Learn and discover all of the top strategies, tips, and tricks for making money while playing online poker.
What Is the Best Way to Make Money Playing Online Poker?
Many people begin playing online poker after hearing about the possibility of making online poker real money profit. Unfortunately for them, poker is not as simple as it appears!
We’ll give you the best strategies, tips, and tricks to help you make money playing online poker.
Online Poker Game Types
You can play two types of online poker games: tournaments and cash games.
Cash Games in Poker
A cash game is a poker game in which each chip represents a dollar amount. The poker game is played according to the rules of the specific variant, and players are free to come and go as they please. If a player loses all of their chips, they can re-enter the game. To cover the costs of running the table, the casino either takes a percentage of each pot called the ‘rake.’
Cash games are a great way to profit from online poker, but they do have some drawbacks; here are the pros and cons:
Pros
- Large number of tables – Cash games are a popular type of poker, and most major sites have games for a variety of stake levels running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- Flexibility – Unlike a tournament, you can spend as much or as little time as you want at the table, allowing you to play for a couple of hours without being locked into a 9-hour tournament.
- Low variance – The variance in cash games is much lower than in tournaments, so if you’re building your bankroll, you’ll notice that the upward trajectory is much smoother with fewer erratic swings.
Cons
- Tough games – As you increase the stakes, online cash games become extremely difficult to beat consistently.
- Inadequate game diversity – While the most popular games, such as Texas Hold’em, Omaha, and 6+, are well catered for, it can be difficult to find a cash game for more obscure variants.
- Tilt – If you have tilt issues, it’s easy to lose a lot of money in cash games because you can keep reloading your stack until you run out of money.
Tournaments of Poker
An online poker tournament is a competition in which players compete for a share of a prize pool. Each player pays an entry fee and receives a predetermined number of chips. The blind levels begin low and gradually increase throughout the tournament, and antes are added. As the tournament progresses, players are eliminated, and portions of the prize pool are distributed once 10-15% of the field remains. The tournament continues until one player has collected all of the chips and is declared the winner.
Online poker tournaments require a different skill set than cash games, but they can still be a lucrative way to make money online.
Pros
- Winning a poker tournament will provide you with a massive return on your investment, with the average tournament win being for 200-300 buy-ins and special events being even larger!
- A wide range of tournament structures and tournaments are available for a wide range of poker variants, so you’re sure to find a game that suits you.
- Dynamic Play – Because of the changing blind levels in tournament poker, you must constantly adjust your strategy on the fly, making for a more fun, dynamic game.
Cons
- Increased variance – Because you’re only expected to cash around 10-20% of the time and make a big score 1% or less of the time, tournaments have a lot of potential for a long downswing.
- Time commitment – When you enter a tournament, you must be available for the entire duration of the tournament, which is usually at least 5 hours.
- While dynamic play can make for a more interesting game, it makes tournament poker much more difficult to master.
- As you can see, both types have advantages and disadvantages, so you should play what you enjoy the most.
Profitable Poker Variants Online
While cash games and tournaments are distinct poker formats, both can be played with any poker variant:
Poker Texas Hold’em
Texas Hold’em is often referred to as the “Cadillac of poker,” and it is by far the most popular poker variant. Every day, thousands upon thousands of Texas Hold’em cash games and tournaments are held.
Texas Hold’em is the most studied of the popular games and has been heavily researched for the last 20 years, so the level at higher stakes is extremely difficult. However, new players are constantly learning, and there are still plenty of soft games to earn money in.
6+ Hold’em, short-deck
Short-deck is a relatively new addition to the poker scene, having gained mainstream traction in 2016. It is similar to Texas Hold’em, except that the cards 2, 3, 4, and 5 have been removed (hence the nickname 6+), and flushes beat full houses. Even in cash games, most short-deck games use an ante and double-ante structure rather than the traditional SB/BB structure.
Because it is the newest game, there is little known about how to beat it compared to a game like Texas Hold’em. Furthermore, because of how close equities run between hands, it is known for being an extremely risky game. There is a lot of money to be made in this game if you can develop a winning strategy.
Omaha
Omaha, specifically Pot Limit Omaha, was on the verge of overtaking Texas Hold’em in terms of popularity in the early 2010s. It is a flop game similar to Hold’em, but players are dealt four cards rather than two, and they must use two from their hand and three from the board.
With the extra cards, you’re encouraged to play a lot more hands preflop, making it a more risky game than Hold’em. This is another game that is difficult to solve due to the sheer number of preflop hand combinations, but if you know how to play, there are plenty of soft games to take advantage of.
General Methods for Increasing Online Poker Profits
Here are some strategy tips/advice to help you increase your table profits:
Bluff-catch with medium-strength hands
Medium-strength hands can be challenging to play. Do you want to bet them and risk being called by someone worse? Or do you check and risk your opponent making a stronger hand?
A good way to play a medium-strength hand like 2nd/3rd pair is as a bluff-catcher. By using these hands as bluff-catchers, you can profit from hands that would have folded to a bet otherwise. Choose hands that are too weak to value bet because these are the best candidates for bluff-catching.
3-Bet with your strongest hands
Many players, especially new players, overestimate the potential of trapping with strong hands preflop. They believe that by playing their AA and KK slowly, they can fool their opponents and win a large pot.
