Micro Stakes Poker Strategy

Most of the popular internet poker rooms have cash games where the blinds are as low as $.01/$.02. When you are playing for stakes this small, you are no longer playing small stakes poker... You are now playing microstakes poker. You can read about the best micro stakes sites here; Micro Stakes Poker Sites. These tables are plenty of fun, but when you are playing at these tables on the internet, you are going to have to make some adjustments to your playing style.

The first element that you will have to consider is fairly obvious; players tend not to care as much as they would if they had a larger amount of money in invested. At some tables this is going to make it much harder to bluff certain players. At the same time you can assume that the caliber of play that you are going to see is not very high. This means that if you are able to play smart poker and simply make good decisions, you should be able to walk away from the table as a winner. You won't necessarily need to outplay your opponents or outsmart them. Just a lack of any mistakes on your part should be enough to beat most of the microstakes poker tables.

Another thing that a player must consider when sitting at the microstakes tables is the wide range of skill levels that they may be up against. This can be true in cash games, but this is especially true in tournament poker.

In the world of online poker, a whole new class of poker players has emerged who specialize in tournaments. It used to be the case that a player had to play in both tournaments and cash games if they wanted to make a living playing poker. There was only a handful of players who were able to have enough success playing in tournaments to be able to sustain themselves. Now the online poker rooms have players grinding away 24 hours/day and there is never any shortage of tournaments. Since many of the microstakes poker tournaments will have several thousand entrants, even the smaller buy-ins can have big payouts and a great return on investment for the players.

This means that when you sit down in a poker touranment with a buyin of $10, $20 or $50; you might just wind up sitting next to one of the world's best tournament players who is just grinding away and playing 10-20 tables at the same time. It's just as likely (or maybe a little more likely) that you will be sitting next to someone who just deposited $50 for fun and they are just sitting around having a good time. These players are probably not taking the tournament as seriously as some of the other players so you need to play against them accordingly.

There is also surely to be a few true microstakes grinders in the tournament. Don't be fooled by these players. Just because they are not putting much money at risk does not mean they are not skilled players. It's not uncommon to find players in these tournaments who have played more than 100,000 hands of poker.