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In the good old days then players were pretty low on sophistication and even the best players were nowhere near as good as the best players of today. An analogy could be made with say Snooker where the best players in say 1980 would be a long way behind the best players of today in 2012. The game has simply evolved and poker has gone the same way. So this means that the players who were at the top years ago either had to re-tool their weaponry or they simply fell by the wayside.

The best players today simply understand the game far more deeply and game theory has been used to devastating effect. So the best players know what your ranges are far more accurately and they are better bankrolled. So don’t even think about trying to push them around because they will have the bankroll and the sophistication to make calls against you that other players wouldn’t. Or they will re-bluff you when other players wouldn’t and trying to be aggressive against strong players is simply placing more money into the centre of the table where they can gain access to it.

So the increasing average level of sophistication in poker presents a serious hurdle for any player and poker suddenly no longer is a battle between who can play their hands well because all reasonable players can do that. Suddenly you are having to defend yourself against high level analysis of your game and if you cannot handle that fight then you are better off sticking to either full ring or lower levels or both.

In online poker then I believe that it is crucial to be able to do three things in order to be able to make money. The first is to educate yourself to be a good poker player. This in itself isn’t necessarily good enough because you may be sitting in games where either your opponents are as equally skilled as you or are not far behind you which essentially means that any value is thin. When your edge is small then variance increases and with it the sample size that is required to ensure profits.

So becoming a “good” player is only part of the equation and the second part of the equation is to make use of those skills at the appropriate level of play. In the modern online game then that level is usually far lower than what many people think as the average skill level is much higher these days. This is why multi-tabling is a skill that I feel needs to be exercised to its fullest possible potential.

Being able to play 12 tables is important because it allows you to be able to play at a much lower level. Playing 12 tables at NL25 is actually placing $300 into circulation and $600 at NL50 and $1200 at NL100. This is how you need to view it but that is still enough action to make a good earn rate. However I believe that you also need to devise a style that is not in common usage to really maximise your potential.

Spinning money up is the practice of taking a much smaller amount of money and then gambling with it and trying to turn it into something much larger. I have done this many times and my own personal record is to turn $100 into $8000 although I did do a poker bankroll challenge and turned $100 into $50,000 but that wasn’t quite the same thing. Spin ups usually are rapid and violent and involve risk. For example the $100 into $8000 I did within about two days or so.

However that was only one success story out of many that were failures. Part of the problem with spinning money up is it is often difficult to know when to stop. For example starting with $100 and making it $200 would be more than enough for most people. A quick $100 gain is not to be sneezed at but I do feel that the entire process is destructive long term.

It simply isn’t good gambling practice not to exercise strict bankroll management whatever field of gambling that you happen to be in. Sooner or later if you continue to be exercising poor bankroll control then variance will simply wipe you out. It really takes someone to be experiencing luck well into the third standard deviation or more to be able to make huge amounts of money spinning up. The rest of us on the other hand fall within normal boundaries and either win small amounts of do our money in.

It is looking increasingly likely that French businessman Bernard Tapie will launch a successful bid to re-float Full Tilt Poker. The projected $185 million dollars that he will need to repay all of the players may be the stumbling block though. However it is a step that I believe is necessary if the site is to repair its badly damaged reputation. I think if all of the players got their money back then most would stay with the site…….I know that I would.

Poker players can be a very fickle bunch although I would imagine that a lot of the players would withdraw a significant percentage of their bankroll straight away as a safeguard. I can well imagine at least $50 million being withdrawn within a very short space of time. However time is a great healer and I see no long term reason for Full Tilt Poker to be successful once again.

Let’s face it, all of the new players who are coming into the game will be unaware of the troubles at FTP and so they will not even know what happened in 2011 and Black Friday. With the database of players that they have at their disposal then they should make a success of it if it is run right and by the right people. I am pretty confident that FTP will re-launch in some capacity and be successful once again. It may take some time to repair the damaged reputation but with enough work then it can be done.

One of the best ways to make sure that you make money playing online poker is to simply select levels below the ones that you know that you can beat. For example let us say that you have never played NL50 before, if you haven’t then what makes you so certain that you can beat this level? Because if you can’t then not only are you going to lose money but you are also going to lose the earning potential that the lost money could have made you. My motto is that it is better to make $10/hr lifetime than shoot for $50/hr and it blow up in your face.

Do not get me wrong here; in no way am I advocating that all players play low levels. If that were the case then nobody would ever move up. What I am saying though is that for players with little experience then the entire process has to be managed professionally. If you can beat the NL50 level then you will crush the NL10 level in all likelihood and be up at NL50 within a very short space of time anyway without having taken the risk.

I have known players personally who started out in online poker playing much too high and who then lost money with it deterring them and scaring them from playing poker any further. So choosing your level is critical and you can be more successful than players higher up who have not found or are not playing at their optimal playing level.

The evolution of a blackjack player runs along very similar lines to the evolution of a poker player. There begins a period of ignorance where the player doesn’t actually know anything and this is what I call the first stage. Millions of players all over the world never pass through this stage and are restricted to playing blackjack in ignorance. The more inquisitive or simply the more interested players may accidentally hear about blackjack strategy and then look to educate themselves further.

