You’ve signed up to a poker room, made your first deposit, got your bonus, hit the cash tables and everything is going wonderfully. You win some you lose some, but at the end of the month you are always in the black. You’ve even signed up for a generous rakeback or poker propping deal and you are doing nicely. Why on earth would you ever want to change anything in this mechanism that works so well? The reason is simple: more money. A good poker player is always on the hunt for new ways to generate revenue, and if something works out fine, it is always considered the lead-up to something much bigger.

Massive online MTTs (the kind that Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars host on a weekly basis, are excellent sources of poker money. MTTs in general offer much better investment/potential revenue ratios than cash games and STTs put together. These MTTs offer a great opportunity for an online player to take down a prize which can potentially change his/her life for a relatively small buy-in.

I’m not saying that there’s little money in cash games. There’s plenty there as well, and the ultra-high limit games see entire fortunes change hands in a few orbits. The problem is that in order to play in these ultra high limit games, one needs to have an out-of-this-world bankroll, and very few people can afford to take that much money to the poker tables. It is safe to say that in order to win $100k, you need a minimum of $100k in theory, but in practice you need much more than that.

In order though to make the successful jump from cash poker to the tournament tables, you need to address a few issues regarding strategy. There are a few apparently minor differences between game mechanics that induce some extremely significant differences strategy-wise. This is why some good cash game players suck at tournament play and why some good tourney players never seem to be able to get it right at the cash tables.

For starters, you need to get used to the idea that your stack is a finite one in tournaments. In cash games – provided you are properly bankrolled – keeping your stack near the maximum levels is a question of re-buying whenever you lose, or simply keeping the money in the game whenever you win. In cash games, your stack is a weapon, but you can afford to throw it around because you can easily replace it if lost. In a tournament, you stack will still be a weapon, but it has a dual mission to fulfill here: it also represents your tournament life. Lose your stack and you’re out. There are tournaments which allow you to re-buy once or a few times, but these re-buy opportunities are not significant enough to downgrade the importance of your tournament stack to cash game levels. In tournaments, you need to wield the weapon that your stack is masterfully: you need to cause damage to your opponents with it, while keeping it unharmed in the same time.

This is the reason why you’ll have to give up certain marginal EV+ situations. In a cash game, you should always act on EV+, even if your value is marginal. In the long-run, you‘ll recover your losses anyway. In a tournament, there will be no long-run if you take a serious hit to your stack. You’ll have to avoid marginal EV+ situations in order to be able to exploit hands in which your EV+ is much more obvious down the line.

In tournaments, the blinds grow bigger as you level up. Now there’s a shocker: you can never actually rest on your laurels, you need to be continuously tweaking your strategy to adjust it to the requirements the relationship between the blind size and your stack size calls for. Dan Harrington has devised a system in this respect, which offers players strategy recommendations in various BB+SB-to-stack-size situations.

The rakeback deal for which you’ve signed up in order to recover rake at the cash tables works in tournaments too: it offers you a rebate on the tournament fees you pay.

Whenever a rookie reaches a level when he’s going to start wondering about the impact the rake has on his online poker performance and he starts viewing the sign-up bonus as a realistic source of revenue rather than an unbeatable hurdle, he’s inevitably going to bump into the question: should he go for rakeback or for a good yield bonus deal instead. In some situations, the answer to that question is extremely simple. There are poker rooms out there which do not subtract bonuses from rakeback. What this means to you is that you’ll get both a bonus and rakeback if you join the room through the right channels. In such cases, comparing the two makes no sense at all.

Most poker rooms however will subtract bonuses from rakeback and because many poker rooms offer no rakeback at all, the choice will often come down to which poker room you sign up to. In such cases, knowing what you give up for something else is extremely important.

Poker rakeback refers to a percentage of the rake you generate via your real money actions, a percentage which finds its way back to your real money account, thus effectively taking the bite out of the poker rake. A rakeback deal never expires: you’ll be earning extra money on it for as long as you play, even if your poker room happens to discontinue offering rake back to new players. Square rakeback deals offer around 30% to their players but special rake rebate deals known as poker prop deals can even offer more than 100%.

A bonus is a form of rakeback as well. Upon sign-up, you have your bonus transferred to your bonus account, from where you’ll have to unlock it in order to have it transferred to your real money account. Once you’ve done that, you can use that money at the tables or you can cash it out. The bonus redemption process is similar to how rakeback works. You generate rake, and your bonus is released into your real money account depending on how much rake you generate. At the end of the day, your bonus is in fact a percentage of your rake which finds its way back to you.

The bottom line: while a sign-up bonus will yield you a bigger rakeback % for a limited time (if you’re playing small stakes), a rakeback deal will offer you a revenue source for as long as you play.

The object of poker is to win money. Sure, some people will argue that it’s also fun and it might be a rewarding activity for a diligent student of the game, but the bottom line is, every move you make at the table and every thought that crosses your mind while playing is directed towards making money, towards relieving your opponents of their stacks, towards winning.

Good players win by exploiting the mistakes their less skilled opponents make. With that in mind, the profitability of the game is obviously highly dependant on who you play against. According to experts, you’ll only win as much money as the table allows you to, even if you are an extremely efficient player.

The above facts explain why game and table selection are both considered important parts of overall poker strategy.

Game selection is about picking the right kind of game for your needs. The days when online poker rooms only offered their players the possibility to play Texas Holdem are long over. Nowadays Omaha and Stud are also available everywhere not to mention other – more exotic – poker variants. In regards to choosing the variant which suits your needs the best you need to know the following: Texas Holdem is a game of short term luck and long-term skill. In Holdem, rookies will be able to upset experienced opponents over the short-run, although this advantage will disappear over the long-run. If you’re a rookie looking to get started in real money poker, by all means do pick Holdem. If you’re a good player though, and you know you’ll be faced with beginners, try to take the action to the Omaha or Stud tables where your skills will offer you an unquestionable advantage over the rookies.

When good players play with other good players, Omaha and Stud tables can become extremely frustrating too. In this case, you’re better off playing these skilled opponents over at the Holdem tables.

Limits/stakes need to be according to the bankroll you possess. Playing on a proper bankroll is one of the most important prerequisites of being successful in the long-run, so make sure you’re well bankrolled for the limit you pick.

Table selection is another such vital problem, as it will ultimately determine the individual players that you’ll be going up against. Here are a few tips that will help you pick a good table:

In a live poker game, if you recognize several of the players as battle hardened pros, you should obviously avoid that table. Poker is not about bragging rights, so you shouldn’t be aching to lock horns with these guys. What you need is a table full of amateurs.

If a table is loud it means people are enjoying themselves, which means there will be more money in the pot in every hand. More often than not, loud tables also betray the presence of alcohol in the players’ systems, which is even better news for you.

If you realize you opponents are only playing the nuts and – while you can make some money off them – you’d be making much more at some other table, do not hesitate to make the switch.

Players should be well-stacked at the table of your choice (compared to the size of the blinds of course). Short stacked people will not pay well, and they’ll be tighter too.

In online poker, you should also pick a well-stacked table, but as far as other tells go, you’ll just have to hang around for a while and observe the betting patterns to gain a clue. Fortunately, online poker rooms allow observers to check play out unseen and unnoticed by those actively taking part in it.

Sign up for a rakeback deal today and start getting back some of the money that you normally lose to the rake. According to basic game theory, playing without rakeback is missing out on revenue and as such, it is a mistake.