Introduction

This is the first part of an article series called poker From Scratch (PFS), where I will discuss fundamental poker skills with focus on limit Hold'em (LHE). First, some words abut the background for this series:

I've played poker online since December 2004. Since then I've systematically grinded my way up from the micro limit LHE full ring games (i started at $0.25- 0.50) to the 6-max middle limits ($10-20 to $20-40), and also the 6-max NL middle limits (NL$400 to NL$1000).During this time I've seen many new players come, stick around for a while and disappear. And I've seen many others get stuck at the micro and low limits, grinding away without winning much, and without improving much.

Since the technical skills required to consistently beat the small stakes are not difficult to learn, these players are probably held back by a lack of nontechnical skills, such as discipline, bankroll management and tilt control. This has made me think about how I would get a new student of the game started, if someone came to me and asked for advice. Thus, the idea for this article series was born.

The target audience for this series is first and foremost players who:

• Want to get started with online poker, and who are looking for a practical guide with advice on how to beat small stakes.
  
• Have experience from small stakes, but have problems winning and/or developing their game further.
  
• Need to work on nontechnical skills such as discipline, bankroll management and tilt control.
  
• Are looking for ideas/inspiration/motivation for defining new goals and working towards achieveing them.
  

What I will try to do in these articles is to take the readers with me on a "poker journey", where we start by forgetting most of what we already know (or think we know) about the game. Then we begin with the basic poker skills, and as we progress we'll gradually add new layers of knowledge and skill. Our first goal is to develop a solid 6-max LHE game, but our path is not 100% determined, and it's possible we will get into NL later.

In order to show how the concepts we discuss are used in practice, I will set aside a separate bankroll for this article series, and grind hands online to generate data, hand examples and interesting topics for discussion. I've chosen to start with LHE 6-max with a 1000 BB bankroll, and our goal is to climb steadily through the limits with conservative bankroll management. Records and statistics will be kept in the separate article "poker From Scratch - Records".

I choose to begin the poker journey at the micro limit $0.25-0.50. This as a compromise between starting in the least expensive way (it's possible to start as low as $0.01-0.02), and quickly reachng a level where we can actually make some money (grinding our way up from the bottom will take looong time). So $0.25-0.50 it is.

Our 1000 BB starting bankroll is then 1000*$0.50 = $500 for $0.25-0.05. Those who want to follow this project but haven't got $500 to start with, can of course start with 1000 BB at a lower level, and those who want to start at a higher level can do that. What's important is that we start with a 1000 BB bankroll, and that we will build it by playing disciplined, solid poker. After playing through a level we will analyze the results (using pokerTracker data and statistics) and discuss what we learned at this level, before we move on.

I plan to keep records in a separate article called "poker From Scratch - Results". We will analyze the results periodically, look at pokerTracker statistics and summarize what we have learned so far. It makes sense to do the first analysis when we're done with the micro limits ($0.50-1 and below), and the next when we are done with the low limits ($1-2 to $3-6).

The rest of this article will discuss the preparations an ambitious beginner should do before he/she starts playing seriously. Before we get started, here is some poker terminology we'll use:

Bankroll:
Capital that is used only for playing poker. This should be money you can afford to lose, and losing your bankroll should not have an impact on your private economy. Bankroll size for fixed limit games is measured in big bets, and several hundred big bets is necessary for a low risk of ruin.

Big bet (BB):
A big bet in a fixed limit game is twice the size of the big blind. For example, if you're playing $0.25-0.50, one big bet is 2($0.25) = $0.50. So a $500 bankroll is 1000 BB for $0.25-0.50 (very safe), 500 BB for $050-1 (pretty safe), and 250 BB for $1-2 (risky).

Rake:
The poker sites make money by charging a small fee every time a hand is played. This fee is called "rake" and is automatically taken out of the pot once it reaches a certain size. The bigger the pot, the more rake is taken, up to a certain threshold (the rake is commonly capped at $3). The rake can remove as much as 5% of the pot at the lower limits, and this effect can can easily turn a marginal winner into a loser. At higher limits the rake removes proportionally less money from the pot, but it's impact is still significant.

bonus:
You can get a bonus deal at many poker sites. This means you get paid back a certain percentage of the rake you generate, for example 30%. bonus is usually paid out once per month, and in many places directly into your poker account.

Winrate:
How fast you win. We measure winrate in big bets per 100 hands (BB/100). If you win 2 BB/100 (a solid LHE winrate) at $0.25-0.50, you will make $1 per 100 hands on average (although the profit curve will be swingy).

