Poker Image Management, and Online Private Poker Parties
When it pays to play online against your pals and why you need to manage your poker image when playing cash games against strangers...
CREATE A GOOD IMAGE Creating a good image, at any poker table, is going to give you an edge. If you’re in a tournament that will mean playing tight for the initial levels while the gamblers blow each other up and clear the field a little. As the blinds begin to climb, you can relax your image and begin to steal a few pots. In cash games, you need to vary your image regularly, appearing to play loose for a while and then suddenly tightening up so no-one can get a comfortable fix on you. If your table image is difficult to predict, you’ll be that much harder for an opponent to beat. All of this works much better with people who don’t know you. It doesn’t apply so well to playing with pals, a subject we will address next.
PALS PAYING ONLINE Thanks to technology, you can organise your social poker evening online, instead of having your mates tip beer all over the carpet, grind crisps into the cat, and grope your wife when they’re drunk. You simply create a private room on your site of choice and you can choose who you are going to play from your own circle of friends. A few clicks of the mouse and you’ve named your private room and enabled your very own no limit Hold’em game. This allows you to set the blinds at whatever amounts you like. It’s a lot easier than trying to get ten mates to drive across town and all arrive in timely fashion, sober and ready for a serious game of poker, free of banter and endless lies about fictional sexual conquests. Better still you’ll save enough on the bar bill to cover your first hour of betting. There’s also the comfort zone. When you play an unknown opponent online you have to learn all of their tricks and twists through sometimes bitter experience. It’s much harder for your mates to fool you, even when they’re playing you online. You already know their likely responses and style of play.
WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO It’s important that you and your party all have accounts with the same site and have money deposited so that at any given time when you schedule a game, all the registering etc has been done. On most sites you’ll see a button on the menu bar marked PRIVATE or CUSTOM. Click on it to see games already in progress and you’ll see another button for creating your own game. Choose a name for your room that all your friends can remember when they scroll down looking for it at a mutually agreed time. Agree a password that lets you all in. Once all this is set up, it’s easy to fire up once a week at a pre-arranged time and can become a regular part of your online entertainment. If you want to see how well this works for bunches of friends already doing it, check out www.texasholdemforum.com
