A bum asks a man for $2, the man says, "Will you buy booze?" The bum says, "No." The man says, "Will you gamble it away?" The bum says, "No." So the man says, "Will you come home with me so my wife can see what happens to a man who doesn't drink or gamble?"

Figured I'd just give you guys a laugh before reading this next post. I've spoken to several players who I've seen lose in online poker matches and discussed why we think they lost. A very common reason that we discovered was after they lose one big hand, they tend to change their game play.

If there is one thing I've learned from playing any poker it is to stick with your game play. If you manage to get $10,000 from playing it nice and slow, stick with it, if you don't you are likely to lose the money.

We discovered that most players play it on the aggressive side and do fairly well until a point where they lose because they were aggressive. Now, they change their game play to try recuperate from their loss.

Now, thinking about this logically they have had more experience playing aggressive and suddenly they change to an unfamiliar game play which they are less skilled at using. They play passivly in order to make back their money but they begin getting frustrated at the slow rate at which their money is increasing or even possibly decreasing (depending on how skilled they are at playing in the unfamiliar game play) and they eventually decide to do something stupid.

Another big problem I found was a surprising amount of people are playing at a late hour when they are tired. If you play like this you will lose money. The same goes for any other distractions such as email, MSN (or other Instant Message programs), music etc. If you want to make it big in online poker, you have to be concentrating all the time.