Why everyone’s playing online poker in Thailand. One of our freelance writers has been playing online poker in Thailand since 2009. We interviewed him for Thailand tips and stuff to bear in mind for anyone moving abroad to play poker. Poker is hypnotic. A siren call. We enter a weird expensive world in a kind of trance. It takes years to get our brains right and generate profit. So the road to that exquisite Maserati is nothing if not crooked. I had met Big Nick in 2014. He ran two 1-2 tables over a dive. Oct 22, 2018 This is a discussion on Fulltime Grind SNG grind. Within the online poker forums, in the Online Poker section; I will start grinding the $4.50 on demands on in 2019, I will review every quarterly. Jan 22, 2019 When it comes to knowing how to grind poker online, this grinder is a multitasking wizard: They play long multi-tabled sessions, amassing eye-watering volume, and boasting outstanding concentration and discipline skills. They give little away and are a formidable adversary. 888 Poker is the fastest growing online poker site in the industry, with thousands of members across the world playing at any given time. Our world-class software is available across all online platforms, so you can enjoy playing wherever you like, w. Jul 21, 2015 Anyway, if you’re setting up an online poker grind station you’re going to want to consider the following. Windows PC or Mac. Having been a Windows-based PC user my entire life I can only.
Small stakes online poker tournaments are fantastic fun. They can be frustrating at times — I’ll give you that — but for the most part, it is difficult not to enjoy yourself while competing in one.
They are also potentially lucrative beasts, not least because they tend to attract players in droves. On some sites — in particular PokerStars — tournaments with buy-ins as small as $1-$10 may see several thousand hopefuls take to the virtual felt in the hope of turning their tiny investments into much more meaningful sums.
As you can imagine, the majority of these huge fields are populated with recreational players and therefore the standard of play is, as a rule, very poor. That’s not to say navigating your way through the crowds and winning one of these things is an easy task, because it isn’t. In other words, don’t think you’re going to deposit $200 online, play a bunch of these tournaments, and suddenly be rolling in cash like Scrooge McDuck in Ducktails. It’s not going to happen.
What is going to happen, or what should happen, is that you continue reading this article — and others you find in the Strategy section — and once you’ve armed yourself with the weapons of knowledge, you go out there and apply that learning to do more than just enjoy these tournaments, but to profit from them as well.
Here are five tips designed to help you both prepare for and find success in small stakes online tourneys.
1. Be Prepared For a Long Session
Most of these low buy-in, big field tournaments take several hours to complete, so you need to be prepared to play for a long time. Be patient as always, but also be ready for a lengthy grind should you go deep in the event.
I’ve been fortunate enough to chop the $3.30 rebuy on PokerStars twice. On both occasions the tournament started at around 7:00 p.m and we finished at 6:30 a.m. This is all well and good if you are a poker pro who can sleep the next day, but you have to take into consideration work commitments if you have a job. Know what you’re potentially getting yourself into when registering for these events.
That said, the tournaments available at WSOP Social Poker do not take hours to complete, making them great to play when you have a little spare time from the daily grind.
2. Be Prepared For Some Crazy Swings
The variance in small stakes poker tournaments is huge because of the sheer number of opponents you have to get through and the fact many of these opponents can be nearly impossible to put on a hand. Also of significance when playing against a large field full of recreational players is the possibility of players calling your raises — even your all-in ones — with some ridiculous holdings, adding further to the unpredictability of outcomes.
While this situation is very favorable in the long run, over the short term you can often find yourself running worse than you ever thought possible. Make sure therefore you have an ample bankroll to fall back on when times are hard — something in the range of 200-300 times of your average buy-in (I’d recommend).
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Play Now3. Keep it Simple and Value Bet Your Hands to the Max
DO NOT try to run an elaborate bluff at any stage of the tournament because it will only lead to tears of sorrow. A lot of your opponents only care what cards they have in their hand and won’t realize from your actions that you’re representing a specific hand — they just want to get to showdown and hopefully win.
More often than not in these events you will want to keep matters simple, playing “ABC poker” and letting the cards fall how they will.
Along the same lines, make sure you get the maximum value from your made hands. Higher-stakes tournament grinders may routinely fire 1/3 pot-sized bets at their opponents, but that’s because it is more difficult to get paid off at those stakes. At the lower end of the spectrum, you can get away with betting more. Because so many of your opponents will love to call your bets, you may as well take advantage with your strong holdings.
4. Listen to the Betting / Prepare to Lay Down Some Big Hands
How often have you heard poker players bemoan their luck and come out with some rubbish such as “I can’t beat these donkeys, they always hit the nuts on the river.” What they don’t tell you is that “these donkeys” often play their hands in a manner that allows you to get away from pots should you need to.
For example, if a weak player has limp-called preflop, called the flop, called on the turn, and then leads into you on the river when the flush comes in, guess what? That player almost certainly has the flush. The same is often true for raises on the river. Even if the only hand that beats you is , if an obviously weak player raises you on the river, you have to consider that he or she probably has !
5. Don’t Worry About Playing a “Balanced Style”
If someone tells you that you have to play a “balanced style” of poker inlarge-field small stakes poker tournaments, laugh and walk away. While you have to do this higher up the poker food chain, you are highly unlikely to come up against the same players ever again in a field of 3,000-10,000 foes, so you can be as unbalanced as you wish.
That means not worrying so much about not revealing certain patterns with your play, such as always betting big with strong hands. While against stronger opponents you should balance your play by varying your bets and actions so as not to be read so easily, against large fields of less skilled opponents this isn’t as great of a concern.
