Poker bankroll management, building and strategy – online poker guide

Fantasy betting at Draftbug

Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | Sports and Fantasy betting | 3 Comments

Fantasy betting is a big deal in the US, but not so much in Europe yet (most likely because sports betting is not illegal in Europe). I like the community aspect of fantasy betting so much that I decided to devote a page on the pokerbankrollblog entirely to Sports and Fantasy betting. My favorite fantasy betting site is Drafbug.com and for this reason I recently decided to become an affiliate and start promoting the site. The people behind Drafbug have written a thorough description of what Drafbug is all about, how to sign up and how to play in their contests. Read it through if you are interested in fantasy betting and post a comment if you have any questions.

What is Draftbug?
Draftbug offers daily fantasy sports contests, where you pick a roster of players for the current day’s games, and win or lose based on their performance that day. Registration is free and only takes a minute. You can play for free, and win small cash prizes, in our daily baseball freeroll. Once you’re ready to play for higher stakes, you can use your credit card to make an instant deposit. After you’ve made a fortune in Draftbug contests, you can receive your withdrawal via check.

How do you sign up for Draftbug?
Registration for Draftbug is free and easy. When you click on any of the Draftbug links or ads on this page, you’ll be brought to a web page that looks like this:

To access the registration screen, click the ‘Create Account’ button circled in yellow in the picture above. The registration screen will look like this:

You’ll need to fill out the requested information, and then click the “Registration” link in the lower left corner of the screen. You now have a Draftbug account, and will find yourself logged into the site and viewing a list of currently available contests.

How do you play in Draftbug contests?
Playing in contests at Draftbug is easy, fun, and profitable (for the winners). When you first log in to the site, you’ll be looking at a screen that looks like this:

The main, tabbed panel of the screen shows a list of the contests that are currently open for entry. From left to right, the columns show a unique id number, the sport, the entry fee, the total prize pool, a short description of the contest, the salary cap for the contest, the number players currently entered and allowed to enter, the deadline for entering the contest or making roster changes, and the type of contest (usually ‘public’).

To learn more about a specific contest or to enter a contest, you’ll click on the hyperlinked “Description”. Since this will be your first contest, we’ll assume that you haven’t deposited any money yet, and that you want to try out the daily freeroll contest. These contests are free to enter, and pay out a total of $5 to the top two finishers. Look for a contest (often the first one listed) with a description like “MLB Tuesday Freeroll”, and click on it. You’ll now be viewing a screen that looks something like this:

The top left section shows roster requirements for the contest. By default, this will be a 1B, a 2B, a 3B, a SS, a SP, a RP, and 3 OF. The top middle section shows which games are included. Some contests will only use night games, while others will use all games. Typically only the second game of doubleheader will be used. The upper right section shows contest prizes. The lower left section shows scoring rules for the contest, while the lower right shows who has already entered the contest.

If you’re ready to enter the contest, click the “I Agree” button to accept the terms of the contest. You will then be looking at a screen that looks like this:

The upper section shows the positions available for the contest. The position highlighted in green is the one that you’re currently selecting. If you want to skip to another position, simply click on it.

The middle, left section shows the players available at the current position, and their prices. If you have enough salary remaining to select a player, there will be a green check mark to the left of the player’s name. To select the player, click on the check mark.

When you’re done picking players, click the “Enter Team” button on the right side of the screen. You can come back to this screen at any time prior to the lineup deadline (which is usually a few minutes before the scheduled game time), by going to the “My Contests” tab on the main Draftbug screen, and clicking on the contest description.

Once the deadline has passed, you can view your opponents’ picks and live scoring by going to the “My Contests” tab on the main Draftbug screen, and clicking on the “View Results” hyperlink.

Check out FanDuel fantasy betting here.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Sports and Fantasy betting

24 WSOP Bracelet Events to be Streamed Online

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Poker News | No Comments

Submitted by Scott Jack, this article belongs to the Poker News series.

The World Series of Poker has just announced several days ago that there will be twenty-four bracelet events that will be streamed online. Both Bluff Magazine and ESPN360 are the two websites where you can watch the action and each of the websites will be allowed to stream 12 final tables apiece. The entire tournaments won’t be available online, but all of the final tables will be streamed online and the video will almost be in real-time.

The Gaming Control Board has rules in place which prevent the action to be delivered via online stream in real-time and this is why there will be a slight delay. Last year a lot of the action from the Rio was streamed online as well with a slight delay and it didn’t cause any problems for viewers. If you can’t make it to Las Vegas for the WSOP then the next best thing is to watch it online via a practically live stream.

