Here are some my favorite pros an some interesting videos with them playing. Daniel Negreanu is now associated with Poker stars, while Chris Ferguson was one of the founding partners in Full Tilt Poker.
Daniel Negreanu Style Small-Ball Poker
While playing online poker tournaments you have no doubt taken notice of certain players' styles of play. These styles could range from loose-passive to tight-aggressive and many variations in between that require a select strategy for counter attack.
You may be familiar with opponent profiles in other ways too. For instance, you can similarly use long time poker pro Phil Hellmuth's guide that applies creature-like characters to your opponents such as an eagle or an elephant. I have added a profile to this guide as well called the "monkey" - specifically in mind for certain internet players.
The loose-aggressive types of players often come out swinging in the early stages. You can liken these types of players to the type of game many poker pros like Erik Lindgren, Daniel Negreanu and Phil Ivey love to play in the early stages. They call it "small ball poker" which basically means playing a lot of small sized pots and forcing opponents nearly every opportunity into making tough decisions. While a professional poker player invariably has an edge in the types of hands using this style of play, there isn't as much an advantage to using it online, especially in the low buy in levels.
In the low limit tournaments, specifically up to about the $20-$30 range, you are still going to run into a lot of players who simply don't know when to fold. The number of players that will play top pair, middle pair or call draws all in actually dominate the low level buy-ins. Now granted, they are usually the early departed crowd too, but that doesn't mean all of them are gone. Some wise up enough after an early, lucky run and do in fact place and make the final table.
The point is small ball poker may be played online but you really have to pick your spots and opponents very, very selectively. Some examples of these opportunities may be against very tight players, near the money, and deep in the money. You can always use your tournament indicator poker calculator profiling grid to find know which players to make a move on. Otherwise, you are best to stick with an mzone strategy playing a tight aggressive game, because in the low limits, chips will eventually fall into your seat by virtue of frequent opponent mistakes.
Hopefully as your skill building in the game improves, you will be able to recognize spots to play without a hand, but rest assured that skill will be most useful in live, higher buy-in tournaments.
Chris Ferguson's Bankroll Challenge
Are you in the bankroll building stage of your online poker career? If you don't even know the answer to that, then you need a lot of luck if you are going to avoid a reload. However, if you do know that you are in a building and learning stage where you want your $50 or $100 to last as long as it can while you are learning the game then you may have a critical decision to make. That is, should you be playing in the NL cash games or sit and go and multi-table tournaments?
If you follow Poker Pro Chris Ferguson's exploits at Full Tilt Poker, while building his bankroll he mainly sticks to the tournament circuit keeping his buys in check, and playing straight-up solid poker. (Yes, the same Chris Ferguson who won the 2000 WSOP!) In fact, on his quest to go from $0 to $10,000 at Full Tilt in a bankroll management challenge, he made his first big leap in a $1 Multi-table tournament where he finished 2nd of 683 entries and earned a whopping $104.
Now this is a guy you can take advice from.
However, we should look at those action-packed No-Limit cash games as well, because a bankroll can grow rather quickly with just a few good hands, not the months it took Chris Ferguson to get out of the penny ranks. Even with limits at .25 and .50 you should probably not sit down at these tables with less than $20, so if you're starting bankroll is only $50 or $100, well you have made your first bankroll mistake already. The lure of these tables are really based on quick, almost exponential growth of your bankroll where a turn of a card can send your draw into poker lore, while 3 other players in the pot watch in amazement as you suck out on each of them.
That kind of hand happens more than you think, but with you on the losing end facing a reload and/or re-buy to exact your full revenge and let your opponents know how resilient you are. Hey listen, you may actually get out of those tables with a profit, even with your limited experience, but it would have surely been based on luck and happenstance that you did. If you do profit, that is actually the beginning of a problem, not a successful bankroll, because you did it in a way that couldn't have possibly built your skills at the game or money management.
That is what building a bankroll is all about: Getting in your playing time, learning from other players, adopting and perfecting strategies, and seeing real hand to hand combat. The best way to do that is in tournament where you can limit your losses to your entry fee and stretch out your playing dollar to the maximum benefit for learning. Take it from Chris Ferguson. If you do that, and still have to reload, there isn't anything wrong. That's when you know you can try again and again by doing it right and skill building along the way.