Pots are only as big as you make them, so when you have these strong preflop hands, you should take every opportunity to increase the size of the pot, including 3betting pre.
Let’s take a look at how two hands play out with and without a 3bet. Player A raises to $6 with his AJ, and Player B traps on the BTN with his KK. The blinds fold, and the flop pot is $15. J95 is the flop. Player A places a $10 bet, and Player B calls. Player B bets $25 on the turn, and Player A calls. Player A bets $50 on the river, and Player B calls as the backdoor flush comes in. In this scenario, Player B receives approximately $90 from Player A.
Now consider the same hand with a 3bet pre. Player B raises to $6, and Player A 3bets to $20, which Player B accepts. On the flop, the pot is now $49, and Player A bets $35 and is called. After that, Player A bets $100 on the turn and is called again. Player A bets $225 on the river, and even if Player B folds, they’ve made more money than the previous hand!
Purchase a Poker HUD
Purchasing and employing a poker HUD, such as Hold’em Manager, will benefit you both on and off the table. It will track your opponent’s tendencies on the table in real time and display that information on your table. You can then use this information to adjust your strategy based on how your opponents are playing.
For example, if you discover that your opponent folds 85% of the time to 3bets, you can begin to 3bet them more frequently and win more pots. Off the table, a HUD can help you find leaks in your own game by tracking all the hands you play. You can filter hands by situation and pot size to see where you’re making mistakes in specific situations, as well as look over hundreds of stats to see where your leaks are.
Avoiding Mistakes When Playing Online Poker for Money
Here are some things you should avoid doing at the table, both in cash games and tournaments. If you do any of these things, you are wasting your money!
Too Tight or Too Loose Playing
If you play too tight, you will miss out on profitable opportunities. Players who only play the best hands believe they are being clever, but they are actually costing themselves a lot of money by refusing to play speculative hands.
On the other hand, chasing big hands with weak holdings can cause you to lose all of your winnings and more. You need to find a happy medium where you’re not exclusively playing the nuts but also not going insane.
Betting the same amount on all possible outcomes
Pot management is a crucial poker skill to master, and knowing how to size best across multiple streets correctly can earn you a lot of money in the long run. If a player bets the same amount on every street, they will miss out on the chance to build a large pot by the river.
Player A, for example, flops the nuts against Player B, who is a calling station. On the flop, the pot is $10, and Player A bets $10 on each street. He wins $30 from Player B if he bets $10 on the flop, turn, and river. But what if Player A increases their bet sizes across the board?
Player A will now bet the size of the pot on each street: $10 on the flop, $30 on the turn, and $90 on the river. In this example, he wins $130 from Player B, which is more than four times what he won in the previous example!
Overprotecting Your Blinds
While it may be tempting to play a lot of hands from the blinds – after all, you’re getting a discount – doing so can cost you a lot of money. When you play hands in the blinds, you are automatically out of position to the rest of the table, making the hand much more difficult to play. Because of the discounted price, if you call with a lot of weak hands, you’ll end up checking/folding a lot.
Instead, defend your blinds much more aggressively, especially from the small blind, and 3bet more frequently. Because calling is such an unappealing prospect, some players will only 3bet from the small blind. Consider how the raiser’s position influences which hands you should call in the big blind. If the raise comes from the UTG at a 9-handed table, their range will be very narrow, and we should adjust our calling range accordingly.
Ignoring the actions of other players
It’s easy to become engrossed in your hand, focusing solely on the hand we’ve made/attempt to make. However, by doing so, we are missing out on a wealth of information provided by our opponents. When we consider what we should do with our hands, we should consider our opponent’s actions.
Things like our opponent’s preflop position, how long it took them to make their decision, and their post-flop actions (passive/aggressive) can help us decide what to do with our hands. If we’re playing an aggressive opponent, we may decide to slow play a hand like a flopped set because we expect them to bet into us, whereas if we bet, they could just fold.
Make Money Playing Online Poker: Frequently Asked Questions
We’ve compiled and answered the most frequently asked questions about how to make money playing online poker:
What exactly is the distinction between cash games and tournaments?
A cash game is a poker game in which the chips have a monetary value, whereas a poker tournament is an event in which players compete for a share of a prize pool. A poker tournament’s chips have no monetary value, and players must finish in specific positions in order to win money.
Is it possible to win more money in cash games than in poker tournaments?
Tournaments can provide a higher return on investment because winning a tournament can provide you with well over 100 buy-ins, whereas a good day for a cash game player would be winning between 10 and 20 buy-ins. While tournaments provide this opportunity, the variance is much higher than in cash games, so you can expect higher highs and lower lows if you choose tournaments over cash games.
How do you play in position when playing online poker?
When playing online poker, you can play in position more often by playing more hands from the BTN and CO and fewer hands from the blinds and early position. This can be accomplished by either raising a larger range when it folds to you in late position or by calling more hands in these positions when faced with a raise.
How much is the rake in online poker games?
The rake in an online poker game is a percentage of each cash game pot that is taken by the poker site (often only after the flop is dealt). This is how online poker rooms make money.
Is it possible for anyone to become a professional online poker player?
Anyone who is willing to put in hours and hours of hard work to learn the game can gain the skills to play poker professionally, thanks to the vast amount of resources and training available online.
Whether you prefer cash games or tournaments, there are plenty of opportunities to make money playing online poker.
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