However, because no-limit hold’em is currently the most popular variation of poker, it will be the focus of this study guide. With all this out of the way, let’s move on and get back to the lessons. We’ll start this section of the study guide with a look at the basics, including some simple betting concepts: Reading the Board. Read this Miscellaneous Study Guide and over 89,000 other research documents. How to Win online Poker. Do NOT Play Poker Online until you learn: - How to cheat by knowing others' cards - How to spot.

Small stakes online poker tournaments are fantastic fun. They can be frustrating at times — I’ll give you that — but for the most part, it is difficult not to enjoy yourself while competing in one.

They are also potentially lucrative beasts, not least because they tend to attract players in droves. On some sites — in particular PokerStars — tournaments with buy-ins as small as $1-$10 may see several thousand hopefuls take to the virtual felt in the hope of turning their tiny investments into much more meaningful sums.

As you can imagine, the majority of these huge fields are populated with recreational players and therefore the standard of play is, as a rule, very poor. That’s not to say navigating your way through the crowds and winning one of these things is an easy task, because it isn’t. In other words, don’t think you’re going to deposit $200 online, play a bunch of these tournaments, and suddenly be rolling in cash like Scrooge McDuck in Ducktails. It’s not going to happen.

What is going to happen, or what should happen, is that you continue reading this article — and others you find in the Strategy section — and once you’ve armed yourself with the weapons of knowledge, you go out there and apply that learning to do more than just enjoy these tournaments, but to profit from them as well.

Here are five tips designed to help you both prepare for and find success in small stakes online tourneys.

1. Be Prepared For a Long Session

Most of these low buy-in, big field tournaments take several hours to complete, so you need to be prepared to play for a long time. Be patient as always, but also be ready for a lengthy grind should you go deep in the event.

I’ve been fortunate enough to chop the $3.30 rebuy on PokerStars twice. On both occasions the tournament started at around 7:00 p.m and we finished at 6:30 a.m. This is all well and good if you are a poker pro who can sleep the next day, but you have to take into consideration work commitments if you have a job. Know what you’re potentially getting yourself into when registering for these events.

That said, the tournaments available at WSOP Social Poker do not take hours to complete, making them great to play when you have a little spare time from the daily grind.

2. Be Prepared For Some Crazy Swings

The variance in small stakes poker tournaments is huge because of the sheer number of opponents you have to get through and the fact many of these opponents can be nearly impossible to put on a hand. Also of significance when playing against a large field full of recreational players is the possibility of players calling your raises — even your all-in ones — with some ridiculous holdings, adding further to the unpredictability of outcomes.

While this situation is very favorable in the long run, over the short term you can often find yourself running worse than you ever thought possible. Make sure therefore you have an ample bankroll to fall back on when times are hard — something in the range of 200-300 times of your average buy-in (I’d recommend).

Hone Your Tournament Skills For Free!

Hone your poker tournament skills for free at the WSOP Social Poker site. Create your free account via PokerNews, head to the tournament tables and play for some impressive prizes including virtual WSOP bracelets!

Play Now

3. Keep it Simple and Value Bet Your Hands to the Max

DO NOT try to run an elaborate bluff at any stage of the tournament because it will only lead to tears of sorrow. A lot of your opponents only care what cards they have in their hand and won’t realize from your actions that you’re representing a specific hand — they just want to get to showdown and hopefully win.

More often than not in these events you will want to keep matters simple, playing “ABC poker” and letting the cards fall how they will.

Along the same lines, make sure you get the maximum value from your made hands. Higher-stakes tournament grinders may routinely fire 1/3 pot-sized bets at their opponents, but that’s because it is more difficult to get paid off at those stakes. At the lower end of the spectrum, you can get away with betting more. Because so many of your opponents will love to call your bets, you may as well take advantage with your strong holdings.

4. Listen to the Betting / Prepare to Lay Down Some Big Hands

How often have you heard poker players bemoan their luck and come out with some rubbish such as “I can’t beat these donkeys, they always hit the nuts on the river.” What they don’t tell you is that “these donkeys” often play their hands in a manner that allows you to get away from pots should you need to.

For example, if a weak player has limp-called preflop, called the flop, called on the turn, and then leads into you on the river when the flush comes in, guess what? That player almost certainly has the flush. The same is often true for raises on the river. Even if the only hand that beats you is , if an obviously weak player raises you on the river, you have to consider that he or she probably has !

5. Don’t Worry About Playing a “Balanced Style”

If someone tells you that you have to play a “balanced style” of poker inlarge-field small stakes poker tournaments, laugh and walk away. While you have to do this higher up the poker food chain, you are highly unlikely to come up against the same players ever again in a field of 3,000-10,000 foes, so you can be as unbalanced as you wish.

That means not worrying so much about not revealing certain patterns with your play, such as always betting big with strong hands. While against stronger opponents you should balance your play by varying your bets and actions so as not to be read so easily, against large fields of less skilled opponents this isn’t as great of a concern.

Obviously, the five tips above are not all you need to be successful in small stakes online tourneys, but they should at least help you in your quest to turn a little into a lot!

