resources that were important to my own success at poker are listed. Also, browse through my blog posts in the basics category. Most of those focus on varying aspects of beginner poker strategy.
• You practice poor bankroll management - Knowing basic bankroll management is easy enough. Many people who have issues with bankroll management are aware of what they should be doing. There is some sort of self control issue here that is hard for others to help you with. It is really an internal struggle and what works for one may not work for others. Some may find playing in the presence of a friend helps, others find bankroll management software helps.
• You have poor game selection - It is pretty common to see players who have a great sense of pride and consequently find themselves playing in games with players that are better than themselves. There is nothing wrong with trying to challenge yourself. Besides, being the 5th best player in a six handed game is frequently profitable. But if you aren’t sure that you have a positive expectation at the table, it probably isn’t large enough to justify playing. Estimating your winrate just by looking at the statistics of the players at a table is a skill best acquired through experience. If you start off at the bottom you can’t be wrong. The easiest way to improve your game selection is to move down in stakes (all the way, if necessary), but it can also be done by scouting out particular tables and analyzing each player. Ultimately, this is like bankroll management: I can “teach it” to you in 30 seconds, but it is up to you to figure out how to make yourself to do it.
• You tilt too often - I can teach bankroll management and game selection, but I can’t make it happen. I can’t even begin to teach tilt prevention, let alone help you implement it. In my personal experience, playing a lot helped me immensely. The more poker scenarios I saw, the less I was affected by the swings, the losses and the suckouts. A numbness to poker is acquired. Your personal experience with poker will almost certainly vary greatly from mine. Tilt often manifests itself in the form of poor bankroll management or poor game selection, but it is not the same thing. Tilt is a change in mental state that results in playing worse poker. Hard tilt might involve breaking a mouse and open shoving at all of your tables. Soft tilt might be losing focus due to a long breakeven stretch. No one is tilt free, but if it is preventing you from winning, this should be your number one priority. All the strategy in the world won’t make up for a bad case of tilt.
• Lack of self control - The three reasons above are all mostly related to the lack of discipline, but I included this to cover other related issues that can make someone a losing player. Examples of this include frequently playing while drunk and/or tired.
• You find playing poker however you please more fun - I personally think that winning is more fun than losing. Winning at six or nine handed poker games will require playing a fairly tight and consistent style of play compared to the style of the average recreational player. If you really enjoy being able to play however you want and making all the crazy plays that you want, I respect that. Being a losing poker player can be a well thought out, rational choice. Playing poker well is not easy, and many people just want to have fun. This “problem” doesn’t have a solution, either sacrificing the fun of not having to play disciplined poker is worth it to you or it isn’t.

If you not only have these problems and your losses from poker are seriously affecting your financial situation, you might have a gambling problem. If you suspect this, go here and don’t come back. Seriously. You may be genetically wired to make impulsive and irrational decisions. I have seen “pros” who were very good at the strategy part and terrible at the rest. These guys have gambling problems and no matter how much they win on the upswings, their lives would be way better off completely poker free.

You should have figured out by now how much of succeeding at poker is about discipline and emotional control. I know my solutions aren’t much of a help, but I’ll plug a few things that other poker players and myself have found helpful when dealing with anything related to mental aspects of poker.

Tiltbreaker – This is the software I mentioned in the bankroll management bullet point. Tiltbreaker can force you to quit playing poker after losing X amount, prevent you from playing above Y stake and other similar things. It may help, but it only fixes the symptoms. A truly determined person will get their demons out by uninstalling the software or playing on a site not regulated by Tiltbuster. I have never used it personally, but I know others like it. When I first started playing online poker I knew I was being mentally affected by the amount I had won or lost in that session. I was playing limit poker at the time and used a software program to cover up my stack size. I had enough self control not to look at the cashier (doing this is the devil!) or close the software program, and it definitely improved the quality of my play.

The Elements of Poker - I can’t say enough good things about this book. The parts about the mental aspects of poker are fantastic and really reframed the way I approached poker. I don’t think the strategy parts are particularly good, but the mental game sections are just so unbelievably good.

Jared Tendler - This guy is a licensed mental health counselor who specializes in helping golfers and poker players improve their mental game. I have seen very little of his stuff, and there may be others out there like him, but his name pops up around the poker world. People seem to like his work. He makes videos about mental game at Drag The Bar, a subscription poker training site.

