Poker Table Selection: How to Choose the Most Profitable Table Almost as important as selecting the most suitable online poker room, is the selection of the best poker table to play at. Once again the profitability of each table can vary massively, so is it just luck whether or not you pick the most profitable? In November 2009 Viktor Blom had already tangled in some of the largest pots in online poker history, and had just broken the world record for largest ever pot vs Patrik Antonius, losing an $878,958 pot. However the best was yet to come, and that same week Blom lost a record. ABOUT CARDPLAYER, THE POKER AUTHORITY CardPlayer.com is the world's oldest and most well respected poker magazine and online poker guide.Since 1988, CardPlayer has provided poker players with. PokerStars.com, the world's largest poker site, has shattered its own world record for hosting ‘THE MOST PLAYERS AT AN INTERNET POKER ROOM' - an achievement that's been certified by the Guinness. Aug 29, 2014 Most Online Poker Tables Played in One Hour The greatest thing about Bertrand 'ElkY' Grospellier's world record was the fact that he hadn't even prepared for it. Legendary online poker grinder Randy “nanonoko” Lew will attempt to become a Guinness World Record holder this coming January at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. There is one catch though. Poker Table Ratings is a online poker player statistics and analyses site that provides statistics how much a poker player has won or lost and more. Details over poker players around the world.

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Almost as important as selecting the most suitable online poker room, is the selection of the best poker table to play at. Once again the profitability of each table can vary massively, so is it just luck whether or not you pick the most profitable?

Well no, there is a logic behind it and in this lesson we are going to look at how to select the most profitable cash game table from the lobby.

What are we Looking for?

We’re looking for the fish, plain and simple. We’re looking for any signs of bad players who play too many hands against the odds and chase, hoping to hit cards on the flop, turn or river to make their hand irrespective of how unlikely it is to happen.

Now in a live casino the only way to do this would be to stand and observe the tables and spot the one with the players who are chasing.

Luckily with online poker this guesswork and time consuming observation is taken away from us, as we are given table statistics in the lobby for each and every table, which is extremely helpful seeing as there can be hundreds of tables to choose from.

So How do we Choose the Most Profitable Table?

The first step is to ensure that you are looking at the right tables. In the first stage of this course and the Poker Bankroll Challenge you will be playing at the 5cent / 10cent stake level and throughout this course you will be focused on the No Limit Texas Holdem ring (cash) game tables.

So, from the lobby, make sure you are looking at the ring game tables, and click on the Holdem tab and select the No Limit button just underneath. The tables we are looking for are the 5c/10c tables with 9 players on a table. Throughout this course we will be playing on full tables of 9 or 10 player tables so you can ignore the short-handed (6 player) tables for now.

As you look at the tables available you will see a number of statistics here, lets have a quick look at what they mean:

• Players – The number of players sat at the table and the maximum players, eg: “7/9” = 7 players sat down with 2 spare seats.
• Stakes – The size of the small blind and big blind and subsequent bets, eg: “5c/10c” = small blind is 5 cents ($0.05) and the big blind is 10 cents ($0.10).
• Limit – The type of Poker Betting Limit of the game being played, either No Limit, Pot Limit or Limit (Fixed) – eg: “NL” = No Limit
• Type – Poker room specific which will show icons for the type of game it is, for example there might be an icon for webcam poker tables, usually there is a legend explaining the icons at the bottom of the lobby.
• Average Pot – Self explanatory, keeps track of all the winning pot values and provides an average pot size as a statistic for the table.
• Players / Flop – The average number of players who see the flop, ie: the players that are not folding before the flop and at least call the pre flop bet and see the cards on the flop, eg: “45%” = at a full 9 man table this would indicate that on average 4 players (9 x 45%) see each flop, meaning there is at least 4 big blinds in most pots.
• Hands / Hour – This is an indication of the speed of the table and displays the average number of hands that are dealt in each hour, the higher the number the faster the table is acting and getting through more hands per hour.
• Wait – If a table is full then you can sign up for the waiting list for that table, as a player leaves, that seat is offered to the next person on the waiting list. This statistic shows you how many people are currently on the Waiting List.

Players per Flop: The Fish-o-meter

The statistic we are interested in to start with is the % of players seeing the Flop, or the Players per Flop column. What this number is telling us is the average % of the players at the table who see each flop. This is our Fish-o-meter as the basic rule of thumb here is that the higher this number is, then the more fish (bad players) the table contains.

Why? Because as you have already learnt, fish chase bad cards, they play hands that they should just fold, and hence you get more players trying to play each flop without any kind of proper hand selection.

A table with a lower percentage would indicate better players, so if you saw a table with 5% then this table has a lot of better players, who play hands selectively before the flop and don’t play with hands they shouldn’t.

As you can see from the screenshot above, there is one table that stands out above the others in the list with a 45% players/flop statistic – this is a really really good table to sit down at, and I would be getting my name on that table’s waiting list as soon as possible.

What we are looking for is tables with a Plrs/Flop % higher than 20%. If you can get greater than 30% then that is even better. The higher the better and the more fishy table.

The screenshot above was taken at 888 Poker and as you can see there are lots of tables above 20% and some over 30%, culminating with that fish stinking 45% table. It’s a similar case at Bovada, and just goes to backup the results of our tests that there are lots of inexperienced players at these two sites where we can make profit.

Every year throughout the world millions of school children, adventurous teens and adults with an appreciation of the incredible all open up the world-famous Guinness World Records publication to find out the outrageous limits of human potential.

