Sunday, April 12, 2009

How to Be Patient Playing Texas Holdem Poker

Texas Holdem
Texas Holdem poker is a mental game. You can’t control the cards you get but you can control how you play them, how other people think you’re playing them, and so on. Here are some ways to maintain your patience in poker and increase your chances of winning.

Only play the best starting poker hands: If you play too many hands, generally when you’re not being patient, you will end up losing more. Pick the best starting hands and you’ll waste less poker chips and keep yourself out of trouble. Some people play tight and only play 1 of every 5 hands. Other people say playing tight is more like 1 of every 10 hands. Either way, it changes your mindset to what good hands really are and keeps your chips in your stack.

Let other people expose themselves first: Don’t let other players learn your style before you learn how they play. Start a game slowly and be patient playing online. See how they react to common moves and remember that for later.

Don’t play the hand right after a bad beat: Better yet, take a couple of hands off to give yourself a time to cool down. Texas Holdem poker has a lot of volatile swings, don’t let yourself get trapped in your emotions. If you lose badly you want to make it up right away, but that never works out.

Know when to fold your cards: Patience in poker also means getting rid of losing hands before it costs you too much. You can always cut your losses, even it means hurting your pride. But hurt pride is better than a diminished chip stack. Patience in poker means you have to lose sometimes and know when to cut your losses. Sticking out a bad hand hoping for a river card is not patient, and it will cost you big time!

There are lots of ways to maintain patience when playing Texas Holdem poker. The most important thing to remember is that patience in poker is vital to success! Impatient players will end up losing their chips. You don’t want to be the guy who’s on tilt and goes all in with nothing, only to see his chips disappear. Play smart and be patient, and you’ll start winning much more.

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Good Poker Players Enjoy Luck that Opponents Give

poker

We all appreciate luck in poker, and wish we could bottle it and save it for future days, but in many ways luck is the enemy of a good poker player. First let’s look at luck from the perspective of the bad player. At least half the time when a bad player wins a pot, he will have gotten lucky to do it. The bad player comes from behind, sucks out when not getting pot odds, makes miracle perfect-perfect catches, spears a kicker on the river poker card, fills up bottom two pair against an opponent with top two pair. The bad player has a million ways to get lucky.

On the other hand, good poker players are playing with the best of it. Sure, they still get “lucky” sometimes, like making a flush draw on the river card, but they will have been getting pot odds on that draw and will have built the pot correctly too. Good players habitually do the mathematically correct action in any given situation. It’s not “lucky” for AA to beat J9. The good player actually tries to avoid being lucky, except to the extent that it would be lucky if the flop came AJ9.

One way that I often get accused of being “lucky” is when an opponent says: “You are so lucky I threw away my poker hand.” Well, that’s why I raised, to get you out. My luck here was again the residue of design. This is the sort of luck that good players manufacture all the time. But it’s not at all the same kind of luck that happens to the bad player. The bad player makes his own luck happen to him; the good player often makes other players give him good luck.

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The History of Roulette

roulette

Roulette is believed to have originated from French culture as the name is a French word which actually means "small wheel". There have been stories, however, that the game actually began in China, and was brought to Europe by communications between the Chinese and Dominican monks. Further stories have shown that the game may have also originated in Europe, as ancient Romans used to play games by spinning chariot wheels on their sides.

The game of roulette as we know it dates back as far as the 17th century to a famous French scientist named Blaise Pascal. It is believed that the game is a product of Pascal's attempts to build a perpetual motion machine, but some say that this is actually just a story.

The year 1720 saw the first spinning ball and rotating horizontal wheel combination to be used as methods of gaming. This game was called "roly-poly". The gaming acts of 1739 banned this game in England. Beau Nash, the Master of Ceremonies at Bath England, ignored these laws, and began a new game called "Even-Odd" which was similar to roulette. This game too was banned in 1745.

The game carried on developing over the next fifty years, into the one that we all know today. Paris casinos featured the modern roulette wheel around 1796, which had similar elements to today's roulette wheels. Europeans visiting New Orleans, Louisiana in the 1800's introduced roulette to the United States. People began to stop playing roulette as gaming establishment proprietors became greedy. As proprietors become greedier, more and more gamblers became unhappy with the 5.26% house edge, and were even more outraged when some roulette operators made a 31-number wheel which had a staggering 12.9% house edge.

The single "0" roulette game was invented in 1842 by two French brothers named Francois and Louis Blanc. From then on the history of roulette began to drastically change. The house edge was reduced from 5.26% to 2.70%, and the game became a remarkable success. Gambling was illegal in France at the time, so it was piloted in Hamburg (Bavaria), Germany and was both profitable and well-liked.

Roulette became popular up until World War II when Americans began to lose less to the game of craps and they found interest in the fact that blackjack was a beatable game. At that point, roulette became less popular. Despite that, many people still play roulette, and it is the oldest existing game in casinos today.

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