Playing when card dead

Due to the very nature of online poker, players will go through times where they find themselves completely card dead, that is receiving unplayable hole cards and having to fold over and over again.

Learning how to play online poker this is not as much of a problem as depending on how many tables you play at once you can often see several hundred hands per hour but in a live tournament you may only see 30 or so hands an hour so a spell of being card dead can seem like an eternity.

If you go card dead during a cash game it is not a major problem as the blinds do not increase so will only eat into your stack slowly but in a tournament, where the blinds continually rise, being card dead can be disastrous as you need to play hands in order to keep ahead of the blinds and antes.

Whether you are in a cash game or a tournament you can actually use being card dead to your advantage. Your opponents will not know you are card dead unless you tell them, so they will just think you have started to play overly tight or that you had a rush of cards earlier in the game and have now reverted back to a tight style.

If you have not played a hand for a couple of orbits due to receiving poor cards, you can use this image to your advantage and make a raise in one of the later position to steal the blinds and antes. As your image will be very tight, they will give you credit for having a premium and and your bluff will usually get through. Likewise, if a loose player has been raising a lot preflop, a well-time three-bet should be enough to take the pot down uncontested.

Obviously you cannot continually raise and steal with rags otherwise you will eventually be called and barring a miracle flop you will be in serious trouble. So instead of feeling negative about your lack of solid hands, give yourself a different task, that of observing the table intensely whilst you are not in a hand.

When you are involved in a hand it is easy to get wrapped up in it and when you have no interest in the hand your attention wanders and you take little notice of what is going on. So if you do go card dead, try to watch the players still in the hand and see if you can pick up on any physical tells or anything that you can use to your advantage in future hands.

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