Three Tools to Beating Low Stakes Poker Games
Low stakes online poker games are pretty fishy. Even the most inexperienced of players can routinely beat low stakes games if utilizing the proper fundamentals at the table. Beating low stakes games basically boils down to three things:
1. Patience
This is by far the most important asset you have in a low stakes poker game. Since the stakes aren’t very high, many players make reckless gambles out of apathy towards the money. A rule of thumb for beating poker games is to do the opposite of what everyone at the table is doing. Since people in low stakes games play a lot of hands, chase a lot of draws, and don’t like to fold, your advantage can be made by playing the opposite style: patient and opportunistically aggressive in the right spots. Put more practically, a winning, patient strategy means not playing a ton of hands. Fold tempting, but ultimately garbage holdings like Ace-Five. Basically wait for a premium hand and punish the sea of fish who refuse to fold with large bet after large bet.
2. Bet Sizing
Since players in low stakes games are generally tempted to chase draws, it is imperative that you bet your strong hands very hard to price them out of drawing to a straight or flush. The same applies for preflop situations when you have a monster starting hand. Don’t just make a minimum raise. Pump it up to 5-7 times the big blind preflop. In higher stakes games, this isn’t a great strategy, but in low stakes games, people don’t like to fold. Why not make them pay out the teeth to see flops? By making large bets, you also help get your opponents pot committed to seeing a showdown. In other words, if you can get them to put in one large bet, it’s not hard to get them to call two or three more large ones afterwards.
3. Straightforward Aggression
Low stakes games aren’t complicated, so there’s no need to make them like that. Advanced, cutsie plays like slowplaying, trapping and check-raising are necessary to beat higher stakes games, but at the low stakes level, people aren’t too concerned with your hand. Remember, they’re just focused on their hand. As long as they feel like they have something halfway decent, they will keep calling you down. Don’t give them many opportunities to get a free card. Many low stakes players are very passive. This means that if you try to trap them by attempting a check-raise, you might just find that they check behind you more often than you were hoping. There’s a popular acroynm KISS which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. That should be the driving theory behind your low stakes poker adventures.