My own personal story involved working inside a casino for nearly nine years and accidentally stumbling on a blackjack book inside my local library. This made me realise that there were sophisticated strategies available that could get the player an edge over the game and after that then I set about the task of reading everything that I could get my hands on about blackjack. Then with each passing book and with each nugget of knowledge comes the building blocks of expertise.

However knowledge of something isn’t always enough and my first venture into playing blackjack was done at relatively low stakes until I found a financial backer that was willing to supply me with enough money to attack the games at a fair level. But the evolutionary part of the process is really only ever complete when a player realises that to beat the game on a fairly regular basis is actually very difficult. Simply finding enough action to make meaningful money is difficult in itself.

I was having a discussion the other day about blackjack with someone who thought that they knew it all. You may know the type; they probably have that kind of mind set about most things and are extremely opinionated. They were of the opinion that you could use intuition to play blackjack against the dealer based on what cards had gone before. This may have some logic as card counting principles work that way but it certainly cannot be even remotely correct in online blackjack.

In that game with sites using random number generators then accurate playing decisions are important. These decisions are calculated by computer and have been well known for years. But yet people simply cannot get their heads around probabilities rather than certainties. If they take a card on 16 vs 10 when they normally stand and bust three hands in a row then they cannot comprehend that any decision can be correct other than standing.

Basic strategy in blackjack is a bit like placing coloured balls into a bag. If there are 100 balls and 51 are white and 49 are black and I asked you to pick the colour that was most likely to be the winning ball then you would choose white. This 51-49 edge dictates that it is the mathematically correct choice. But yet it is still only one ball away from being 50-50 and we could easily find five or six black balls being pulled out of the bag on the trot. The problem is though with blackjack is that seeing what the proper play is isn’t as straight forward and is why many people fail to believe in basic strategy.

I have often said that to build a poker career needs to be done from the bottom upwards and then to accept that your earnings will reach a finite level. I think the vast majority of poker players need to accept this going in to make poker a career. Every single player who plays the game cannot be earning six figures or seven figures and especially in today’s modern climate.

However if playing poker is easier for you to do on a full time basis simply because you don’t have a job then you can actually make a go of it. But to succeed in this business I believe that any player needs to do two things at the outset in order to play the game as a job. Firstly you need to educate yourself and that will be a fairly intense learning curve lasting several months.

Secondly the key then is to play lower than you may actually want to do with all that new found knowledge. I would start in the $10 no limit games because these levels are low enough to do really well at. The biggest winners at these levels make around 10ptbb/100 hands and if you can so that then you are making $2/100 hands over the long haul.

The third piece of the puzzle involves learning how to play more and more tables but this may mean tweaking your style and playing tighter. If you can play ten tables and keep the same earn rate then you should be nearing $20/hour. While this is not mega money, it does represent $40,000/year playing full time and that is a pretty solid base to start from.

Any solid player can make money in online poker just by lowering their estimates of just how much they can make. For example playing $10 no limit games at full ring would in my opinion produce an earn rate of around 10ptbb/100 which would be $2/100 hands in $0.05-$0.10 games. Now if you played full ring then it really wouldn’t be difficult to play ten tables and see around 750 hands per hour. So $15/hour could be achieved at this level and more on top if you include rewards and rakeback.

It doesn’t take much for a cash game player to make $20/hour these days and for a twenty hour working week then that is $400/week simply playing nothing more than $10 no limit hold’em. That compounds to a $20,000 per year income just playing NL10. So there isn’t any need to play higher or all that much higher if you don’t need to. At the end of the day then poker sites spend a vast amount of money promoting themselves and attracting new blood to the site. So the lower that you play then the more of this new blood you will encounter.

So there is every reason to stay at lower levels and if the better players want to move up then that is great because they make it easier for you to get the fish money. I think the NL50 and NL100 are tough levels these days but a player can do well in games at around the $20 or $25 levels with good solid poker.

Certainty is very alluring for sure, we all like things to be certain. We like life to be certain and most people do not like change. When it comes to betting then what better feeling is there to be on some “sure thing”. The same principle applies in how some people want to make money at poker. They all want to win big or to have a very high hourly rate but few players are prepared to take the necessary risks in order to achieve it.

To achieve a much better hourly rate in poker then you must drag yourself away from short term certainty. Players who are rocks and who play for the nuts rarely win big in cash games and especially in today’s modern environment where players are much stronger and more knowledgeable about the games. So this moves us on to variance because without variance then there really can be no significant earn rate. Let us look at a coin flip as an example.

Imagine if you could get someone to flip coins with you for money. You win $1.50 every time you guess correctly while they win $1.00 every time that they guess right. You flip coins 200 times per hour and so in an average hour then your opponent will win 100 x $1 while you win 100 x $1.50. So after an average hour then you are ahead by $50 and so your hourly rate is $50/hour.

However you will lose 50% of the time and even go on some long losing runs. If you wanted to inject certainty into the equation in that you won regardless of whether it was heads or tails or you had knowledge about the result that your opponent did not have then they would either not play with you or stop playing after a very short space of time……the end result being that you don’t make $50/hr.