Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Texas Hold’em Food Chain

At the top of our actual food chain is said to be the shark. The same applies to poker. Poker has few sharks and many fish. It is not surprising that the sharks remain on the top of our poker food chain. That is their place!

Day after day more sharks are born; they bring their unidentified bodies to an online poker table and start chomping. Never do they eat alive the oldest, biggest and best of the shark world though, only fish! Look at the most popular online gaming sites. They have their sponsored sharks at the tables daily. These sharks eat alive even the most talented of players – the wanna be sharks. The wanna be’s simply can’t compete in the poker food chain. They just don’t quite have the skills. I guess we could call them turtles, compared to the great whites of the online poker ocean!

We have tad poles and guppies also in our poker food chain. It doesn’t matter what these little ones do, they remain on micro tables. The medium fish have skills just a little better then theirs chomp away at their bankroll and increase in the poker food chain as they grow.

To make a chart of the poker food chain is really simple:
  1. Great White Sharks: High Stakes Killers
  2. Turtles – High Stakes Attempters
  3. Medium Fish – Medium Stakes
  4. Guppies – Low Stakes
  5. Tad Poles – Micro Stakes
  6. Fish Out of Water – Stay off the Internet Poker Tables until you can swim.
Where do you fit in to the “Poker Food Chain”? Wherever you fit you must play your stakes accordingly. You can make money in poker regardless of your food chain level – Unless you are a fish out of water! (If you are get lessons on poker strategy).

For those who want to be a turtle I have a suggestion – Play medium to high stakes instead of attempting to come face to face with a predator you cannot possibly beat. If you are losing at medium stakes, go and eat some guppies! Guppies of course can always eat some tadpoles.

Let’s look at this as a classic example. I stepped down in the online “poker food chain” not so long ago – for 1 day! I increased my bankroll by 15 times what it was! Morally it may be seen as wrong, being a medium fish playing guppies. Regardless if I attempted to eat a turtle I would have been dead and had NO bank roll at all! At times we all need to step down in the food chain as part of survival. If we were down to our last $10 on our online poker site we would hardly play medium stakes.

Again, look at your level on the “poker food chain” and don’t be too proud to be a guppy or tad pole when needed. I have seen 1 of the BEST ONLINE poker players playing in $1 SNG’s. There is no shame – be proud! This player was ranked 80th in the world of online poker and was playing $1 tournaments due to being kicked and booted and eaten alive by great white sharks. He should have remained a turtle and instead became meat and reduced to a guppy! Sometimes we need to go down to get back up. Remember the food chain when we do this. Every guppy can grow into a fish!

By :Danielle Adams-Benham

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Sunday, July 19, 2009

Trapping in Online Poker Holly Wood Style

There is nothing like performing a beautiful trap when you have the nuts! Sucking your opponent dry feels great, especially when it’s Holly Wood Style!

I was playing online poker at a cash table; I had joined a friend for fun. Internet Poker is a great thing when you have friends abroad, I joined at a cash table, talked away and my friend and I were having the time of our lives. I was playing very safe; I was really there for the enjoyment. Indeed online gaming can be fun with friends!

We were on a full table full of aggressive players. There was one man - as an example – whom they were calling “re-buy boy”, he continually re-bought (Although I missed taking his chips, I took his seat as he left). They were playing loose as hell and me tight, is my point. So I am sitting playing tight and was dealt Ace and 8 of spades. The flop comes down giving me my nut flush straight away. There was no prior raise for this particular hand but they were about to start. I was raised: a huge raise! I sat and thought, and thought until I had almost used all my time clock prior to calling. I knew I had the nuts but extraction was the key. The turn came and was useless to either person. Regardless, my internet poker Hollywood performance had paid off! My only remaining opponent went all in which is exactly what I wanted! Snap call this time, no more need for acts.

His response was “OMG, WOW!” “You obviously don’t know her,” says my friend. Indeed he didn’t, but he wouldn’t forget now. Online Poker Software developers have given us a time clock to make sure that the game is played at a fair and reasonable pace. I suggest you use the software developer’s online gaming tools to your advantage.

