If you’re just starting out with online poker then you perhaps have heard about poker sharks. These are the people who like to take your money and they can do this quite easily. The question is, “how do you avoid the sharks?”

The simple answer is that you can’t, you just have to shape up and learn the game because this threat is unavoidable. This is why certain players were so aptly named – Sharks (pros) and Fish (amateurs).

You would think that sharks would play on the high stakes tables winning $100’s per pot, but contrary to popular belief, many of these professional sharks tend to frequent the lower stakes tables in order to take the money from the fish, like taking candy from kids.

These sharks usually have from three to five tables open at any one time and will usually play on tables with blinds as low as $0.05/$0.10 per hand up to $0.25/$0.50 per hand. Each pot may only be on average between $1.00 and $10.00, but throughout the day (and with up to five tables open), most sharks will make a handsome little profit.

The best advice to give would be to simply close the table if you feel as though you are being hustled and playing on a table full of sharks. Some sharks even purposely make ‘donkey’ moves just to make you think they are not a shark. This means that they will inevitably take you to the cleaners at the decisive point and this is what makes a shark a shark.

There is no real way of avoiding them, so try to ‘up’ your game as quick as possible. The more hands you play, the more you will improve so that one day you can hopefully become the shark.

There is also a way of finding out about each player’s ability as there are now a growing number of portals in existence that offer players information on other players. Just by entering a username and the actual poker network that they are playing on, you can find out plenty of invaluable information.

Some of these sites are free to join and will give you X amount of searches on players per day, whereas some make you pay a subscription fee so that you can perform as many player searches as possible throughout the day.

This is an awesome tool for both new and experienced players and generally reveals the type of current form that a player is on as well as information such as the previous 10 or 20 results the player has had, the types of tourneys that the player generally enters and the actual earnings per tournament (or overall) that the player has received. This useful spying tool is largely unknown to many players but it can be very helpful when trying to locate the sharks.

The great thing is that this information is actually available, but you must not forget that other players can also freely view your details. You should always try to imagine that there are at least two or three sharks around any table.