With the streams being broadcasted on Bluff Magazine and ESPN360 nobody needs to worry about any technical difficulties because they are two of the best sites for the job. There will be no cost to watch the streaming action from your computer as was the case last year as well when the WSOP was being streamed.

All of the twenty-four poker tournaments that will be streamed online don’t consist of the Main Event and several other tournaments. Part of the reason is because the Main Event isn’t finished until months afters all of the upcoming events. The first final table will be played on June 2nd and the last event will be streamed July 1st so you almost have a full month of non-stop live WSOP action to watch from your computer for free.

Some of the most popular World Series of Poker events that are being streamed online are as followed. Make sure you try to watch as many of them as you can because you will not only learn a lot about playing live tournaments, but it’s also going to be tons of fun.

•    Event 15 – $5K No Limit Holdem Six Handed – June 8th – ESPN360

•    Event 29 – $10K No Limit Holdem Heads-Up – June 15th – ESPN360

•    Event 33 – $10K Limit Holdem – June 17th – ESPN360

•    Event 45 – $10K Pot Limit Holdem – June 25th – Bluff Magazine

•    Event 49 – $50K H.O.R.S.E. Poker – June 30th – ESPN 360

There are still plenty of other smaller buy-in events which will be broadcasted, but if you’re like most of us and you don’t have an entire month to watch poker try and catch the above final tables. The most anticipated final table should be the $50K H.O.R.S.E. Poker tournament as many of the best poker players in the world will be competing in this event which should make for a strong final table.

This news is brought to you by Scott Jack the author of a Poker Blog.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker News

The Real Poker Game: Deepstack Poker

Monday, May 25th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Strategy, Poker Tournament | No Comments

Submitted by John, this article belongs to the Poker Tournament series

You can find a lot of different poker games online lately. Not only there’s the difference between tournament poker and cash games, you can also choose between long handed and short handed games, single or multi-table tournaments,… . But there’s another important factor which determines your game: the amount of chips you sit down with (in regard to the size of the blinds).

It’s a known fact among the more experienced poker players that most tournaments in a lot of online poker rooms can’t offer you a quality poker game. The starting stacks are mostly not big enough in regard to the size of the blinds, which increases quickly. The result is ‘early shoving’: because you end up fast with less than ten big blinds, you can’t wait anymore for your quality hands to play and just have to go all-in to see if your hand holds up in a coinflip or worse.

This is definitely the case with single table sit ‘n go’s. There simply isn’t a poker room yet which offers you deep stack single table tournaments. Luckily there are rooms who offer enough quality deep stack tournaments like Full Tilt Poker (although the buy-ins are reasonably high here, so not suitable for small bankrolls) and PokerStars (offers tournaments starting at $2). So what’s so special about these deep stack tournaments?

Making a game deep stack completely changes the game. You will notice you can play a lot more hands in those games, making it more similar to a cash game. Because you’ll always have more big blinds, you don’t have to get all your chips in the middle before any card on the board is turned. In contrast, there’s room for more play on every street because things like ‘implied odds’ are way more important in those games. Maybe you don’t get the right pot odds at a certain moment in a hand, but because both you and your opponent play with a lot of chips you might have to call: if you hit your (miracle) card you can win a lot of chips! You can find some more tips about deep stack poker right here.

So deep stack poker really is a great opportunity for the more experienced poker players who want to experience what it’s like to be in a real tournament, just like the pros on TV. If you already have troubles with your patience in regular sng’s or tourneys, you should not play deep stack. Finally you should not give up after missing the money a couple of times, because there’s a bigger chance you miss the money than reaching the money in tournaments with like 90,180, or even more than 1000 players. Just try to win in the long run, like this guy tries . Good luck!

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Strategy, Poker Tournament

Gardening project update 1

Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | Off topic | 5 Comments

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted a piece about my gardening project which means that it is about time for an update. I actually took some heat for my first gardening project post; apparently people were disappointed to read about plants on a poker blog, some even threatened to stop reading my blog if I continued posting about my garden.

Therefore before I continue with tales of plants I thought I would write at least something about poker…..

I have started listening to a new poker radio show, “The All in Radio Poker Show“, hosted by Vic Porcelli, Andy Kazen and Craig Hogard every Saturday (I have forgotten the exact time due to the time difference between USA an Europe).  You might recall that Vic Porcelli has contributed with some really good articles on this blog.  Anyway in the future I will be writing a weekly review of the show and also contribute to it from time to time.