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Obviously, the five tips above are not all you need to be successful in small stakes online tourneys, but they should at least help you in your quest to turn a little into a lot!
This article was originally published on Feb. 14, 2017. Last update: Jun. 18, 2019.
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Almost 12 years ago, my house was robbed while I was at work. One of the items the burglar decided to relieve me of was my desktop PC. Thankfully, I was fully insured and received a payout, which I then used to buy what was my first laptop.
Since the day I bought the aforementioned laptop, the only time I have used a desktop machine was at one of my office-based jobs that I held until delving into the poker world. However, last month, I returned to the world of PCs.
Although I didn’t purchase the PC purely for playing poker, it struck me that there will be potentially many PokerNews readers out there who are in the market for a new machine that they intend to use for grinding online poker. It also dawned on me that buying a new rig can often be a daunting process if you’re not sure what you should be looking for or know what specifications you require. While this article isn’t going to go into great detail about exact specifications of computer components, by the time you finish reading it you should be armed with enough knowledge to go out there and purchase a new setup.
The first thing I’d suggest is to avoid computer superstores that sell off-the-shelf machines. Here in the UK, the biggest computer retailer is PC World. It may seem ridiculous telling you to look elsewhere, but trust me on this.
When I was pricing up my new machine I ran the specifications of various machines that were within my budget to a friend who is a huge computer nerd. At least 90% of these machines had great processors but poor graphics cards and/or poor hard disks and other components. To make a long story short, the machine that I eventually purchased cost me £843 (approx. $1,310) and the only PC World machines that can get anywhere near it carry at least a 50% premium.
Anyway, if you’re setting up an online poker grind station you’re going to want to consider the following.
Windows PC or Mac
Having been a Windows-based PC user my entire life I can only comment on these. While I love Macs and everyone I know who owns or uses a Mac sings its praises, I am a PC user.
The good news about online poker sites is they generally don’t need a powerful PC on which to run. That said, once you start playing multiple tables, have third-party software running at the same time, and maybe stream some music as you play, you’re going to start needing a little more oomph. And let’s face it, you’re not only going to play poker on it, you’ll have to try out some games, too!
I’d go with a later generation Intel i5 processor. Moving into i7 territory can start to get expensive and some of the i5 versions are more than capable of handling what you’ll throw at them, including most of the latest games.
Make sure you have plenty of RAM. At least 8GB should suffice, but it is pretty cheap these days so beef it up to 16GB.
As for graphics cards, make sure it’s a decent version (model 960 upwards) of a NVIDIA GeForce GTX and you’ll be fine.
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Lastly, it’s worth shelling out the extra money for a Solid State Hard Drive or SSHD. These are so much faster than a standard hard drive and I believe more reliable too as they have no moving parts. While unnecessary for online poker, the 5-6 second boot time is cool enough to warrant the extra outlay.
Monitor — It’s not only size that matters
Many people fall into the trap of thinking that bigger is better when it comes to a PC monitor, and while they do have a point, it’s all about screen resolution.
Make sure the screen you’re buying is true HD and has a display of at least 1920 x 1080p so that you can play multiple tables without a ton of overlap. Once you’ve found one with a good resolution, choose your monitor size bearing in mind that a high resolution on a small screen can make everything seem tiny. I went for a 27” screen and would have opted for a 4K monitor had my budget allowed — make sure your graphics card supports 4K if you go down this route.
A wired gaming mouse
It seems that the current trend is for your mouse to be wireless, but you can’t beat the reliability of a wired mouse. For one thing, they don’t run out of batteries when you’re sitting there with aces!
When choosing a mouse, make sure that it is comfortable for how you hold it — some people like to have their hand flat, other grip it like a claw — and that it has an adjustable DPI which allows you to tailor how sensitive it is. That’s particularly useful if you have a large screen.
Most gaming mice have a number of buttons on them that allow you to assign actions to them, meaning you can click one button and you’ll fold or another and you’ll move all in. This is awesome for high volume grinders.
Above all, make sure it is comfortable to use because this is what you’ll have hold of for several hours at a time.
A gaming keyboard
While a good keyboard isn’t necessarily essential, you don’t want to scrimp and save here, either. Again, like with mice, gaming keyboards have programmable keys that can be a godsend if you play a lot of tables and/or video games. Comfort is key here if you’re going to use your machine for word processing a lot. Take it from someone who writes a lot that a bad keyboard is bad news.
Miscellaneous considerations
It’s a given that you require a comfortable, supportive chair and a roomy desk, but what about access to a wired internet connection, a backup connection, and a charged laptop?
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Wireless internet is much more stable than in the past, yet plugging into the router itself means the only time you’re going to be cutoff is if the router fails or your internet goes down. Having a backup connection may seem like overkill if you only play low stakes, yet the cost of a mobile broadband dongle or being able to tether to your cell phone gives you the peace of mind that should you lose your internet connection you can be back online in no time.
But what if there’s a power cut? That’s where the fully charged laptop comes in handy. If the power goes off, fire up the laptop and either pray to the poker gods that your electricity supply returns before your laptop’s battery drains fully, or head to your nearest fast food restaurant or coffee shop and leech their power.
While you don’t have to spend several thousand building a state-of-the-art machine for playing poker, it is worth investing in something that is at least a little future-proof. Feel free to post your machine specs in the comments box and we can all nerd out together!
![Free Free](/uploads/1/2/5/1/125199349/790996912.jpg)
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