Starting poker

[Tboner7]

I just started playing poker online and overall about 4 months ago. Should I be making money by now? Is it bad that I'm still losing money or is that expected this far in?

[K C]

This is not a good sign but I wouldn't really get too discouraged if I were you. Any time you're losing money though at something you need to dedicate yourself to making the kind of changes needed to turn this around. Very often that involves wholesale changes to the way you play.

Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of players who lose money at online poker do so because they play too loosely. And not just a little too loose either. They play way too many hands pre-flop, call way too many raises pre-flop, and stay around way too often post flop, often to the end, without the proper hands to do it.

Thank God for these players though of course /images/graemlins/smile.gif You need to take a hard look at your game and ask yourself if you're one of them.

There's a lot more to this of course, but the rest pretty much deals with how profitable you're going to be - break even, a little, a decent amount, a lot, etc. Keeping from losing though can pretty much be solved by not throwing money away on crappy cards.

KC
kingcobrapoker.com

[HopeydaFish]

[ QUOTE ]
I just started playing poker online and overall about 4 months ago. Should I be making money by now? Is it bad that I'm still losing money or is that expected this far in?

[/ QUOTE ]

Continuing to lose is to be expected if you haven't done anything to improve your game. If you're still making the same mistakes as you did when you started 4 months ago, there's no reason that you'll suddenly start making money. You need practice to play winning poker, but you need to make a conscious effort to continuously improve or your "practice" will amount to no more than reinforcing bad habits.

Read SSHE, go through the 2+2 forums, get Poker Tracker, analyze your play after every session, post hands on here, etc... If you don't do any of those things, you'll just keep on losing.

[Tboner7]

Well I have gotten bettER compare to the beginning. Half the money I've lost was the first month. I recently went to Noble Poker and they gave me $16 just for joining. I went up to $22 hovered there for a while, but am currently down to just a few dollars now.
what is this Poker Tracker thing?

[K C]

It's a program which tracks your play and the play of your opponents, using hand histories. It's a very valuable tool, but doesn't work with all sites, so check first to see if it's compatible with the site you're playing at.

If you're losing at Noble, then there's a lot of potential for improvement I'd say /images/graemlins/smile.gif This is maybe the softest place to play on the net.

Again though, don't get discouraged. You're just learning the game at this point, and as long as you're getting better, that's the main thing. And you really haven't lost any real money anyway. Just keep working on your game.

KC
kingcobrapoker.com