Now back to the garden

Here’s what it looks like now

As you can everything is growing nicely and our tomato plants have their first flowers. We did have a bit of a set back a couple of days ago when a massive thunder storm flattened most of the summer flower seedlings which caused an invasion of slugs and snails. I managed to kill all the snails (killing snails isn’t that hard actually) and  pick up most of the seedlings, so we are in the clear for now.

I will update you again in a couple of weeks.

Tags: Off topic

Personality Deficient

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | Poker and Life, Poker Articles | No Comments

Submitted by Dungbeetle, this article belongs to the Poker and Life series

It’s been a while since I’ve checked up on Dungbeetle’s poker life on the Magical Mystery Poker Tour blog. Last I heard he was not doing well and sadly the bad streak has not improved. Below is a particular sad post which I have chosen to post here because it reminds me that no matter how many times we keep saying to ourselves that poker is a variance game and bad beats / losing streaks are supposed to happen, sometimes they simply get the better of us leaving us miserable.

Work finished early today, so I thought I’d continue my hate/hate relationship with online tournaments and promptly lost $600 without ever coming close to the money. I played poorly, but seemed to be cold decked a lot.

The highlights:

- Held AA on a board of AK78K whilst going well in a $100 tournie. Lost to KK. Money all went in on the river after we both slow played.
- Flopped 9 high diamond flush out of small blind when average stack in a $75 tournie – other guy has ten high flush
- Held QQ on KQxx board in UB tournie – got it in against KQ – river = K

I’m not really complaining as I didn’t play well. In 2007 and 2008 I was dynamite in online tournaments, taking down about 85k in profit. Now I am just making up the numbers. I actually canned 2 tournaments with average stack tonight – there is just no point, so I might as well be blinded off.

Not sure what the answer is. My son, girlfriend, friends and family are fantastic, but I just seem to get down on myself and that clouds everything.

Clearly I’ve had a few wines before this post, but maybe it’s good to get stuff off the chest. However, it seems the upcoming Vegas trip is a car crash waiting to happen.

I think time and again how lucky I am – there are millions of people in the world who are much worse off either financially or health wise. Despite this self coaching I am unable to lift this downer.

I need to lift out of this pathetic self-pity, but whether I have the strength to do this is another matter.

About to play football manager………..anger factor about to rise by a multiple of ten.

Apologies readers for you wasting five minutes to read this drivel

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker and Life, Poker Articles

How are poker bots raking online money?

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Rules, Poker Strategy | 12 Comments

Submitted by Thomas, this article belongs to the Poker Strategy series.

Sophisticated card-playing robots – known as “poker bots” – have now been playing online for years and the trend is accelerating. The increasing activity on poker bots forums and the growing interest generated by the annual poker bot competition (organized by the University of Alberta) are prime indicators of this trend.

Of course, online poker rooms have been fighting bots since the beginning as it hurts their
revenues but, detecting bots is becoming more challenging every day as bots improve their
counter-detection measures. While Full Tilt, one of the leading online poker rooms, recently
successfully detected a network of bots (and redistributed the seized bankrolls, thousands of
dollars, to the fooled human opponents), it only shows the tip of the iceberg.

This increasing presence of online poker bots proves, if still needed, that it is a very lucrative
business to be in. But how are poker bots raking online money? In other words, how come poker
bots are so successful against human players?
Thomas Kessler, founder of My Poker Coach (a free Poker coaching service based on a
leading bot), explains what makes poker bots so strong:
In the long run, poker bots are winning against humans and this can easily be explained by a
number of bots’ intrinsic properties:

• Analytical power: bots have, already today, a massive amount of analytical power and it
is going to further double every two years as computers become more powerful. Our bot,
for instance, simulates ~5 million situations at the Flop in less than a second to perfectly
assess the current hand strength and the possible outcomes. Something a human player
will obviously never match.

• Lifelong memory: can you remember how the opponent sitting next to you last month was
playing? Bots have a memory that will never fail. They can remember all their opponent’s
previous actions and playing style. In our case, we store all the observed moves (even if
our bot isn’t in the hand) in a large database and, next time we play against the same
opponent – even in 3 years, we already know his playing style.

• Discipline: most humans are open to emotions and are sometimes looking for adrenaline
in a game. Bots are disciplined and will, for instance, never go on a tilt. Discipline is key in
poker and always pays off in the long run.