Use the clock to pull Holly Wood Acting Stunts, use it to trap, use it to its full advantage like I did. Good Luck!

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Thursday, July 16, 2009

Online Poker Cheats

A few days back a lot of cash went missing out of my bank account. Needless to say, I was frantic. I was told at the bank that this happened when I used my visa card to pay for a lot of shopping. The card was swiped thrice, so thrice the bill amount was credited into the store’s account. Such incidents I am told are quite common. You need to be careful and alert at all times.

You might have come across many people who are afraid of making any kind of online transactions. Security is always at risk, they say. Online poker players too are wary of online casinos. They feel that the game might be rigged, as in the casino might be using bots (which are software programs pretending to be human beings) as other players which will help the casino win all the games. They also worry about their credit card details which are given to the casino to make payments. You might be enjoying a game of poker at home with a steaming mug of hot chocolate and in the meanwhile, someone has wiped your account clean.However the chances of such a thing happening are very difficult due to the
responsible gaming norms set in place by the sites

Players too, collude with each other at times and try to manipulate the game. The online casinos, however, are vigilant at all times and can easily detect such frauds.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Rounders’ connexion

Word is out that Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio is all set to star in an untitled film that centers on the world of online casinos based in Costa Rica.

This film is written by scribes Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who gave us the cult classic Rounders.

Rounders is set against the backdrop of New York’s underground world of high-stakes poker. It is the tale of Mike (Matt Damon), a master card player who trades the poker-playing rounds for law school. Even though, the new life he’s staking out seems like a legit road to success, it’s short on the thrills and excitement of back room poker games. So, when Mike’s longtime friend Worm is released from prison, and they need to quickly earn enough cash to pay off a huge debt that Worm owes; Mike deals himself back into the world of Rounders.

A “rounder”, by the way is a person whose sole means of earning a living is by playing cards. The film was widely appreciated by poker lovers. It greatly added to the popularity of Texas hold’em and other poker games.

There are pro poker players today who credit the movie for getting them into the game. The film drew in recent successful players such as Hevad Khan, Gavin Griffin and Dutch Boyd. One of the best descriptions of the influence the movie has comes from pro player Vanessa Rousso: “There have been lots of movies that have included poker, but only Rounders really captures the energy and tension in the game. And that’s why it stands as the best poker movie ever made.”

Rather than just being flamboyant, like the Bond movies, Rounders dwelt into the nitty-gritty’s of back room poker games in style.

At a point when the stakes are being raised, Mike stops and contemplates the game. He remembers a quote from Jack King’s book Confessions of a Winning Poker Player about how poker players don’t recall big wins they have, but remember accurately their big defeats.

The final scene shows Mike in a taxicab to catch a flight to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker.

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Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Learning to play poker: a novice’s experience

When I had just begun playing poker I was the raving maniac. A player who kept on calling and betting irrespective of what hand I was dealt. I never ever used the fold button and kept on loosing irrespective of who I was playing against. I would call this my kamikaze phase. Come to think of it the Kamikaze Pilots of World War II at least knew what they were up to. It took me the hard way to learn that just looking up a few poker rules and regulations and reading a few blogs does not qualify you to play online poker overnight. The kamikaze phase continued for some time till it came to a point that I started folding more frequently then the rest of the players in the poker room. I finally realized that one needs to vary your poker game play else your opponents begin to read your moves. The only saving grace in all this was that I was playing with play chips and not hard cash.

The next phase was a more calculating one. I happened to come across a couple of poker odds calculators. These tend to give the mathematically correct odds to know if you should be in the hand or not. Why I say mathematically correct odds simply because you have no way of knowing which cards may be there in you opponents hand. Also there is a large chance that there could be another Kamikaze maniac sitting on the same table as you. What really set this phase apart was that I began to look and calculate odds before deciding what to do next. I have still a long way to go and every day is a new day. I think I must add here is the fact that the more you play poker online, the more you gain in terms of experience and tactics which make you a better poker player as time passes. There are no short cuts in life and the same holds true for poker

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