What we need before we get started

1. Motivation
Before you can even think abut making good money from poker, you have to know that this is something you want, and you have to enjoy playing poker. Rising through the limits takes dedication and hard work, and you will meet adversity on the way. The luck element in poker will cause frustrating periods where you either lose for a long time, or where you play and play without getting anywhere.

In order to deal with adversity you have to know that:

- This is something I want to do!
- Variance and swings are part of the game.
- Correct play will take the money (eventually).

If it becomes a chore to sit down and play, then having poker as a regular income stream is probably not for you. If this is the case, you shold not think about making money, and rather play because you enjoy it. Be honest with yourself before you embark on a poker career, and you will save yourself a lot of frustration later.

2. A Bankroll
Money begets money, and to make money you have to spend money. Winning poker is about investing in profitable situations where the expected return is greater than your investment. You should view your bankroll as a tool that enables you to exploit profitable investment opportunities that come up at the poker table. Therefore, it's imperative that you protect your bankroll, since losing it leaves you unable to capitalize on future situations (which means you not only loose the bankroll, but also future income). Sloppy bankroll management is a common error among beginning players, so let's look closer at this and show why a big bankroll is necessary.

We will use a 1000 BB bankroll to keep our risk of ruin very low. Some will think this is too much, especially for small stakes, but when it comes to this I'm very conservative. We will be playing 6-max, which is a poker form with high variance, and downswings of several hundred big bets can happen.

Variance is a measure of statistical dispersion, which in plain English means it is a measure of how much our observed results will deviate from the expected (average) results. A skilled small stakes 6-max player can expect to beat the games for 2 BB/100 or more without too much difficulty. Over a large number of hands this player's profits will grow proportionally with the number of hands played, and the average growth rate is 2 BB/100. But this does not mean he can sit down, play 100 hands and expect to leave the table with 2 BB more than he started with.

The graph below shows a simulation of a profit curve for a 2 BB/100 winner over 500,000 hands. The profit grows almost linearly with the number of hands played, and we see that our Hero has made about 10,000 BB, which is the expected total profit for a 2 BB/100 winner over 500,000 hands (2 x 500,000/100 = 10,000).

Fig 1: A simulation of 2 BB/100 over 500,000 hands

But look what happens when we zoom in on the first 10,000 hands on the graph:

Fig 2: A simulation of 2 BB/10 over 10,000 hands

We observe that our Hero started well and won 200 BB over the first 5000 hands. Then he lost back about 125 BB of his profits before he started climbing back again. This illustrates what variance does to your results. Your profit for a session, a day or a week can be very different from your expected (average) results. Hero's expected result for the first 10,000 hands was 200 BB, but he netted only half of this (but he made it back later).

The luck factor in poker causes variance, and variance makes it necessary to play with a bankroll that is big enough to survive short term fluctuations. We need enough to prevent us from going broke (a disaster), and to prevent losing so much that we have to move back down to a smaller limit to rebuild our bankroll (this delays our progress). Downswings come in all sizes, and although swings of 300 BB or more are rare, they do happen, so we will stick to a conservative bankroll management scheme of 1000 BB.

So we start with a bankroll that can handle (almost) anything variance throws our way. We will probably never have to move down in limits after moving up, and a big bankroll also makes for less stress during losing stretches. Before we move on I want to (again) point out that your poker bankroll should be completely separated from the rest of your economy. You can cash out your profits any time you want (but leaving the bankroll at minimum 1000 BBB), but remember that cashouts slow down the building process.

4. poker account(s) with bonus
The choice of poker site is of less importance at the micro and low limits, since the quality of the small stakes player pool is mostly the same everywhere. But it's your responsibility to choose a site that is secure. And if you plan to play at only one site, you should make sure there are enough games avaliable at the limits you will play (usually not a problem at the small stakes).

If you keep your bankroll at a big gaming company like pokerStars, Full Tilt or Partypoker, you should be able to sleep well at night. But as the bankroll grows, it's a good idea to regularly transfer parts of it to your bank account as a security measure.

When you have found a poker site you like, look into the possibilities for bonus deals. The rake can reduce your winrate with as much as 2 BB/100 at the small stakes, and this effect is particulary strong for 6-max games. A bonus deal that gives you back 30%, or thereabouts, will give a signigfican boost to your bankroll building.

It's important that you look for the best bonus deals before you sign up! New players sometimes register online accounts without bonus because they don't know bonus exists, and this is the same as throwing money out the window. Note that some sites don't allow bonus, but make sure you get a good deal on those sites that do allow it.

