It must be pointed out that Brunson readily admits in that book that his style of play would struggle to be successful in poker games where there was not an awful lot of money on the table. An overall lack of money on the table would mean that his aggressive style of pushing players out of the pot through intimidation of losing very large amounts of money would be greatly negated.

This is certainly the case with online no limit poker games. Many players do not necessarily buy in for the maximum amount anyway and all of the online poker rooms impose limits on the amounts that players can buy in for and this limit is usually set at one hundred times the big blind.

This would equal $400 in a $2-$4 and $2000 in a $10-$20 game etc.This means that unless someone wins and gets ahead, that it can be quite rare to find a player with 200-300 big blinds on the table. Players tend to be less fearful when they have less to lose and it is this factor that would blunt many of Brunson’s strategies.

Plus there is another factor that also needs to be considered. Many people have now read Supersytem but even more importantly, the general thesis has been roughly replicated in many other areas of poker literature including books, magazines and websites. This means that most players now see the importance of aggression in poker and can also see when other players are stepping out of line.

What this means in a nutshell is that ultra aggressive poker will simply not be tolerated now like it was when this book was first written. Plus I dare say that it was the sheer presence and reputation of Doyle that enabled him to get away with many things a good percentage of the time simply because many players dared not tangle with him in a pot without a good hand.

It is very difficult to attain this level of intimidation in online poker where your opponents are merely staring at an avatar. In many of the games that I play in, unless you achieve the correct level of aggression then you will find that your opening raises will be getting re-raised frequently.

The fact of the matter is that if you raise to $70 in a $10-$20 for example and the player on the button re-raises to say $240, then that $240 will represent a much higher percentage of your opponents stack than it would have done in the games that Brunson would have been playing in.

In some cases it could represent as much as a third of your opponents stack and many players will get pot committed far more easily thus making it more difficult to get them off the hand.

But many of the stratagems and advice still holds good today all these years later. The section where Doyle talks about the small connecting cards and the dangerous trap hands is still highly relevant in today’s online games. It does not matter where you are playing poker or against who, it is still crucial to your overall chances of success to balance your game.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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