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When you are playing online poker, one of the most important differences that you need to exploit between the online poker and the land-based poker game is the availability of statistics. With the online poker game, all kinds of statistics are tracked in real time, allowing you to make decisions not only within games, but before games as well about what you are going to do during the online poker session. One place in which this is especially apparent is when you are searching for an online poker cash game. You always have information available in the lobby about each game, with stats available regarding hands per hour, size of the pot and percentage of players seeing the flop at a minimum.
Between these three minimum display stats, the most important one for finding a juicy online cash game is the players seeing the flop stat. This is almost always expressed as a percentage, so if you see 30% under this column in a 10-handed online poker cash game, you know that on average three players will see the flop each hand. Some hands might be more and some hands might be less, but the amount averages out to 3 out of 10 players seeing the flop on any given hand. This statistic is important because it shows you the relative “looseness” of a game.
The next most important stat out of the three is the hands per hour stat. This is important for the purposes of calculating your potential rate of profit from that table. To paraphrase the quote of Matt Damon’s character from Rounders, you can expect to win around one big bet an hour from a table at a normal land based cash game. Typically, that is about 30 hands an hour. That means that at 60 hands an hour you can expect two big bets an hour and at 90-100 hands an hour (the average for many high action cash game tables), you can expect three big bets an hour.
The actual average size of each pot is not that important, which is counterintuitive to most players, but perfectly logical when you compare the information that stat gives you with the information gleaned from the other two.
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