It’s been an unparalleled summer of success for Britain in the sporting arena, and even as September arrived, a certain Andy Murray kept the feel good feeling going for another month. Away from the Olympics (and tennis, and cycling) there is another arena where Britain constantly dominates the world without achieving any headlines: online poker.
Poker is massively popular in the UK in all its forms, whether that’s live games for real money, free poker online with the likes of SkyPoker, or high-stakes multi-table games for the top players online, Britain is dominating at them all. With more people taking up the game every week, and a great number of resources online to help people learn, there’s no reason this domination should end.
One of the most remarkable feats by a British player in recent months has been the performance of Sam Trickett who played 2,171 hands of online poker recently and won an astonishing $265,315 for his trouble, all of which he managed to fit in during a day of playing.
Averaging those figures out reveals just how dominant Trickett was, winning a huge $100,000 on one hand and winning around $120 on every single hand (that is, of course, an average). Although far from Trickett’s best performance in a single day (although one of the best ever online), it does serve to illustrate just how much money can be made playing online poker in the UK, and just how good the opposition are if you’re interested in playing the biggest cash games.
For the majority of us, such figures are a lifetime away, as is having the guts to play for really huge money. Nonetheless, everyone starts somewhere, and Trickett has gone from scratch to the top of the game in just five or six years. With sufficient determination and time taken to really hone your game, anybody can make it to the big tables (although perhaps not with the same level of talent and instinctive nouse).
The most important thing you need to be good at poker is to be patient and to learn how to work out what other people are doing. Certainly there’s a lot of luck and the mastery of odds involved but the key is to know not whether your hand is better than your opponent’s, but to be able to work out that his is worse than yours.
Whilst this might seem redundant, it’s the key to winning at poker because it should teach you not to chase the best hands on unlikely outcomes, but to play your opponents hands, and therefore know when to stick, when to twist, and when to just admit that this time you haven’t got the right cards to stay in.
So, if you want to get good at poker, just head online and get cracking, practise makes perfect after all!
