Online poker attracts all kinds of player. Sometimes you will be able to chip away at players who are much weaker than you. But what about when you come up against an advanced player with a top game? As Blur put it brilliantly in their hit Parklife, ‘confidence is a preference’. Advanced players have confidence to burn; they are completely relaxed at the table and they have complete faith in their game. You must do the same. If you play with confidence and calmness you will be able to face any opponent, no matter how good they are. Good poker players are human after all. They just make more good calls than average players. They play the percentages and try to make the optimum decision at every street of every hand. Confidence and consistency, hand in hand, are a difficult combination to break down. Another way of dealing with facing top players is to try to stay under the radar. This could be as simple as noting down a player who you believe to be much better than you and avoiding pots with him (unless you have a monster). Or if you are playing cash poker, you could try buying in with a short stack, thus keeping the sharks on the table at bay (the better players tend to be drawn to poor players with heaps of money in front of them). If all these things aren’t working for you, it may be that you are playing at too high a level. You may need to level down if you feel that you are regularly coming up against players you deem much better than yourself. Away from poker, why not Play Fruit Machines to pass some time?
