Despite being a fairly well-known poker variant, draw poker online is still full of players who make very specific types of mistakes that are easy to exploit. They play too passively with their good hands, and don’t bluff enough with their bad hands. That means that they don’t make much money when they actually have something good, and they’re folding a high percentage of the time. There are two natural strategies to follow against this type of player, and here we’re going to look at them.
A lot of players, especially in online draw poker, are tempted to try to be very tricky and trap when they make good hands by trying to check-raise and do other complicated plays. In games where people call too much and don’t bluff raise enough, this is absolutely terrible. Because of this, the first strategy you should employ when playing draw poker online is to value bet your good hands in a very straight-forward manner. If you have a good hand, and you’re going to be ahead of whatever your opponent calls with on average, then you should just go ahead and bet. If you check, hoping to raise once they bet, you’re not going to make as much money against players who check or call too much (as opposed to betting or raising) and rarely bluff.
Another aspect of playing against overly passive players is that they don’t bluff you nearly enough to make it difficult to play against them. If you have a hand of medium strength in any of the draw variations and a typically passive opponent has opened up with a lot of betting and raising, you can normally just go ahead and fold without worrying too much about it. When your opponent doesn’t bluff very much, that means his range of betting hands contains a very high percentage of hands that are super strong. When most of his range beats your medium strength holdings, folding medium strength hands to aggression is the right strategy. Since they’re not bluffing with enough hands to make you doubt whether you should fold or not, these players are very easy to play against.
A great benefit of playing online is that you can take notes on players using the built-in note-taking options that most online poker rooms have. This way you can mark people as being passive (or aggressive), and have your notes on them in the future if you play against them again so you can be sure to employ the right strategy.
