I was recently playing in a free poker tournaments where I had pocket Aces. I felt pretty confident so made a high raise, another player then raised again. Time to call… my opponent turned over 9/2 and made a set of 9′s. I knew then that my game was over.
Im sure I am not the only one who has met this fate (and thrown my computer mouse flying across the room) and I wont be the last.
Wherever you play your poker, you are bound to play against donks day in day out. I have found that I have experienced more donks on free poker tournaments site, NoPayPOKER.com. I know the reason for this is because NoPayPOKER is a totally free poker website where you never have to spend a penny of your own hard earned cash and it does attract many types of players from all over the world.
Now, although there are quite a few donks at NoPayPOKER, there are also a lot of pretty good players too, even if I do say, much better than me. I started playing poker at NoPayPOKER roughly 9 months ago, and although I am not the best player in the world, I have still managed to bag myself about 22k in FreeD. It isn’t millions, but at the same time, its money, and free money at that! I actually started winning my games in the last 3/4 months.
It took me a while to notice, but at the end of a tournament, the players left at the final table were the good players and not the donks who were playing earlier in the game. This made me look in to it a little further.
I devised a strategy to avoid being donked, but although these do work, they are not 100% fool proof.
It’s guaranteed that there is a freeroll running every thirty minutes, and what is also guaranteed is that if you want to play the first hand then you will have to go all in. Some players will play any two cards on the first hand. There are reasons for this. Some players going all in first hand take the view “win big early or go home early”.
By this I mean if they can double or treble up first hand then they have a bit of flexibility over the hands they play from then on. On the other hand some players are just genuinely bad and don’t know how to play the game. So I would say unless you have pocket aces/kings/queens, don’t play the first hand.
Another important tip when playing is to suss out early on who are the good and bad players at the table you are playing at.
It normally takes a good few minutes to find these players in a freeroll as there are lots of table moving. It can take a few hands to figure out whether the players are good or not. If you spot a player who is doing some big raises, bluffing and being a pain in the backside, then I would suggest avoiding them. What tends to happen is they will win a few big hands, then loose a few, and then go on tilt. By working out how players are playing will not only help you avoid being donked but also in your all round game. Whilst playing on other sites I have taken notes on players to build up a profile of good and bad players. I wouldn’t necessarily go to these lengths on NoPayPOKER, but I do keep a mental note of bad players.
My next bit of advice is one of the most important when playing any type of poker. Always play the cards, not your feelings. This can be extremely difficult but key to making the money. Do not hold grudges against players on your table.
If you are a well rounded poker player and have been playing a while its no doubt that you have managed to build up many skills which have served you well. However, my last point would be to throw these out the window when playing with donks.
Remind yourself where you learnt these skills, other poker sites, casinos, private games, etc.
What separates these from NoPayPOKER brings me full circle to my initial point. You learnt your poker skills whilst playing with your own money. It’s much harder to go all in first hand with 10/3 when you have just bought in for $100.
People always say it’s much harder to play poker against bad plays than good ones. All your bluffing skills, positional play, squeeze play forget, because a donk will call anything.
To summarise;
(a) Avoid playing the first hand
(b) Establish who the good and bad players are at your table
(c) Remember who the donks are (maybe create a list)
(d) Don’t let your emotions get in the way of your hand
(e) Forget your poker skills when playing donks
Adopting these tactics will not win you free poker tournaments, but should help you in avoiding an early bath and should at least get you into the money.
Posted on January 27th, 2010 by Admin
Filed under: Fun Stuff
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