This post comes to you from the “Do as I say, not as I do” department. As a result of keeping excessive amounts of money in my poker account, I might lose it because Full Tilt Poker is on the verge of going under. Earlier this year I made a half-hearted attempt to get Supernova Elite on Pokerstars. Due to stagnation in my game, I ended up playing 100nl and 200nl mostly, and yet I still had ~23K on Full Tilt even though I wasn’t playing there . As an American, there is some merit to keeping money online because redepositing large sums, let alone small sums can be a daunting task. But I still should have taken off about 15k. That would leave me a healthy amount of money to play 200nl on a lot of tables with a low risk of running out and having to redeposit.

Those who have more reliable redeposit options should strongly consider keeping less than 30 buy-ins (for a low stakes NLHE cash game player) online. Remember, your bankroll is how much money you have devoted to the exclusive purpose of funding poker games. It is not necessarily how much money you have in your account.

Factors to Consider:

• Does the site allow player to player transfers? If so, you can always exchange cash with a trusted friend to fund your account. Make sure the caps are high enough to transfer how ever much money you plan to need.
• What are the deposit options and how much do they allow you to deposit? Some sites will have a VIP option that allows players to wire transfer large sums. Others only allow credit cards and e-wallets. Some sites cap the amount of money a player can deposit in a day/week/month. Be mindful of any fees associated with these transactions.
• Do you expect to be moving up in stakes soon? Moving up in stakes tends to more than double your bankroll requirements, so you will need to save up to play higher.
  
• Do you have money on other poker sites? If you have money on another site, taking too much off of another poker site doesn’t matter that much. While you max out the weekly deposits you can play at the other site.
• What would happen to your financial situation if you couldn’t play your normal stakes for a month? It is not impossible that some sort of hitch in payment processing could affect your ability to deposit.
• What would happen to your financial situation if you lost the money that was in a poker account? This is a very unlikely occurrence if you play on reputable poker sites, but I thought Full Tilt was reputable and financially sound, so it could happen to you too. Another way to lose your money is if your poker account gets hacked. This is unlikely to happen if you protect yourself from hackers.

Once the online poker bug bites you, your wrist feels the pain. When you are 20 tabling for over 100 hours a month, your wrist begs you to stop. I never got the point where it was swollen or anything, but I would definitely go to bed with a wrist feeling completely weak and filled with dull pain. The National Institute of Health has some wrist strain tips that I have tried. I also have tried some of my own ideas and more poker specific ones. Here are the results.

I tried:

Wrist rests: The gel/foam ones like this didn’t help nearly as much as the bead kind. The bead one would break after a while and leak everywhere, but it usually helped a little bit. It does make a bit harder to move the mouse really far if you are using two monitors.

Changing my posture: I made sure that my wrists weren’t bending upward, like the NIH suggests, but I don’t think they ever were. I tried changing the height of my chair a million times and sitting up straight (which is surprisingly hard to do for long periods of time). I didn’t get much out of this.

Wrist splint: This made playing a bit harder and made clicking the mouse feel weird because my hand was no longer ergonomically fitted to the mouse. I think it helped a bit, but it is hard to differentiate between real and imagined gains when they are very small.

Trackball mouse: I purchased a trackball mouse in hopes that since my hand could remain stationary, the pain would go away. Instead, it made my thumb hurt and I was unable to play very many tables or control the pointer very well.

Stacking tables and using “Jump to Table”: While this does reduce the amount of motion your hand needs to make, I found it hard to keep up with game flow considerations with stacking. Jump to table was frustrating because my mouse would end up places I wasn’t expecting.

TableNinja: I played way too much poker without TableNinja. Having software that auto sets bet sizes eliminates a lot of unnecessary clicking.

Stretching: I did some stretches along the lines of this guys advice. It felt good while stretch, but I never noticed feeling any better after.

Taking breaks: This helps a lot. I probably should have mentioned this point in my poker session length post.

Switching hands: I had trouble performing actions in time with my left hands, but I found that using my left hand for browsing the Internet and my right hand for poker took a lot of pain away. I have a right handed mouse, but it honestly doesn’t feel bad to use left handed. This should also not only reduce the pain, but reduce the chance of having long term problems (although if you are hardcore, it increases the chance you have long term problems in both wrists).

What I Didn’t Try, But You Could:

Joysticks: This is mostly for sit’n'go players, but some people mass multi-table online poker using joysticks. Both gaming joysticks and poker specific joysticks can be used.

