Read also

• Poker Rakeback
• Tournament Fees and the Rake

The deposit process breaks into clumps with a few possible points where you have to just... wait. Be patient and begin the process with the following steps:

1. Pick a quality online poker room.

2. Select your transfer method of choice from the online poker room's cashier.

3. If the transfer method involves a third party (meaning any method that doesn't send your online poker room a real-life paper check), go to the third party's Web site and register appropriately.
Make sure to follow the site's directions for account creation and verification to the letter. (If you send a check straight to the online poker site, skip to Step 9.)
At this point you may encounter a time lag. If you use an online holding company, its tickle (the amount the company initially puts toward your account to make sure it has the correct bank info) and your verification of the account balance could take as long as a week.

4. Check your online poker room for first-time bonuses. Weigh this figure against how much you're willing to use as a poker stake and determine the amount you want to deposit into your online poker account.
Many sites give you bonus money to play with for making their site your room of choice.

5. Transfer the necessary funds from your real-world account (checking account or debit card) to your online third party (the ACH provider or online holding company).
Don't forget to move enough money to account for any service fees that the poker site or holding company charges you along the way. You may experience a delay of a day or two as your funds seep from one account to the next.

6. Verify that your online third party deposits the correct amount of money and that your real-world account reflects the withdrawal properly.
An error anywhere in this entire process is unlikely; but if one occurs, it may be something like a double withdrawal.

See also

• Online Poker Opponents: Keeping Track of Poker Styles
• Online Poker: Predicting Opponents and Recognizing Tells

Your principal playing expenses in poker are the very chips you're wagering and the money that they represent. That's why it's called gambling. There are, however, some additional expenses associated with playing poker in any kind of organized setting, whether in a casino, an independent cardroom, or at an online poker site.

Some of the online-specific expenses have already been covered, such as the transaction fees and other costs associated with establishing a real-money poker account. Add to these a couple of traditional poker-playing expenses that have migrated from the real world to the virtual realm: tournament fees and the rake.

You've learned already that online cardrooms do not make their money by accepting wagers from players. Instead, their profits depend on charging a fee to all players for facilitating the games themselves. These fees come in two varieties, the first of which is known as the rake (or sometimes the table rake or the pot rake).

The rake is the amount of money that is collected by the house from each cash game pot (see figure). Each online poker room has different policies here, but they are stated up front and in fact are pretty similar. A typical rake is five percent of the pot, rounded to the nearest $.25, up to $3 per pot. Many online poker rooms have carefully calibrated rake charts that take into account the betting limits and the number of players in the game.The rake is often reduced when there are fewer players at the table; at some micro-limit games, there is no rake at all.

Read also

• Holdem: Manipulating Your Opponents
• Online Poker: Predicting Opponents and Recognizing Tells

You don't have to keep track of every single play at your table, so don't get carried away with your notes. You are, after all, a poker player first and a private detective second, so you should focus the vast majority of your efforts on playing the game. However, you do want to get in the habit of keeping your unblinking surveillance eye on unusual plays and unusual players.

As your tournament gets going or as you play a few orbits during a ring game, you should watch for patterns your opponents start to display. You can exploit patterns if you discover them. Here are a few areas to keep an eye on:

See also

• Online Poker: Predicting Opponents and Recognizing Tells
• Holdem: Manipulating Your Opponents

A tell is a hint that a player gives you as to what the strength of his hand may be - either through the way he bets, or the way he physically behaves around the table. Successfully interpreting the tells of your opponents will make a huge difference in any given session you have at a poker table.

It almost goes without saying that in order to watch for tells in the first place, you need to be watching people. This tends to be easiest to do when you're not playing in a hand, but rather just sitting back and taking it all in. Although the other players not in the hand are watching television or reading the sports pages, you should be keeping an eye on your opponents. See how they face each other and how they react as they win or lose, bet or fold.

See also General Poker Tips (Part I)

See also General Poker Tips (Part II)

Two Things That Separate the Good Player from the Bad Player:

• The difference in the game is how you play the bad hands and marginal hands. There's nothing new about this statement - it has been written many times before. Almost every player in the world knows what to do with the good hands. And if such hands are virtually "self-playable", then it follows that one secret of the game must reside in how the bad hands are played, and the marginal hands. It is what you do with these hands that makes the difference in the game (and what gives the better player his edge).
• The way a player responds when his game hits the skids is another thing that separates the good players from the bad. Every poker player will go into mind-numbing "free fall" at one time or another in his poker career. This is that well-known state where every single thing that can possibly can go wrong goes wrong. How the person responds to this is another indicator of expertise. Did you come away from this poker session with a $400 loss? Or an $1100 loss? When your game started going downhill, did you try to "play through it" using prudence and common sense? Or did you jam the accelerator to the floor and increase the magnitude of the disaster as you barreled downhill?

See also Holdem: Manipulating Your Opponents

There are 19,600 Hold'em flops. We'll list the statistical facts which accurately describe the composition of most flops:

A large disadvantage to playing poker in person, at a brick-and-mortar casino, is all of the distractions that are present to the player when he/she is trying to concentrate on their opponents and pick up on tells. Within one blink of an eye, your chance to pick up on an expression that your opponent did not want you to see can pass.

Fortunate for us online players, we do not have to deal with any of the classic confusion of normal poker. Even though you are not face to face with your opposition, it is much easier to tell what is going on in the minds of your opponents. Since the only constantly changing variable is the cards and your opponent, subtle signs and patterns are far simpler to pick up on if you know what you are looking for. These small tells are often overlooked by most online players, but they can let you know much more then you may have previously thought.

See also

• Holdem: Positional Concepts - Your Position
• Holdem: Positional Concepts - Your relative position

When we are betting, how large should our bets be? In No Limit Hold 'em we have a lot of options.
For a while, there was a standard mantra for bet sizing. The accepted standard was to make a pot-sized bet on the flop, between 2/3 and 3/4 pot on the turn, and between 1/2 and 2/3 on the river. The assumption behind these bet sizes, particularly the river, was that a smaller bet would be called more often than a larger bet. The classic "don't want to scare him away" thinking. This is dumb.

Most players make the decision whether or not to call, raise, or fold based off two main considerations: