Two Secrets for Gaining Confidence at Online Poker

Without confidence, you cannot be profitable at online poker.

This article is for intermediate to advanced online poker players who are looking for ways to gain confidence at online poker.

The secret of confidence is to obtain an informational edge over your opponents and this is what the two secrets provide.

After playing online poker for a short while, have you sometimes felt like some of the other players at the table knew the strength of your hands?

If you bet your strong hands, everyone else would fold to you. Or if you had a medium-strength hand in a heads-up situation, your opponent would bet aggressively, forcing you to a fold.

Confidence and Online Poker

This is a feeling that many online poker players have experienced at one time or another. One reason for this type of situation to arise is when your opponents use software aids designed to profile you. This put you at a certain disadvantage if you are not doing the same thing yourself.

There are many online poker aids to choose from and it is hard to know which ones are truly useful.

If you play online poker, the most powerful poker tools are the head up displays, or HUDs in short. HUDs are programs creating transparent overlays over the online poker tables where you sit with your opponents. These overlays display each player's betting style, aggression, looseness or any other stats from a large range of available choices.

There are two types of HUDs. The first kind uses a local database deployed on your computer while the second kind is based on a remote application using a very large universal hand histories database.

Local HUDs can be standalone programs or parts of integrated programs like PokerOffice or Hold'em Manager. These so-called poker tracker software collect all the hands that you play online and automatically store them into a local database. This data is then combed and massaged in order to find the playing patterns specific to each player whom you encountered in the past.

Whenever you play online poker, your HUD will access this information in real-time and display it over the table. This method provides you with the edge of knowing instantly the type of players you are playing with as soon as you sit down.

If you have been playing online poker, you know how important it is to know your opponents as all kinds of players rub elbows, from the tightest rocks to the most unpredictable maniacs. Many online poker players already know and use these HUD-type programs.

The first secret, which I reveal now, is that if you want to increase your confidence at online poker, you can achieve that by gaining an edge over your opponents. That edge is information. The way to gain this informational edge is by getting data mined observed hand histories. Hence you gain additional information about players that you never met before.

Gain Confidence in Online Poker

So the next time when you sit next to Tuna-Donka-K3 for instance, you may immediately know that he is a dangerous shark. Otherwise if you had absolutely no information about Tuna-Donka-K3 as this would be your first sitting next to him at the online table, it could have cost you a ton of money just to discover his betting tendencies.

Initially an unknown to you, you needed to play enough hands for the local database to get updated and to properly represent his player stats. The key is that by getting observed datamined hand histories you may have access to a description of the style of the other players, which you could not have obtained otherwise.

This is particularly useful when starting playing at a new poker room or when trying to move up to a new stake level. This way you will immediately know who the regulars are, as they will certainly appear in the database due to their frequent play.

Note that certain vendors sell full tilt and pokerstars datamined hand histories, even though these sites do not allow the practice. The good news is that it is illegal for the poker rooms to scan your private computer information in order to detect the specific files containing the bulk hand histories. So it is completely safe for you to get as many hand histories as you want. Some players buy millions of them.

The first secret is thus a method for improving your local poker tracker database by adding observed hand histories, if you currently use such a poker tracker software or if you are planning on using one. In the same category of poker aids, and this is my second secret, there is a unique tool that is an advanced HUD. This online poker product brings the poker information game to the next level.

This tool is called poker-edge. Poker-edge collects millions of online poker hands 24/7 thanks to its army of networked computers whose sole task is to connect to hundreds of online poker rooms in order to record hand histories. This massive data mining application is then used to feed into a very potent HUD. I use the word massive because millions of online poker players are profiled within this colossal database and this is what makes it unique.

The benefit is that it does not matter at which poker room or at what stakes you are playing, as pokeredge will have data about your opponents no matter what. Plus you do not need to maintain a local poker tracker system or to buy hand histories. All the background work is done automatically for you and you only need to launch poker-edge before you start playing.

Purchasing bulk hand histories or using pokeredge both offer similar advantages, that is to say gaining additional knowledge about your future opponents. The difference is that poker-edge players' stats are very large and include information about millions of online poker players. Whenever and wherever you sit at an online poker table, you will know instantly the playing style of most of your adversaries, especially the regulars who are the most dangerous players.

It is up to you to choose either poker-edge remote HUD or an enhanced local poker database. But if you fail to take action after gaining knowledge of the two secrets for gaining confidence at online poker, then you are sure to wonder at times "Why does it feels like my opponents know the strength of my hands. But how come I have no idea about theirs?"