Usain Bolt is in there for breaking the 100m world record (9.58 seconds). Do Ya Think I'm Sexy crooner Rod Stewart pops up too, holding the record for the largest music concert in history when an estimated 4 million (!!) people turned up on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach to hear him perform. And it's impossible to miss Robert Pershing Wadlow who strides into the record books courtesy of being the tallest man of all time, measuring in at a whopping 8ft 11in.

In 2008, a very familiar name made its debut in the Guinness World Records book: PokerStars. On December 28th PokerStars broke the world record for the world's biggest ever poker tournament when a staggering 35,000 players registered for an $11 event. It could have been many more players too - to ensure that the tournament ran smoothly without any hiccups PokerStars capped the entrants at 35,000. It sold out days before the cards were in the virtual air. Of course, a $500,000 guarantee (which ensured an overlay of $115,000) helped bring the players to the yard too.

While the tournament was a smashing success, the endeavour was not without risk. Scott Byron, Senior Manager, Operations & Poker Services, recalled that 'any time that you push the limits, there is some risk. If we overloaded the server capacity, we could crash the site. This would both be costly and embarrassing, in that we are publicly going for a record and failing.'

In Limit Texas Hold’em, betting is structured so that all bets on a given round are of the same size. In the vast majority of cases, a smaller bet is required in the first two rounds of betting, with a larger bet required on the turn and river. Generally, a Limit Texas Hold’em game will be named based on the size of these bets. Texas holdem calculators. The game is divided into four rounds of betting. Initial pot is forming by Blind Bet. The first player who takes place at the table becomes a dealer. The game starts from the position next to the dealer button, a round disk marks would be the dealer.

Bryan Slick, a Senior Manager Poker Room Operations, was another brainchild of the record attempt. He too was concerned that the PokerStars servers wouldn't be able to cope with that many players in one tournament but, when it came to player numbers, he was optimistic in his approach. '[I wasn't surprised] when the tournament sold out days in advance - we put a lot of effort into advertising it and ran many satellites. We could have got 50,000 players [if we hadn't capped it].'

As the clock ticked down to start time 35,000 pre-registered players waited excitedly for their chance to be a part of poker history. Behind the scenes at PokerStars HQ, that excitement was tempered with a fair amount of concern. As Byron explains, 'The critical moment in any large tournament is the start time. This is not just because of the actual seating itself (opening thousands of tables at once), but because of the need to update all of the lobbies of the participating players at the same time - this is a huge increase in simultaneous data flow from the servers to the players. In most of our world record attempts there is usually a short lag at the start, and that's when we hold our breath!'

One of those players experiencing a short lag was Ted Cook from Chicago, Illinois. At the time Cook was a 41-year-old pro who had transitioned from live poker to the online game like millions of others before him in the wake of Chris Moneymaker's 2003 WSOP win. Cook says, 'I was playing every day then! I started on PokerStars in 2007 and only played tournaments, especially ones with big huge fields.'

They didn't get any bigger than this 35,000 runner field. And, with just a few tables left Cook was still in the running and doing well. The man called 'FuFish' was picking up chips and, as Cook recalls, the chatbox was going crazy for him too: 'There was a story on the PokerStars Blog about the tournament and the guy writing it [Kristin Bihr] was talking about what a raucous rail I had! All of my friends were on there and when word got around that I was getting deep in this tournament they were all coming out of the woodwork. My friends were dominating the chatbox!'

While Cook and his companions were masters of the verbal arts, sadly that didn't translate into tournament glory. Cook was eliminated on the very first hand of the final table when his pocket Sevens lost a race. He picked up $1,500 for the ninth place finish but says, 'based on my chip stack I couldn't be too disappointed. I was 8th or 9th in chips and I lost a race. How can you really complain? When you survive a field of 35,000 people everybody on that final probably had to get lucky and come from behind three or four times. I know I sure as hell did!'

Cook may have narrowly missed out on a major score - the eventual winner stan34powa won $30,000 - but, for PokerStars, the tournament was a tremendous success. Not only did this event propel the company into the record books but, just as important, it set the stage for a series of even more impressive feats in the future.

In 2008 a tournament with 35,000 players was unheard of. Now, as Byron explains, it's standard. 'Technology keeps advancing, and with it so does our capacity. We can now run events with 35,000 players routinely - these days it's when we start getting up into the 200,000 player range that we're pushing the limits.'

Of course, that doesn't stop PokerStars from pushing the online poker envelope; in fact, it just spurs backroom staff like Scott Byron and Bryan Slick on. 'By 2011, we had run a world record tournament with 200,000 players', says Byron, 'in 2014 we reached 225,000 and in 2015 we reached 253,698 players in a $0.01 event.'

So why does PokerStars continue to attempt these record-breaking feats year after year? Byron says the answer is definitely not because they're profitable. 'We don't do these tournaments for profit; we lose money on them! These tournaments are a lot of fun, for us and for the players.'

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Slick, meanwhile, sees it as PokerStars's duty not to rest on their laurels. He says, 'The size of PokerStars is such that people expect this kind of performance from us, so it's not really Earth-shattering when we do such things. It seems strange but it's true. As for the 2015 tournament [with 253,698 players], that was mind-blowing.'
In one cold December night in 2008 PokerStars shifted the boundaries of what was possible in the world of poker. The company hit the record books and an everyday pro from Chicago fell at the final hurdle. It wouldn't be the last time that the Guinness World Records would hear from PokerStars, but that's a story for another day..

Other stories from this series:

Meet PokerStars' longest-serving player of all time
The ghosts of WCOOP
The Moneymaker Boom that almost wasn't
Alexander Stevic and the start of a new era in poker
The PokerStars Sunday Million Two-Timer Club
Smile! You're on Kid Poker Camera!

World Record Most Online Poker Tables For Sale