Low Stakes Poker - Low Stakes Poker Player

When starting out playing poker, many people believe they can play for fake money (play money) and then transition for real money. This simply is not the case. There’s a big difference between fake money games and real-money games.

In fake money games, there’s no incentive to fold whatsoever. All of the online poker sites will give you unlimited amounts of fake money, so there’s no major reason to conserve your chips. Obviously, in a real money game, you don’t have an unlimited amount of cash (if you do, congrats!) so people actually play seriously. Some play-money players play for pride (some nice alliteration huh?), but that incentive is not nearly as much as cold, hard cash.

In a fake money game, you will be called and paid off with all sorts of hands because people simply want to see what you have. People won’t do this in a real-money game, even if the bet is just a dollar. If you play a lot of play money games, you will get used to winning more with your ‘winning hands’ which doesn’t transition into a real-money game. Your hand selection will get too loose, and it will affect your style of play too much.

While fake money games are good to get used to the rules of Texas Hold’em or just for fun, they are not a good learning tool for transitioning into low-stakes real-money games.

This website is about succeeding at low-stakes poker, but what exactly is low-stakes. In their poker strategy articles, PokerTips.org referrs to fixed-limit Texas Hold’em games of $2-$4 or less as low-stakes. As for no-limit holdem, games with $.50-$1 blinds are considered low-stakes.

I could be politically correct and say that ‘low-stakes is whatever low-stakes is to you,’ but that would be a disservice. The truth is that low-stakes referrs to a style of play, more of a Texas No Fold’em if you will. What is low-stakes depends if you are live or online, since live games tend to be much looser than live games.

Nowadays, with online games being tougher, I’d think of fixed-limit games of $1-$2 and lower being low-stakes, and no-limit games with $.25-$.50 blinds as low-stakes. For live games, I’d say you could multiply these amounts by four or so. Pretty much any game that is $5-$10 fixed or less or no-limit with $1-$2 blinds play like low-stakes games.

Shocked by the difference? If anything, the online games are probably tougher at these limits, since they are full of nits, whereas the live games tend to be full of calling stations.