To make money these days playing NLHE (no limit holdem) then you need to play differently to the masses. To do this means that you need to know just how the masses play in online poker games. Let us look at full ring games for example to show what I am talking about here. Just how does a reg make money at these levels from say NL25 through NL200? Well I think that there are an awful lot of tight-rakeback pro’s at these levels or semi-pro’s. These guys are doing nothing special but churn as much volume as they possibly can.
They will profit from rakeback and value from weaker players but will not be making much from other regs. So they need to multi-table to make as much as they possibly can. I think one of the keys to beating these players is to play differently to what they are doing. This year I played a lot of NL100 full ring and this was my normal playing level. I have had a good year but I have also felt this level tightening up and the soft money has become very hard to get.
I have devised strategies to attack and try to extract extra money from the regs but to be honest then I don’t think that they have been overly successful. There is a very important reason for this and it is because on big sites then many regulars flock here because of the player volume and so more pro’s play at this site than anywhere else. What we have here is a trade-off between volume and player quality because there are less pro’s per 100 head on smaller networks but the volume isn’t there to be able to game select.
So the regs are getting smarter and so playing too many tables means that it then becomes difficult to balance your ranges. It has also become a way of playing poker that has bored me senseless at times and this has been a problem with me putting the hours in. I have made a good hourly rate this year but I have only been playing around 10 hours/week and so I could have simply run good although that makes a nice change for me. However next year I want to play more single table poker but at higher levels…….I think I am pretty much burned out 10-12 tabling full ring and making auto-decisions and want to start playing “poker” again.