• Game richness: there are many great poker strategy books out there but most players
remember less than 20% of it and they often over-use the few strategies they remember.
Bots can learn a large set of strategies and only apply them when most appropriate.

• Patience: who likes to fold 80% of his hands without seeing the Flop? Bots will only play
hands that should be played, even if they’ll have to spend most of their time watching
opponents playing (and collecting information on their playing style).

When asked what human players can do to defeat bots, Thomas says: to increase your chances
against bots you should definitely train yourself with them to learn their play pattern
and you should frequently change your online ID so that bots can’t rely on their historic database when playing against you.
So, next time you play online, ask yourself if you’re ready to play against bots!

About MyPokercoach.net:
Created by voluntary Artificial Intelligence developers, MyPokerCoach provides a free
online poker coach that has recently proven to be stronger than Poker Academy Pro 2 (the leading
commercial poker software).
The coach will provide play advices in a fictive online Texas Limit Hold’em game against 4 to 9 bots
(using play money) and give detailed explanations on the advices. It can directly be launched using
the button “Launch coach” on the MyPokerCoach site as no software installation is needed (it only
requires Flash version 10 to run in your internet browser).

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Rules, Poker Strategy

Betting@betfair’s poker portal

Sunday, May 10th, 2009 | Poker Articles | No Comments

Introduction

Betfair.com was the World’s first betting exchange, opening it’s doors to online punters in June 2000. What sets Betfair apart from regular bookmakers is that customers chose their own odds and whether they want to back or lay an event. This means that at Betfair you are betting against other customers in what can best be described as the sportsbetting equivalent of a stock market. As payment for organizing thousands and thousands of bets between customers every day Betfair charges a 5% (and less for valued customers) commission for each winning bet.

The people behind the betting@Betfair site have realized the demand for an online community for all the Betfair customers and thus created a portal with background and supporting information for all the betting activities that take place at Betfair. Of course these days you won’t find a sportsbetting site that doesn’t also offer poker to its customers. Betfair is no exception and therefore betting@Betfair also has an extensive poker section which will be the main topic of the remainder of this review.

Betting@Betfair/poker has a pretty impressive line-up of featured poker writers including Annette Obrestad, Sorel Mizzi, John Tabatabai and Peter “Zupp” Jepsen who each run their own blog through the site. Most of the really good articles on the site come from betting@Betfair/poker’s in house poker expert, Marcus Bateman, who I must say knows what he’s talking about. You can also follow the progress of the small stakes poker player Matthew Pitt along with other selected Betfair poker bloggers.

Poker Bloggers and articles

To give you an idea of the selection of poker articles available through Betting@Betfair/poker I have selected my top 5 articles and listed them below:

• Rocket Science, by Peter “Zupp” Jepsen. From 3500$ to 65000$ in 50 minutes…..now how sick is that?
• The re-re-steal, by Marcus Bateman. If you can master and time the re-re-steal move you will have gained a powerful weapon in your pursuit of winning poker tournaments.
• Pot control, by Marcus Bateman. When you’re deep stacked in a tournament and up against another deep stack,  practising pot control will save yourself from losing a big portion of your stack with a strong, but not super strong, hand.
• Funny situations from recent live games, by John Tabatabai. I love reading tales from high stakes games where the pros get bad beated and make mistakes just like the rest of us
• Attacking the big stack, by Sorel Mizzi. Don’t be afraid to attack the big stack in poker tournaments as there is often a good amount of chips to be found here. On the other hand if you have a hard time playing a chip lead, read this article and think about what you can do to defend against people attacking your stack.

Annoyances

• The betting@betfair/poker site has accumulated a large number of good poker articles, but it is almost impossible to get an overview of the themes they cover. This is due to the fact that articles are solely arranged on the site by the the people who wrote them. As a consequence say you want to find an article about bankroll management, you then have to look through the list of articles posted by each writer to check whether it’s there or not.

• The left menu seems to have a mind of its own in certain situations. For example when Peter Jepsen’s blog is chosen, many of the menu items disappear. And if you click WSOP, the sequence of left menu items changes and new menu items appear. This is all a bit confusing.

Suggestions for improvements

• Improve navigation of article themes by adding a TAG or theme category system

• The “More about Betfair poker” section doesn’t contribute much. It contains old, and my opinion irrelevant, articles and might as well be removed from the site or remade into a page that adds value to the users

• The “Poker Video Vault” section is intuitive to navigate, but a lot of the videos are quite old. Maybe there should be a time limit on how long videos can stay online.

