When you play high stakes poker at say http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/rafa-nadal/ then you constantly have to place yourself into tough spots in order to make money and this leads to higher variance. This is why you need a much higher bankroll for say $10,000 games than you do for $50 games in terms of the number of buy-ins that you need. This is even more so in six handed and heads up games than full ring. However if you want to be what I call a “basic online pro” then you can get by with a very strong fundamental game.

So you don’t need to be placing yourself into tough spots too frequently and you can backoff when played back at. This is because your opponents will be less likely to want to escalate the pot beyond certain levels at low stakes games than they do at high stakes games. Let us look at an example, it gets folded around to you on the button and you raise with the 9c-5d.

The player in the big blind calls and you both see the flop with around 100bb in your respectivestacks. The flop comes 10h-7s-2c and they check with the action now being onyou. Because our hand isn’t connected or suited then there is far less chanceof us making a big hand. So we are going to find ourselves in situations wherewe have no pair, weak pairs and no draws far too often.

Also because we raised then it will be tougher for us to represent hands on certain flops.Let us say that we c-bet this flop and get called and the turn card comes and is the 4c. Clearly then our opponent stands a very good chance of calling us on the turn because the turn card didn’t really alter anything. So our fold equity is very low and our pot equity is even lower.

We have placed ourselves here into a tough spot when the best course of action would have been to have simply folded the hand pre-flop. If we barrel the turn and get called then we are placing ourselves into greater jeopardy. The only way that we can now win this pot is to get our opponent to fold their equity and hopefully they will do that if a big scare card comes on the river. Failing that and we may have to barrel the river as well. Placing yourself into too many tough spots in poker when all you need to get the dollars is good solid play is not good poker.