Playing poker for a living is a dream that the majority of people who have tossed a chip into the pot (whether it be live or online) have entertained for at least a moment. For most, that moment is a fleeting, ephemeral thing. For a few, however, it’s a bit of an unscratchable itch, an apparently ideal career.
Playing poker for a living is, by all accounts, a tough gig on several levels. However, this article isn’t concerned with evaluating the quality of your pending career choice. The point of this article is to let you know about some tools that will make your run at poker-pro-dom far smoother. Will they guarantee your success? Absolutely not, but what we can guarantee is that you’ll save a lot of time, money and frustration if you employ these tools from the word go.
So, without further ado, here’s our list of the top five resources you ought to be employing if you’re going to take a serious shot at earning a living on the felts.
TRACKING SOFTWARE
Success at poker comes down to one thing: collecting information and analyzing it accurately. Ok, maybe that’s two things, but you get the point. In movies and on TV, a lot of emphasis is placed on gathering information about your opponents, but that’s actually a secondary concern for you, especially online. The most important player to gather intelligence on is yourself.
You’re looking for two things: one, which games net you the best return; two, which actions within the games net you the best return. It would be nice if we could accurately recall both of these things from memory, but we can’t. If you think can, you’re kidding yourself. Everyone has a tendency to focus to heavily on either the positive or the negative of a memory, and poker isn’t any exception. The solution? Tracking software such as PokerTracker or Holdem Manager.
Both programs record all of your online play and store it in a database. There you can review your results and also go over your play with a fine tooth comb (which hands do you make the most money with? The least? Which games are you beating for the most money? What times of day are you most profitable? And so on), giving you access to critical information that will allow you to make better decisions about what games to play and how to play them. Bonus: Over time, you’ll accumulate lots of information about your opponents as well, and can put that information to work to further increase your profit.
Both programs are available for a bit under $100; we have a special discount available for Holdem Manager. Contact us to get Holdem Manager for $64.
EFFICIENCY SOFTWARE
Online poker doesn’t sound hard – click some buttons, move the mouse, click some more. Truth be told, all of the clicking and moving gets not only old, but distracting, especially if you’re playing several tables. You only have a limited amount of time to make a decision in online poker, so every second you spend dragging your mouse over to another table, hovering over the fold button and clicking is another second you lose for making the tough decision on another table.
The keyboard has always been a more efficient way of navigating programs, and now thanks to a few key efficiency applications, poker players don’t have to be tethered to the mouse anymore. Our personal favorite: TableNinja, which allows you to customize keystrokes to associate them with various functions (switch table, fold, raise, resize table, etc) that traditionally required a drag and click. While each keystroke only saves you a fraction of a second, those fractions add up – especially if you move up to playing the dozen or more tables that online pros play simultaneously.
OPPONENT INFORMATION
Knowing yourself is the most important task to accomplish as a developing poker player, but knowing your opponents doesn’t hurt either. Thankfully, there are a number of sites that do the research for you and provide you with detailed overviews of the players you’re facing.
Tools are available for both cash and tournament play. On the cash side of things, Table Ratings is a popular site that tracks the performance of players at a handful of major sites and provides detailed analysis of their results. On the tournament site, Official Poker Rankings, Sharkscope and the PokerDB provide comprehensive results of MTT and SNGs, giving you awesome insight into whether the player who just three bet you from the button is a hardcore pro or a weekender.
There are also tools that serve basically as ‘buddy lists’ – if you encounter a weak player one day, add them to this tool and you’ll be instantly notified the next time the player sits at a table. Game selection is critical, especially now as online games get tougher and tougher. Tools like Tournament Shark’s Smart Buddy allow you to stop waiting for the fish to come to you and allow you to instead zero in on them.
TRAINING SITES
Learning by doing is a great tool, but learning by watching others do can be an even better tool. Why learn by trial and error when training sites provide you with thousands of videos of other people playing (or reviewing their play) and providing analysis of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it?
There are dozens of training sites, and choosing the right one for you can be tricky. Most sites focus on a particular format of poker, so if there’s a format you prefer (cash, SNG, MTT) exclusively, you’ll want to sign up at one of those sites. A handful of sites provide coverage of all formats – megasites such as CardRunners and Deuces Cracked – but you’ll want to do your own research on this one before making a decision. Training sites are not cheap – they generally have a sign up fee of some sort followed by a monthly subscription fee that can range anywhere from a few bucks to a couple dozen – so choose wisely.
You can also generally earn free training site memberships for getting rakeback at a site. Contact us for a current list of what free training site memberships we have available.
RAKEBACK
Everything listed above will make you more profitable (or at least give you the tools you need to become more profitable) but it all comes with a shared drawback as well: cost. Putting out money when you first start playing can be a tough pill to swallow, and it might not even be feasible for some people.
That’s why rakeback is the number one thing an aspiring poker pro cannot be without. Rakeback not only doesn’t cost anything – it earns you money as you play. It sounds like a cheesy sales pitch, but it’s true, and once you understand what rake is, you’ll understand why rakeback exists and how it works.
Poker rooms make their money by taking a small percentage of each pot in a cash game, or by adding a fee to a tournament entry. That cut / fee is called the rake, and it amounts to thousands of dollars a year, even for recreational players.
Poker rooms are always competing for players. Once players became savvy about rake, poker rooms realized they could attract players by offering a lower rake. Smart rooms realized that lowering their rake was one thing, but keeping it the same and rebating part of it back to players as a ‘bonus’ was an even better idea. The smartest rooms realized that offering rakeback to all players, even those who had no idea what it was and hadn’t asked for it, was a losing model, so they decided to allow their affiliates to offer it. That way, savvy players could find the promotion easily and would stay with the room, and the room could continue to collect full rake from uninformed players.
We offer rakeback at dozens of rooms, including top rooms like Full Tilt Poker and Cake Poker. You can review all of our current offers here.
Poker is a job, similar to most insomuch that it requires an investment from you to improve and excel. Hopefully the tools above will give you a better idea of where your investment should go, and make your transition from a casual player to a full-time pro all the more successful as a result.
