When it comes to playing online poker one of the most important aspects to making money is the ability to go Bum Hunting. Have you ever heard the saying “if you can't spot the sucker at the table within the first ten minutes then you are the sucker”? Well I'm going to talk you through three of the most sure fire ways to spot the fish at the poker tables to make sure that your time spent playing poker is as profitable as possible.
Look for players that limp in then call raises frequently
Good poker players spend a lot of time working on their game through reading books, watching poker training videos and taking part in free poker lessons. Because of all this, they know that being the pre flop aggressor has so many benefits in terms of the amount of different ways that they can win the pot both before the flop and after.
The main benefits are that you get to thin the field of players and stop otherwise junk hands from seeing the flop which means you could pick up the pot pre flop, uncontested. Even if you do see the flop, you'll likely have less opponents in the pot with you (ideally one other person on most occasions) and will be able to win a lot of pots with a simple continuation bet.
So having said that, fish that do not know correct poker strategy, often limp in with hands that they want to see a ‘cheap flop' with. Good players spot the fact that this is a weak play and attack the limpers by raising with a wide range of hands and because the fish wants to see a flop so often you will see them calling this raise a huge amount of the time with all sorts of speculative holdings.
Find players with less than a full stack
Every Bum Hunting good poker player knows how important it is to keep their stacks topped up to the maximum when playing online poker. The reason for this is so that when you have a good situation come up where you have a winning hand, you can maximize the amount of money that you can make in the situation by having a full stack.
Many fish are unaware of this fact. As a result you can often scan through poker lobbies to find players sitting with less than a full stack. The likelihood is that you have just stumbled across some weak players. In an ideal world you want the players to have fairly full stacks as opposed to short stacks (less than 20 blinds) as some short stack players can be playing a completely different style of their own (a specific short stack strategy).
Finding these fish on a consistent basis is just like getting free poker money when you have a solid game plan for beating them.
Bum Hunting By Donk Betting Frequently
A donk bet is when a player bets post flop into the pre flop raiser instead of checking to them. Giving that player a chance to make a continuation bet.
Although the ‘donk bet' does have some tactical value in certain situations you will see it most frequently used by the fish at the tables. The sizing of the donk bet is often another give away to the players skill level as you'll often see fishy poker players making very small donk bets in relation to the size of the pot.
If you're wondering why a donk bet is bad then let's look at a hypothetical hand situation and break it down.
Imagine that you are the pre flop raiser with a hand such as AQ. Everyone else folds at the table except for one player (who happens to be the fish) who calls out of the big blind with 88. I'm going to assume we know his exact cards for the sake of illustrating my point.
Next the flop is dealt and the cards come out J,K,7. The fishy player is first to act with his pocket 8's and decides to make a small donk bet to ‘see where he's at' and find out if his hand is good.
This is a very common situation that bad poker players find themselves in and the reason why the logic of the play is flawed is because they can often be bluff raised off of their hand as they have given away the fact that they do not hold much and so ironically they have not found out anything as they will be forced to fold the best hand the vast majority of the time.
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