Online poker continues to grow around the globe. You can play online poker in just about every single country in the world. Money is being made and players are winning their way into live poker tournaments almost every single day. But how do you prosper in the online poker world? How do you get started and what steps are necessary to get an account? We are going to discuss how easy it is to begin playing online poker and provide you with some tips to get started.

Choosing a Poker Room

Today there are a vast number of online poker rooms available. These poker rooms have varying rakes for cash game players. The rake is the amount of money that the casino takes from every pot. This is where the profit is made in cash games for that particular poker room. The larger the stakes the more profit that can be made. Typically the rake is around 7-10% of each pot. If you happen to play cash games this is extremely important as the rake effects your bottom line. Deposit bonuses are also a factor in choosing a poker room to many players. The deposit bonus can be anywhere from $50 to $200 dollars depending on the poker room and the promotion. The caveat is that you do not simply receive the deposit just because you signed up.

Once you have signed up you must then play a pre-defined number of hands to incrementally receive that sign-up bonus. So you need to read carefully before making your decisions. The traffic that a poker room receives can and will affect your ability to get a good cash game or tournament. It will also determine when you play as well. Larger poker rooms like Full Tilt and PokerStars have great cash games and tournaments going around the clock. So it is never difficult to find a game. However, smaller poker rooms like Ultimate Bet tend to slow down later in the day and the tournaments do not have as many players. Also, the cash game tables have fewer players too during the late night hours.

You also want to find out what kinds of poker games and tournaments are available. If you prefer to play Texas Hold’em then you will find that in every poker room online. However, if you want to play Badugi, Chinese Poker or games like Deuce to Seven Draw you will need to do some homework and make sure those games are available where you are considering depositing.

Style of Play

As you might have guessed the style of play in an online poker game is vastly different compared to live brick and mortar casinos. The biggest difference between the two styles of play is that online play is much more aggressive. The aggression factor can be so extreme that it borders on ridiculous. Many online poker players will push all in pre-flop with hands as marginal as [2][3] or as strong as [A][A]. This can make it fairly easy to accumulate chips but sometimes difficult to hold on to them because there is so much additional variance added by the hyper-aggressive play.  I always recommend that you exercise patience when playing online poker in a tournament format. This allows you to wait for hands or hit a set. When you do you are more likely than not going to get paid off which is the point of being patient to begin with. Should you choose to not be patient and get involved in three and four way pots with middle pairs or races and flush draws you are not as likely to be successful in either the short or long-term.

Let other players give you’re their chips. It doesn’t take a lot of time to build a stack with an aggressive table. So be smart and pick your spots!