Your first buy in at any poker table is the most important, mainly because it gives the first impression of how you play. This is a kind of metalevel concept in poker that you can use if you have a buy in to spare. You start off your game playing super tight, only the top four hands. About an hour in, you add some more cards to the mix and start playing other good cards. Remember, this isn’t about winning yet. Eventually, you’ll start evolving your online poker play to the extent that you’re playing every other hand, regardless of the cards, essentially you become a calling station. This will get the astute players attention and the tourist won’t notice, but they’re not the ones you’re having to outplay anyway. Finally, you become the maniac, when you’re about half stacked from your initial buy in. You raise with nearly any two and you call down a lot of hands with much worse. On your final hand of the casino online table, and hopefully you’ve gained some chips by now to make it look great, you take the worst hand you can get, 2-7 or something similar and raise with it under the gun. Now before you do this, you go back to your tight folding strategy. When you get that raise UTG, since you’ve loosened your image, you reraise all in. Whatever the outcome, you show your cards. And talk about confusion. From tight, to calling station, to maniac, to insane duck hook raiser. Then you buy in again, and you play your TAG game, and you take their money.
