The boom days of online poker are well and truly over.  The early years of this century saw massive growth in the online poker world, and now we are settling down into the ‘big business’ era.

Online card rooms are now a lot sharper and much more business like than they were in the early days.

And the online poker player is on average more knowledgeable and informed than used to be the case.

Are we into the era of ‘Super Poker’?  That is, poker as an established industry? Not quite.  There is still quite a lot of growth to be done, and in the process of that growth, a number of industry issues will need to be sorted out.

Cardrooms can now with some accuracy calculate the lifetime value of their players, so the days of giving massive incentives to attract new players are fading fast.

Turbo multi table tournaments have become quite popular lately.  Obviously the speed is what is attractive with these tourneys.  Many players can’t handle the wait. Waiting for cards, waiting for position, waiting for cards again.

But a common mistake in this type of game is that players feel under enormous preassure to make a move as fast as possible.

And that is a BIG mistake.  You will still need the cards.  Even more so in this game, as your opponent may have rubbish, and you should know by now that you need to have the goods to beat the lucky players.

When you sit in to a turbo mtt, first thing you should do is take a deep breath. Then calm down.  Just because the game is turbo doesn’t mean you have to play turbo too.

Remember, because of the mistakes the other players will make, you still need solid starting hands.

Avoid confrontation without good cards, and let your opponents play with their weak low pairs or off suit high cards.  This will mean that as the game progresses, and the chip stacks increase, you will have more opponents that are chipped up enough to give you good odds if you are eventually forced to make your move with a low pair.

Of course it will happen sometimes that you end up going all in with a less than ideal starting hand.  The odds are that you won’t get premium cards within the first twenty or thirty minutes of every turbo tourney you play.

One more thing to remember with this tourney structure is that it will be harder to get some players off of pots even though it may seem obvious that they have completely missed the flop. With a smaller starting stack many players feel committed after a pre flop raise on AK that misses.  Having committed what is now a large portion of their chips to that hand they feel compelled to stick with it to the river.

Let the other players make those mistakes all they want. And let you capitalize on them.