5. NETeller (or similar) account
Neteller is an online payment service that you can use to move money between your bank account and your online poker accounts (and between your online accounts).

When I want to move money online, I deposit to my NETeller account, and then I deposit into my poker account with NETeller. When I want to cash out, I transfer money from the poker account to NETeller, and then from NETeller to my bank account. Fast and simple.

Moving money between poker sites via NETeller is free of charge, and cashing our to your bank account (wire transfer) only costs $1, but note that the credit card deposit fee is very high (3.9%). Therefore, you should use bank transfer deposits (takes a few days, but NETeller does not charge you for this) or keep a moderate amount on your NETeller accont at all times. Then you should rarely need to deposit (if you're a winning player, that is).

When your NETeller (or similar) account is registered and ready to use, move your bankroll online, and you're good to go.

6. pokertracker and PA Hud
pokertracker.com/>pokerTracker (PT) is a commercial software package that will keep track of both your own and your opponents' play. The program imports your online hand histories into a database, and keeps track of where you played, when you played and what you won or lost, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.

If you want to analyse your own play, you can pull out every single hand you've played, and you can search for specific situations (for example, playing aces from the big blind) using PT's filtering options. This makes it possible to analyse your own play in detail, and you can do the same thing for your opponents (the hands you play against them gives you data on their play). How to get started using pokerTracker is a topic for a separate article, so here I'll simply say: This is something you need.

A PT licence costs $55 at the time of writing.

pokeracesoftware.com/>Pa Hud (pokerAce Heads Up Display) is a pokerTracker add-on that pulls out statistics for your opponents from the PT database, and displays them on the table while you play (look at the the screenshots pokeracesoftware.com/hud/screenshots.php>the PA HUd online tutorial to see how this works).

The use of pokerTracker + PA Hud while playing will be discussed in future articles. For now you should know that having pokerTracker statistics for your opponents available while you play will enable you to play better against them. This information is (in principle) the same as what you would have without using the software, but the software stores all this data for you (i.e. the hand histories), then extracts useful information from the data and displays this information on the screen for you to see and use.

A PA Hud licence costs $25 at the time of writing.

An alternative to pokerTracker is pokeroffice.com/>pokerOffice, but since I don't have any experience with this software, I will not discuss it here.

Going back to school

The majority of high stakes online winners have one thing in common: They have spent a lot of time working on improving their game. Since we want to get to where they are (at least closer to that than we are now), we have to work on our game too. Getting better at poker is a continuous process, and you should be prepared to spend time studying the game, studying your opponents and analysing your own play.

Different people learn in different ways, but I have always subscribed to the good old-fashioned method of systematic study and clear, logical thinking. The three most important components of my own learning process have been:

1. Literature
There is a vast amount of poker literature on the market, but fortunately you only need a few good books, and most of them are published by the company TwoPlusTwo. Here are some LHE books that any serious student of the game should own:

The Theory of poker (Sklansky):
By many held to be the most important poker book ever written. It's an advanced book that discusses concepts that are common for all poker forms.

Small Stakes Hold'em (Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth):
The best introduction to fixed limit Hold'em in my opinion. This is a practical text with a thorough treatment of pot odds, outs, preflop and postflop play. The emphasis is on exploiting the mistakes made by players who play too many hands and go too far with them (loose and bad players), and this is an opponent type we'll meet often at the online small stakes tables.

Hold'em poker for Advanced Players (Sklansky/Malmuth):
Before Small Stakes Hold'em was published, this was the book for LHE, and it's still essential reading. Many advanced topics are discussed here.

Middle Limit Holdem poker (Ciaffone/Brier):
A combination of text book and quiz book. The authors discuss the different phases of the game (pre-flop, flop, turn river) in separate chapters with a collection of quizzes after each chapter. You will benefit from trying to solve the problems on your own before you study the authors' solution. When you work through the problems, focus on the procedure for getting to the answer (the factors we consider, and the logic we use), and how to solve a poker problem analyticaly.

How Good is Your Limit Hold'em? (Jacobs):
A quiz book with detailed solutions and discussions after each exercise.

Real poker II: The Play of Hands (Cooke):
A collection of Cooke's best essays from Cardplayer Magazine. In each essay Cooke discusses a poker situation, and explains how he is thinking at the table.

