Before talking about the merits of single tabling, I should give you a brief history of my playing career. I started playing internet poker three years ago after watching it on TV. Like the majority of people I started off clueless, played above my bankroll and lost a lot. After about 6 months of constant studying and improvement I started to play reasonably and found myself holding my own in the 10/20 full table game I was playing at pokerroom.com.

If only somebody would have told me this...

In this month’s article I am going to try and give some advice to beginning players, advice I wish I would have received before I started playing. Hopefully, those players who have been playing for at least 6 months will agree, on the whole, with the advice I am about to give.

In my first article I discussed the merits of single tabling. In this article I am going to look at what you can learn from playing shorthanded. This article is not going to talk about the required tactics and strategy needed to beat a shorthanded table (I will save that for another day). We are going to concentrate on the skills that you will learn from playing shorthanded and how they will help you when (or indeed if) you return to full tables.

Some of the most important decisions you will make during a session are made at the outset, before a single card is dealt to you. In this month’s article I am going to look at those decisions and the thought processes you should go through when making them.

Before looking at them in detail, I should point out that most of the decisions listed below cannot be made in isolation. Depending on your poker knowledge and the state of your bankroll, you may give additional weight to some decisions over others. In some situations, the answer to one of the questions may be so important that it will override all of the other decisions.