• The organization of the left menu is not intuitive. It feels quite unorganized and does not aid the user in navigating through the articles. I think the left menu would improve by having some overall headers such as “Featured Poker Pros”, “Featured Poker Bloggers” , “Articles” , “WSOP” etc. When clicking the header, a drop down list of the sub menu points should appear. For the “Articles” header it would be really nice if the drop down list contained links to the different poker themes covered on the site.

Conclusion

Betting@betfair/poker contains a large collection of really good poker articles written by people who know what they are talking about. All the site requires from you is a little patience to navigate through the articles and I’m sure you will find one that will improve your game.

Tags: Poker Articles

Draftbug blogger freeroll

Friday, May 8th, 2009 | Sports and Fantasy betting | 2 Comments

Wednesday this week I was invited to participate in the Draftbug blogger MLB fantasy betting freeroll. Since I have no clue what so ever about baseball and fantasy betting I thought it would be a great way to learn how these kind of events take place.

It was actually easier than I thought. I simply signed up for an account and then registered for the freeroll through the main lobby. This very much resembles the sign-up procedure for restricted poker freerolls. Once registered, I could enter the clubhouse for the event where I was to chose my team by the points cap method. Basically you have 1400 points available to set your team of 10 players. When you click on each of the positions to fill, you are presented with a list of players to chose from with each player costing a certain amount of points.

Having no idea what the OF, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, C, SP and RP positions mean I just picked some random players so the total points added up to 1400. Needless to say this is probably not the optimal approach and sure enough I finished in last place out of the 13 participants. My team scored 9 points in total compared to 61 points for TheInsidePitch’s winning team

I quickly want to mention that a really cool feature of the Drafbug site is that once the MLB games start you can follow your team’s performance live in the clubhouse.

I talked to the guy who runs the Drafbug site while I was setting my team and he told me that he usually gets his player information from either Yahoo (Yahoo|Sports|MLB|Players) or Hardball Times. I will definitely try to understand player positions and get some more detailed information on their current form when I play my next event.

Here’s the list of the other bloggers who participated in the Draftbug Blogger freeroll. Most of the blogs are about sportsbetting so check them out if you want to learn more. I will see if I can arrange a poker freeroll one of these days so I can beat the guys on my homeground. How hard could it be to beat a bunch of sportsbetting poker noobs…lol ?

• Alex Zelvin, ‘waiver wire’, The Waiver Wire

• Kyle Huberman, ‘icehube’, Draftbug Millionaire

• Dave Hall, ‘Roto Guru’, Roto Guru

• Troy Patterson, ‘TroyPatterson’, Rotosavants

• Sean, ‘scojo’, 27 Pitches

• Nick Cichielo, ‘Junkballers’, junkballers

• Josh Culp, ‘Future of Fantasy’, Future of Fantasy

• Dan Williams, ‘TheInsidePitch’, The Inside Pitch

• Justin Hulsey, ‘JayHulsey’, Fandemonium Sports

• Paul Bourdett, ‘The Pick-up Artist’, Rotoexperts

• Mike, ‘bonds’, Winning at Fantasy Sports Live

• Steve Schroeder, ‘stv1313’, Steve’s Gambling Sketchbook

Check out fantasy betting at FanDuel

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Sports and Fantasy betting

The toothpick, apple and fork balancing trick

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | Off topic | 3 Comments

Since I don’t really have any poker related articles to post today, I thought you might find the toothpick, apple and fork balancing trick interesting.

The toothpick, apple and fork balancing trick

Nobody at my work thought the trick was cool, but they are all physicists so what can you expect?

IMO this is an exceptionally illustrative example of the Lever Principle in action, and best of all it only took me about half an hour to master.

Tags: Off topic

Gardening project

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 | Off topic | 3 Comments

This is about as offtopic as it gets:-) My girlfriend and I decided to tidy up our patio about a week ago and in the process we purchased two tomato plants and sowed a bunch of different wild summer flower seeds in the limited soil we have available.

I thought it would be kind of fun to documents how the plants in our little garden grow during the summer. Many of the seeds have actually already germinated, but you probably won’t be able to see them in the first picture series below.

Tomato plants, Hostas and Hortensia

Pelargoniums and hopefully soon to come summer flowers

I will give you another update in a couple of weeks

Tags: Off topic