/ CityAM / 08 February 2008 / Leave a comment

You don't need to be able to read people to beat the old campaigners say's Betfair's Oliver Bowen in the CityAM series...

If you look around the office you will probably see the old campaigner. He normally has a desk in the corner where no one can see his screen. He's grey haired, wears a waistcoat and carries a walking stick that he uses to beat people out of his way as he walks down Bishopsgate.

The old campaigner makes shrewd business decisions but he can't give you a Power Point Presentation explaining why. It is the assimilation of years of knowledge. A wide range of contributing factors gives him an intuitive feeling about the shape of the market.

It is an old poker adage that if you see a player at the high-stakes tables for many years then you can be sure that the player is either very rich and stupid or very good at poker. It is normally the latter. Phil Hellmuth has won eleven World Series of Poker bracelets by being very good at poker. Like the old campaigner he plays poker based on feel and intuition. Sometimes he has the uncanny ability to tell you exactly what you are holding.

Your first reaction to your cards, how you pick up your chips, where you put your hands, what clothes you are wearing, and what you say are automatically stored and cross-referenced with a lifetime of data to come to an assumption over whether you are weak or strong.

One of Hellmuth's favourite expressions is "I felt like I was at the height of my powers". By this he means that he was in tune with everything going on around him. He has an understanding that cannot necessarily be explained by one factor and his decision making is totally subjective based on his "read" of his opponent and the situation.

Playing poker on the internet offers you the chance to escape the old campaigner's beady all-knowing eyes. It doesn't matter if you are shouting "DON'T CALL, DON'T CALL" while you are running a monster bluff. It doesn't matter if you are sweating, fidgeting, praying, or whatever else. You can log into Betfair and hide behind the computer screen. You can win, whether you are good at reading people or not.

Instead of thinking about what you should do with your pocket aces against opponent Ben Grundy, you have to think about what to do with your pocket aces against opponent X.

Unless you play very highest-stakes, in online poker you will be exposed to thousands of different players and you will not be able to see the "tells" that the best "live" players rely on. This levels the playing field. But it also gives you the chance to get an edge by taking a more statistical & objective approach to the game of poker.

When you sit down at a random cash table on Betfair or play in a random tournament you need to think about optimising your decision making based on the statistical profitability of your actions against a random opponent. It becomes less about the myriad of physical tells and specific players and more about the statistics. Odds, position, value, range and variance are the key factors.

Learning to play poker online is a very good foundation for playing "live" poker. Betfair's World Series of Poker Europe Champion Annette Obrestad is one of the greatest players in the world. She fine-tuned her game by playing millions of hands online before taking her skills to the "live" tournaments.

The transition from online poker to "live" poker is easier because as an online player you can focus on perfecting your own optimal strategies before applying them to more subjective situations.

Some of the top "live" pros can't make the transition to online poker because they rely heavily on reading players. They even make some elementary errors that Annette would be horrified by. Their basic game is not good enough.

Leave the complicated psychology for later. Learn to play profitably online first so that you know what to do in any given situation. This means you can play with more confidence and give away fewer tells. This way when you get to the casino and sit down next to the old campaigner you will stand every chance of beating him.

Betfair Poker's $100k guaranteed prize pool tournament takes place every Sunday at 1830 GMT.

Tags: Phil Hellmuth