Ice: I only did this a few times when it really hurt. Maybe as a routine thing it will help, like it does for pitchers in baseball.

Split or Dvorak keyboards: Split keyboards are normal keyboards split into two. Dvorak keyboards have an entirely different layout that is designed to reduce unnecessary hand movement. I had all my pain in my mouse arm but if the keyboard is causing you pain these could be worth a try.

Ibuprofen: I’m not big on taking lots of drugs to cover up the pain without solving the problem, but it probably makes things more bearable.

Every so often a thread will pop up in poker forums debating whether short sessions or long sessions of poker are better. How long you spend playing online poker can be more important than you might think. I made a little pro and cons list, followed by a brief write up of my opinion. This mostly applies to online cash games because other types of poker don’t allow you to come and go as you please.

Short Sessions

Pros:

• More likely to remain focused
• Less likely to soft tilt
• More likely to proactively game select
• Less eyestrain and wrist strain

Cons:

• More time wasted loading up/closing out tables
• Less hands per hour for the same reason
• Less time to build up table image and get reads on other players
• Less likely to have a winning session

Long Sessions

Pros:

• Able to build up table image and potentially exploit table dynamics
• More hands per hour
• More efficient use of time
• More likely to have a winning session

Cons:

• Probability of losing focus is higher
• Soft tilt can set in
• Greater eyestrain and wrist strain

I am personally in the short sessions camp. I find it greatly beneficial to play one hour sessions instead of playing until your vision is blurred. Playing one hour sessions keeps me on my A game. Even a 15 minute break between sessions can get rid of some tilt and refocus me. I still can play lots of poker by playing many sessions in a day. Some people will prefer otherwise, but I think in long sessions people tend to get lazy about game selection, but your tables are way less likely to go bad in an hour than they are in three hours.

First of all, don’t panic and clear your schedule for the next several hours. Be prepared for the fact that you will likely not get your money back. Take screenshots of as much as possible.

1. Try to log into your poker account. If the hacker hasn’t changed your password yet, or if he gained control through another method, such as a man in the middle attack, you will able to lock the hacker out. Immediately change your password and e-mail address.  If the hacker has a keylogger, he will still have your new password. To prevent him from chip dumping your money, you should self-exclude yourself for a day or a week. That means no poker for that period of time, but it means no poker for the hacker either.
2. Send an e-mail to support with “URGENT: HACKED” in the title. Ask them to immediately freeze the account from playing, transferring or withdrawing. If the site offers live chat or phone support, do that as well.
3. If you cannot access your e-mail because the hacker has taken control of that as well, use a different e-mail account and send a message with the information from step #2 PLUS an explanation of why you are using a different e-mail, as well as proof that you are in fact the account owner. Mention all your account details, as well as what IP address you normally play from, how much money was in your account when you last had control of it and anything else you can think of that helps corroborate your story.
4. Go to PokerTableRatings and see who the hacker has been playing. Make note of the players that your account is losing to. Also, use the poker client’s find player feature to search for yourself in types of poker that are not tracked by PTR.
5. If the opponent is playing outside of his normal stakes or if there appears to be collusion, send another e-mail to support with this information.
6. If the opponent appears to be a legitimate regular who is not associated with the hacker and the play is ongoing, go onto the poker site and talk to the other player in chat and tell him he is playing against a hacked account and ask him to sit out. If the money in your poker account is lost by the hacker to players who are not in cahoots with him, it will not be returned.
7. Make a thread on 2+2 in the Internet Poker forum and sending a PM to an applicable poker site representative is a good idea. Be clear, complete and polite. You will likely be told what I am telling you here, but it can’t hurt to try. Plus, some of the more helpful posters will assist in doing some of the detective work.
8. Figure out how this happened and rectify the problem. If you still have your e-mail account, look through the filters to make sure that no one has been secretly forwarding your mail. Run Spybot S&D and your anti-virus software to look for malicious software. Think about any shady software you installed recently or who has had physical access to your computer lately. Is your Wifi unprotected? You will probably have to reformat your hard drive to be sure that there are not any rootkits lingering. If you aren’t a tech person, the posters in your thread from step #7 should be able to help you out with this. Just be sure to thank them, even if you don’t get your money or account back.
9. Gather all the evidence you have, screenshots, screennames, country and IP of hacker (if the poker site gives it to you) and report it to the police. This does not apply if you live in a third world country or if online poker is illegal in your country. Even if the police tell you that you can’t do much, later on there may be insurance or tax benefits of reporting the crime.

