Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 08 January 2009 / Leave a comment

Many people seem to think that poker is purely based around degenerate gamblers, who sit down and lose millions of dollars and go broke while a few sharks hoover up all of it as quickly as possible.

Although there are a few big players who lose large amounts in the highest stake games (mostly rich business men, with examples such as Guy Laliberte and Andy Beal), most of the poker economy is kept going by lots of low limit players, and it's important to understand the process when thinking about the games you should play long term.

Most of the poker economy starts with players making small deposits, usually between $10 and $100 and losing it either slowly or quickly at the lowest stakes. Some of the players at the lowest stakes will either be good players dropping down to build a roll back, or the better players who are making small deposits and will grind out a win. The players that lose typically either deposit small and try again, or disappear for good.

The players that won at these stakes will usually move up the stakes, where at first they will be consistent losers to the regulars at the higher stakes - this feeds the good players at this level who try and move up themselves and so on all the way to the very highest limits. What this means is that for any game to be really profitable it has to have large amounts of micro stakes going on - be it live or online.

It is important to keep track of how many micro stakes games are going in any variant, and a particularly good example of this is the explosion of pot limit Omaha. As the general standard of hold'em improved, bad players started losing their small deposits at an even faster rate than they usually did. As a result, they started looking for games that they felt they had more of a chance in. As Omaha is the closest variant of poker to hold'em (in that it has a flop, river and turn) many bad players flocked to the low stakes PLO games. As a result, and in a very short period of time, very high stakes Omaha games formed - all simply because of lots of micro stakes games starting.

By keeping an eye on low stakes games, you can see where the next trend will probably be and you can try and get in early when there is a huge amount of dead money involved. Next game will be Omaha hi/lo if you ask me...

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