There’s a lot of advantages to online play versus brick and mortar, but none more profitable than all the information that you can have at your fingertips augmented by the information that others provide during play.

First and foremost, before sitting down to play, you’ve got to be prepared. Every serious player should sign up for an account on thepokerdb.com and keep a browser window open next to your poker screen. I’m in no way affiliated with thepokerdb.com except for having an account on there myself, but I have found it so useful that I don’t hesitate to laud its praises to anyone who will listen. It keeps a record of all the multi-table cash tournament results from PokerStars.com, searchable by screen name (and they’re in the process of adding results from other major sites as well). (more…)

If you’ve played any amount of online poker, you’ve undoubtedly come across conspiracy theorists who claim that the websites you’re playing on are rigged. Some will try to convince you that if you cash out too much money from your account, the site will penalize you by dealing you bad hands and bad beats. Others will tell you tales of supposedly rigged “action flops” designed to get good players to pump money into pots with solid hands, only to leave plenty of outs for fishy callers to suck out (the implication being that it’s more profitable for a site to reward weak players to keep them playing rather than letting the better players beat them into submission, never to return). Then, of course, there are those hands where multiple players are dealt pocket pairs and everybody thinks the system has got to be suspect. What do I think? All these conspiracy theories are just a bunch of nonsense invented by players who are either inexperienced or delusional. (more…)