Online Poker Isolation Raise:

The isolation raise in online poker is a popular tactic adopted by successful online poker players.

Why is it so successful? Put simply, it allows you to exploit the weakest players at the table.

In poker, a game that is played between players, the majority of your income is derived from players who are making mistakes. Obviously the kinds of poker players who are making the majority of the mistakes in the big pots are the weaker players at the table.

One of the biggest weaknesses in their game is they have a tendency to play too many hands, usually in a passive nature, so you will see them limp/calling in hands a lot.

Unlike the pros, they are playing recreationally for a bit of fun, so want the action. How do they achieve that? By playing more hands since it's boring to always fold, especially if they have already committed money into the pot. So you will see them limping into pots and calling a raise to try and get lucky with their mediocre hands.

If you have a player who is always limping in front of you, it presents an opportunity to isolate them in certain spots, especially when you have a decent hand. By raising the pot, it enables you to gain control of the hand, so even when you miss the flop, you can still take down pots with a continuation bet, since the weaker player will assume you have a strong hand on the flop, having raised before the flop.

You will undoubtedly find lots of these types of players at Golden Palace Poker. When you do make a hand, having raised pre flop, it allows you to win a sizeable pot and hopefully their stack when they catch a piece of the board as well, since when your opponent is limp calling with KT and hitting a pair they're never folding.

The key is to be patient and wait for a good starting hand to be aggressive with. By tightening up your isolating range requirements, you can be confident that you have the best hand when you make top pair. Even when they limp/fold you win all the dead money in the pot and you create a more aggressive table image, which will hopefully help you to get paid off in future hands.

For the most part when you are isolating the weaker players at the table, the majority of the time the tend to limp/call pre flop and then fold the flop, so you will win a lot of small pots, but it all adds up over the course of a session.

If you adopt a tight aggressive pre flop strategy that isolates the weaker players at the table, it won't be a case of whether or not you will win money in the session, but exactly how much will you profit. It's ridiculously easy winning money against these types of opponents, and the beauty of it is they don't even realize how flawed their games are. If at all possible, try and profile the players before you even sit down at the online table, to try and get position on the weaker players. If they are sitting to your left, it's going to be more difficult trying to isolate raise them.