Winning in Tough Hold'em Games (Grudzien/Herzog):
This book is co-authored by one of the biggest online LHE winners, Nick ”Stoxtrader” Grudzien, who plays the nosebleed stakes ($300-600 and $500-1000). This is the most advanced book on shorthanded LHE play in existence, and you should study it thoroughly. It's not an easy book for a beginner, but buy it anyway and keep it ready for when you are ready to read it.

If you're on a limited budget, I recommend you buy "Small Stakes Hold'em" first. At any rate this should be the first book you read in my opinion. Note that most of the LHE literature discusses full ring (10- and 9-handed) play, and before "Winning in Tough Hold'em games" there were no books devoted exclusively to short-handed play. Since we will be playing 6-max, and since many of your future opponents will have read this book, you should read it too.

I've bought and read most of the good poker literature on the market, and I have 80+ books in my "poker library". My philosophy has been (borrowed from David Sklansky): You can't learn everything from books, but this is no excuse for not learning those things that can be learned from books. You should read, think, play, and repeat the process. Good poker books catalyse your own thinking (they give you ideas to think about) and there's always some new insight waiting to be discovered.

2. Online forums and coaching sites
Four big and well known online communities that I use regularly:

- TwoPlusTwo
- poker.com/>Stoxpoker
- Cardrunners
- DeucesCracked

TwoPlusTwo has long been the biggest online poker forum, and it's free. Many of the famous online high stakes players (Stoxtrader, TheBryce, Schneids, Sbrugby just to mention a few) have posted there, and you can learn a ton by reading hand discussions and follow the thought processes of players more experienced than you. You should also try to post hands yourself. If the problem is interesting and well presented, you might get a good disussion going.

Stoxpoker is a younger and smaller site, but it's growing fast, and the signal/noise ratio is excellent. This is a subscription site. For a 69 sign up fee + $20/month you get full access to the forums and to 250+ (at the time of writing) coaching videos (LHE, NL, PLO, Razz and tournament play). Seeing a top player play while you listen to him explaning his thought processes has educational value far beyond the subscription price.

Cardrunners is known as the NL site (they also have PLO and tournament content), but they have recently started to offer high quality LHE content. Well known online players like Green Plastic, Sbrugby, Stinger, Schneids (and many more) produce videos, and they have a big and active forum. This is a subscription site ($100 sign up fee + $25/month).

DeucesCracked is a subscription site ($29/month) with forums and coaching videos, mostly NL and LHE content (and both are excellent). They also offer personal coaching for a wide range of skill levels.

Spending a few tens of dollars per month on a video subscription service (or two) is something I recommend, and I also recommend making a habit out of browsing and participating in quality poker forums. The understanding of poker concepts develops over time by applying them and thinking about them. Participating in discussions and watching videos of good players will accelerate this process.

3. Analyzing your own game
Improving as a poker player can be seen as a cyclical process:

- Find your biggest "leak" (big and frequent mistake).
- Eliminate it from yor game.
- Repeat the process.

This is not quite as simple as it may seem, since you can't eliminate your leaks if you don't know what they are. This is one reason why getting input from others is important (see the discussion about poker forums and coaching sites above).

Analysing your own game is a very important part of the poker learning process, and this is something you should do regularly. We will talk more about this in future articles, but you should make a habit of going through your hands after each session (using the pokerTracker replay function), and analyse the most important ones (typically hands where big pots were won or lost). Step critically through the hands and think through your decisions at every desicion point. If you discover mistakes, think about whether this was a one time mistake, or if it points to a systematic flaw in your game.

I keep a log of interesting hands, and I usually update it daily. I typically find 2-3 interesting hands per day, and I copy/paste the hand histories into the log and write comments. These hands are also good candidates for posting hand problems in online forums.

NB! Don't let the outcome of the hand influence your judgment. Be honest with yourself and evaluate the quality of your decisions independently of whether you won or lost the hand.

Summary

We have taken the first step towards a (hopefully) rewarding poker career, and we have set ourselves up with motivation, a bankroll, online poker account(s) with bonus, software tools and essential literature.

Future articles will be more techincal, but we will also discuss in more detail some of the things we touched upon here (e.g. pokerTracker/PA HUd, and analysing your own game). We'll also spend time on the psychological aspect of the game, and discuss discipline (or lack thereof), tilt, fear of losing, and illusions/denial. These factors can be just as important for your bottom line as your techincal skills (or even more).

In Part 2 we'll start developing a solid LHE 6-max strategy, designed to beat the small stakes online games. We will discuss preflop play, simple use of pokerTracker/PA Hud and record keeping.

Good luck!
Bugs