The Importance of Table Selection in online poker | Online Poker Bonus

With the ageing of the online poker world, it is getting harder and harder to win in online poker. With the vast amount of learning sources that the internet provides, even the bad players starting to get better and the average players starting to get good. One way to deal with this is better table selection. In this article we will describe what we see as a ‘good table’.

The first thing to notice when we are going to sit down at a poker table is the stack sizes. When there are players at the table that are not full stacked (i.e. less than 100 big blinds) you can be pretty certain that these are not the best players. A good player always wants to sit down with a full stack to maximize his edge. There is one exception though: the professional short stacks. These days you see a lot of them at various stakes. They sit down with the minimum buy-in and the try to abuse the mistakes a lot of players make. If a player for example opens too many hands, the short stack will re-raise all in with a wide range of hands. In general, you don’t want to have too many of these players at your table. For example, it is also harder to play a lot of hands against the big fish of the table when there is a professional short stack on your left who picks up on this and starts re-raising you light.

Look at the statistics of the table you want to sit down at. In the poker lobby you can always see these table stats: % players per flop, average pot size and hands per hour.

-% Players per flop: You want to choose a table with a high % of players who see the flop. Bad players in general want to play too many hands, so the higher this percentage, the better.

-Average pot size: With this statistic you have to ask yourself what you prefer. If you are a tight player, you want a high average pot size so that the other players are making the action and you can sit back and wait for the better hands. If you are an aggressive player, you may prefer a lower average pot size. In this case, players are more hesitant to play big pots and you may want to punish them by making large bets and raises to run them over. If there are bad players at the table it is generally better to have a bigger average pot size. Bad players make more mistakes, so you want to have the pots bigger to make as much money as possible from their mistakes.

-Hands per hour: this statistic is not that important because it’s always fast changing. However, as a general rule you want as many hands per hour, because as a winning player you want to play as many hands as possible.

Conclusion

Don’t just sit down at a table. Study every table you want to sit at and look at the statistics we mentioned in this article. It doesn’t have to take long and you will win back the lost time easily!

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