_{This article was originally published on Feb. 14, 2017. Last update: Jun. 18, 2019.}

Finding a trustworthy room to play online poker can be a monumental burden. That's all the more true if you're just looking for a place to play poker for free. We've listed five of the best play-money poker sites to enjoy and help hone your skills.

• Tags

  tournament strategysmall stakesonline pokerPokerStarsPoker Rules

Good to Know Before MIT 15.S50 Begins

Poker / Texas Hold’em Rules

Obviously, you should know the ranking of the poker hands, and how cards are dealt in texas hold’em. Know the terms straight flush, four-of-a-kind (or quads), full house (or boat), flush, straight, three-of-a-kind, two-pair, pair, high card; know preflop, postflop, flop, turn, river.

Betting Rules

• You should know how betting in poker works. Understand the terms bet, raise, call, check, fold, and all-in. Check-raising means checking and then later raising in the same betting round.
• Know what a blind is. There will be a small blind and a big blind each hand.
• Know that preflop, the big blind is last to act. On each postflop betting round, the small blind is first to act, and the dealer is last to act. Know when a betting round ends (eg. if all players check, then the betting round ends).
• Other good terms to know for positions are cutoff (right of the dealer), hijack (right of the cutoff), under-the-gun (the person left of the big blind; first to act preflop).

Mathematical Concepts

In class we will run through an example to illustrate the terminology you should know.

• Suppose the pot has $500 in it, and your opponent bets another $250.
• You may call his $250, in which case cards are flipped over:
  • If your cards beat his, you win the whole pot of $500 + $250 (that he just put in) + $250 (that you just put in) = $1000. You profited $750 from this gamble.
  • If his cards beat yours, you get $0 back. You lost $250 from this gamble.
• Or, you can fold, resulting in a payoff of $0.
• In this example, we say that you are getting 3-to-1 odds to call. When you win, you profit 3 times what you risk losing.
• Suppose the probability that your cards beat his is 10%. Then your expectation for calling is 0.1(+750)+0.9(-250)=-150. By calling, you expect to lose $150 in the long run. Your expectation for folding is always $0. Therefore, you should fold, since your expectation for calling is negative.
• Suppose the probability that your cards beat his is 50%. Then your expectation for calling is 0.5(+750)+0.5(-250)=250. By calling, you expect to earn $250 in the long run. Therefore, you should call, since your expectation for calling is positive. If you were to play this game a large number of times, your average payoff per game would be $250, with 100% certainty. This is called the Law of Large Numbers.
• We say that a gamble has high variance if it takes a large number of trials to converge to the expected average payoff per game. A gamble has low variance if it converges quickly. In general, high variance means high risk, and high risk usually means higher reward, ie. higher expectation.

Book Recommendations

Miller, Ed, David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth. Small Stakes Holdem: Winning Big With Expert Play. Two Plus Two, 2004. ISBN: 978-1880685327. Only for limit hold’em, but still one of the classic books in poker and written by mathematicians.

Slightly outdated, but very good:

Online Poker For Money

• Harrington, Dan. Harrington on Hold 'em Expert Strategy for No Limit Tournaments, Vol. 1: Strategic Play. Two Plus Two, 2004. ISBN: 978-1880685334.
• Harrington, Dan. Harrington on Hold 'em Expert Strategy for No Limit Tournaments, Vol. 2: Endgame. Two Plus Two, 2005. ISBN: 978-1880685358.

Rodman, Blair, Lee Nelson, Steven Heston, and Phil Hllmuth, Jr. Kill Phil: The Fast Track to Success in No-Limit Hold 'em Poker Tournaments. Huntington Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1935396314.

Study Poker Online

Nelson, Lee, Tyson Steib, Steven Heston, Joe Hachem, and Bertrand Grospellier. Kill Everyone: Advanced Strategies for No-Limit Hold 'em Poker Tournaments and Sit-n-Go's. Huntington Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1935396307.

More entertaining than educational:
Hansen, Gus. Every Hand Revealed. Kensington Publishing Corp., 2008. ISBN: 978-0818407277. [Preview with Google Books]

Not that practical, but theoretically very interesting:
Chen, Bill and Jerrod Ankenman. The Mathematics of Poker. Conjelco, 2006. ISBN: 978-1886070257.

Nazarewicz, Pawel. Building a Bankroll. Pawel Nazarewicz, 2012. ISBN: 978-0615589886. Mostly for full ring cash games.

Welcome!

This is one of over 2,200 courses on OCW. Find materials for this course in the pages linked along the left.

MIT OpenCourseWare is a free & open publication of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.

No enrollment or registration. Freely browse and use OCW materials at your own pace. There's no signup, and no start or end dates.

Knowledge is your reward. Use OCW to guide your own life-long learning, or to teach others. We don't offer credit or certification for using OCW.

Smart Poker Study

Made for sharing. Download files for later. Send to friends and colleagues. Modify, remix, and reuse (just remember to cite OCW as the source.)

Free Online Poker Sites

Learn more at Get Started with MIT OpenCourseWare