Whenever a player is playing poker online then has already been mentioned, the software does basically everything for you except make your decisions. But there are other areas that need to be attended to in live poker games that many online players simply take for granted.

For instance, because you can see all of the cards on the screen at any one time then you are always aware of just who is exactly in the hand at all times. You also know whose turn it is to act, how long that player has left to act and how much they have on the table in terms of money.

But the sheer lack of this built in facility in a live poker game opens up all kind of avenues for unscrupulous players to exploit it and believe me when I say that certain poker players would not think twice about doing such things. Certain players will try and disguise the fact that they have any cards on the table, either by obscuring them with their hands or possibly with chips.

They do this to try and prompt a reaction from someone (either betting or checking) that they otherwise would not have got had they realised that they were still active in the pot. Some poker players deliberately attempt to cause ambiguity by checking in a manner that could easily be mis-interpreted. Then if you check after they “check”, they can then claim that they never checked at all and had intended to bet themselves.

There are all types of possible angles for the poker opportunist to exploit and it only takes the novice and inexperienced poker player to be the victim of one such trick on only one occasion to be on the receiving end of a serious financial loss. It is for a similar reason why certain players like to disguise how much money that they have on the table either in cash or chips or both.

Imagine for a minute how destructive it would be if a player who was playing No Limit Texas Hold’em poker tried to bully what he thought was a short stack out of the pot with a big all in bet of say $1000 only to then find that his opponent had four one thousand dollar chips concealed at the back of his stack.

If the all in player had declared himself “all in” then his bet is binding but he only made that bet because he believed that his opponent only had a further $1000 on the table.

Concealing your hand

This might seem very obvious but it is surprising just how many players in card rooms are careless when it comes to exposing their own hand. Once again this is something that the online player never has to worry about because the software does this for him.

But there is a certain amount of technique involved when attempting to look at your own hand and doing this badly or perhaps carelessly can end up costing the novice live game poker player an awful lot of money.

At the end of the day, it is your responsibility to look at your cards in the securest way possible and any information that you carelessly give away to the other players is even more ammunition for them to use against you. While most poker players do not go out of their way to get a sneaky peek at an opponents hole cards, others do and the card room rookie needs to keep a keen eye out for this.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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