Good luck! Also, check out my post on poker account hack prevention.

There have been many instances of poker players having their accounts hacked. I have never been hacked, partially because of luck and partially because of preparation. If you play microstakes, you are at pretty low risk for hacks, but why not protect your money anyway?

There are very complete guides to poker account security that you should definitely read in addition to my post. Those guides cover more complete computer security issues that will help protect you. I will make a quick bullet list of things that are more poker specific that you should be aware of.

• Use a separate e-mail for poker and make sure the “secret question” isn’t something someone can easily obtain by searching Google or looking up public records. Your e-mail account is the key to your poker account. If your e-mail provider allows, make sure to set up a phone number or backup e-mail account to be able to regain control of your account.
• Don’t tell people what your poker e-mail is, and don’t use the e-mail to sign-up for anything else. Just recently, Cardrunners and PTR got hacked into and e-mail addresses were stolen. A clever hacker could use this information to connect a screenname with an e-mail to either reset the password or to use the e-mail to login and run a dictionary attack.
• Use a strong password for your poker accounts, and don’t use it for other accounts. To be extra safe, use different passwords for each poker account. Use KeePass to manage these.
• It is possible for a hacker to hijack your poker account if you are logged into your account and he is on the same wireless network as you. Usually attacks like this come from someone knowing that you are a poker player, meaning this could be a roommate or someone at a poker tournament with you. This means avoid using your poker or e-mail accounts on shared connections unless you connect through a VPN. I use StrongVPN and have had no problems with their service. The small fee is well worth the increase in security. Make sure to get a VPN based in your home country (and definitely NOT the USA) or else you may get your account temporarily locked.
• Speaking of trust issues, don’t save your password on your computer. It only takes one drunken night for your roommate/girlfriend/dog to empty your account.
• A common form of coaching is the sweat session, where one player uses screen sharing software such as TeamViewer or Mikogo. Make sure you know how to use these software programs correctly, as they have options that allow the other user to control your desktop and potentially steal your money. You only want to let your coach or friend see your screen, but not be able to control anything. Even in view only mode you are at risk for the viewer to use your hole card information against you. Be very wary if someone suggests to you a particular table or opponent and if anything feels strange to you just find new opponents or end the session.
• Be wary of links to download software. Only download poker software from trusted sources (such as the official sites of the software, not download repositories) and avoid pirating them. This is potentially true for all software, but no one is going to install a hole card viewing exploit into the latest Batman movie. I have never heard of this actually happening, but definitely stick to trusted sources of software.
• Use a security token if available. A security token can prevent keyloggers being employed to gain access to your account and complicates the process of resetting your password via e-mail.

Nothing is foolproof, and I will be completely honest – I don’t do everything on this list. Some of the stuff won’t matter that much, but if losing the money will be catastrophic, by all means do everything on this list and more. Tomorrow’s post will be the companion question to today’s post: “What do I do if my poker account got hacked?“

Some bad mindsets include:

• the need to win at all costs
• the need to gamble
• drunkeness
• tiredness
• preoccupation with personal issues
• the urge to play poker to impress someone

The intangible mental aspects of poker are the hardest thing to teach as a poker coach. In fact, I don’t know how to help someone beyond common sense advice. The difficulty in teaching this to a student is that the problem isn’t that the student doesn’t know that playing drunk is a bad idea, it’s that there is an impulse control issue.

Noting that, here is something to consider next time you want to stay up playing until six in the morning because the “games are so good.” Research from Duke University found that, “These subjects also displayed decreased activity in the anterior insula, which focuses on negative outcomes, so that whereas well-rested people generally look to minimize losses, sleep-deprived individuals may instead seek to maximize gain.” There was also some bad news for me, an avid Monster drinker, “[I]f you are tired, caffeine may boost your attention, but this will not necessarily change your evaluation.”

Controlling impulses to play while in a poor mindset is only part of the solution. Maximizing the amount of time you are in a positive mindset is also very important to continued success in poker.

Read the Elements of Poker. The chapters about the mental aspects of poker are unparalleled in any other poker book (or any other resource) that I have ever read. It completely reframed the way I thought about poker.