Poker bankroll management, building and strategy – online poker guide

Why players struggle in no limit cash games – part 3

Sunday, December 4th, 2011 | Poker and Life, Poker Cash Games, Poker Strategy | No Comments

Everywhere you look these days then there are poker coaches, poker websites and poker books and magazines all discussing no limit hold’em. But yet even as a full time player and writer then I am still not blinded to the fact that this form of poker is probably the most difficult of the lot for novice players to succeed at. In the final part of this series then I want to discuss variance and how this affects your mind set. I often hear how tournament poker has the worst variance out of all of the major forms of poker. I am certainly not going to dispute this as it is a given.

We recommend these poker bonus deals

However what you also need to factor into the equation is that if you are playing a live event then even if you bust out horribly, you are never going straight back into another event in a negative frame of mind. This is not the case in online cash games where if you get AA busted by KK for 100bb then you just may be multi-tabling and facing several more key decisions within the next few seconds. In fact you may be buying back into the very same table that you have just lost 100bb on.

What makes matters even worse is that these beats can come thick and fast online and you can take several very big punches in a very short space of time even though the speed of online play means that you will get into the long term faster. This is not always seen or noticed by novice players in the heat of the moment and is why variance can often be the most formidable enemy that any poker player has to face during their lifetime as a player.

We recommend these poker school and poker tools

In fact many a potential successful player has probably stopped playing the game simply because a really bad run very early in their poker life totally and utterly destroyed their confidence. Someone once said that poker was a “tough way to make an easy living” and these words are very prophetic. Poker can be an easy living if you can accept everything that comes with it or it can just be the hardest thing that you have ever tried to do in your life.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk

Upcoming poker weekend

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 | Poker and Life, Poker Tournament | 2 Comments

I’m sitting here – bored as hell – playing the PokerStars daily 50k$ guaranteed tournament and suddenly realized that it’s been ages since I wrote a post on my blog. Since I’m not getting any playable cards what so ever, I thought I might as well fill in whoever reads this blog what I’ve been up to lately.

The main take home message is that I’m busy. About 2-3 months ago I enrolled in an MBA program to get one step closer to a big-money job as director of some insanely – GOD DAMN IT just busted out with AJ vs KQ, Jokerstars kicks me in the balls again -  rich company. In addition, I started up a new website project, which will hopefully be launched within the next couple of months; it’s going to be awesome!!!!

Anyway back to poker. This weekend my poker buddy Arturo will be visiting me in Copenhagen. We will be kicking ass on PokerStars. You have hereby been warne

Top 10 USA Casinos For Poker #9 – Bellagio, Las Vegas

Sunday, September 18th, 2011 | Poker and Life, Poker Articles, Poker Top 10 Lists | No Comments

In this article series we plan to make a top 10 list of casinos for poker in the USA

The Bellagio is an iconic venue which is known around the world. Having become a shining beacon of Las Vegas, Sin City’s top casino has been showcased in many a film, television show and other entertainment, bringing it to the forefront of the public eye. However, whilst the glitz and glamour of the venue may be ever present, it hasn’t stopped the fact that the Bellagio really is one of the worlds top gambling establishments.

We recommend these poker bonus deals

Part of a famed hotel complex, the Bellagio is located in the very heart of Las Vegas, offering easy access for all visitors to one of the most popular American cities. Built on the Vegas Strip, the Bellagio replaced the legendary Dunes hotel, opening in 1998 with a reported $88m grand ceremony. It has found international acclaim on the gamblers circuit and continues to be a top spot for notorious poker players including Jennifer Harmon, Barry Greenstein, Chip Reese, Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson.

One of the attractions of the Bellagio is that if caters to a wide number of visitors whether gamers want to drop just a few dollars or play with thousands. An impressive art gallery, the famous fountains and fine restaurants can be found at the Bellagio, enabling those enjoying the casinos services to spend many hours enjoying their favourite pastime whilst surrounded in glitz and beauty. Meanwhile, the casino includes a wealth of gambling opportunities including the usual slot machines, some of which are unique to the Bellagio, and table games such as baccarat, craps, roulette and poker. And it is poker that makes the Bellagio one of the worlds most sought after venues.

Whilst playing against the house can be fun, the Bellagio offers one of the best poker rooms in the world, with high rollers able to come and bet thousands amongst each other. Whilst gamers can make a few hundred grinding away at the table games, it is in the poker room where the real money is made, and for those entering this high stakes world, it’s worth getting some practice by using websites such as partypokerbonuscodes.com to play a few free games first.

We recommend these poker school and poker tools

The poker room itself has the same chic appeal as the rest of the Bellagio complex, and it offers one of the only live poker spectator events in the industry with its ‘Big Game’ of $2,000 and $4,000 limits. However, aside from the main event there is plenty going on, and the casino has regular tournaments of Hold ‘em including $300/600, $75/150 and $4/8 limits allowing everyone to play no matter their budget. Las Vegas’s only $20/40 stud game is found here, and they also provide a range of no limit Hold ‘em games. Of course, such is the popularity of Bellagio that weekend waits for lower stakes tables can take hours, and staff can sometimes seem a little pompous. But, whether gamers want to be spectators, dabble a little or play for big bucks, the Bellagio remains one of the world’s top poker venues.

Why do you play poker?

Sunday, August 14th, 2011 | Poker and Life, Poker Tournament | 2 Comments

Despite being in a rotten tournament slump these days with no cashes in ages and underdogs constantly busting me out, I still somehow enjoy the game. Why else would I keep playing through frustration after frustration with a bank account that would be better off if I didn’t play at all? Maybe it’s simply a bad habit when I’m bored or maybe it’s more of a love/hate relationship…..fact is I keep playing. Why do you play poker?

Frustration at the tables this weekend

Sunday, August 7th, 2011 | Poker and Life, Poker Tournament | No Comments

Arghhhhh haven’t had any success what so ever this weekend. Lost 5-10 key hands in tourneys where I was ahead by 65% or better. Haven’t hit my draws while opponents have hit their draw all the time – when I hit top pair, they hit straight or flush; when I hit straight, they hit flush. Sometimes poker is such a joke….it’s been for ages since I’ve had a decent tourney cash. SIGH!!!!!

Top 10 USA Casinos for Poker #10: MGM Grand Las Vegas

Saturday, April 16th, 2011 | Poker and Life, Poker Articles, Poker Top 10 Lists | No Comments

In this article series we plan to make a top 10 list of casinos for poker in the USA

Located right in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip, the MGM Grand is a majestic sight and the second largest hotel resort complex in the world. The current building opened in 1993, replacing the Marina Hotel which had stood since 1975. As a whole, the casino has gone through some interesting changes over the years. It initially featured a Wizard of Oz theme and a family-friendly amusement park on site before switching to its current Art Deco, Hollywood style.

We recommend these poker bonus deals

Attractions at the MGM Grand

The MGM Grand’s attractions include a famous lion habitat and its casino is the largest in Las Vegas, offering thousands of slot machines, a wide variety of table games including over 100 tables of Blackjack and an enormous Race and Sports Book.The poker room at the MGM Grand is a favorite both among locals as well as visitors from all around the world. It features 22 tables, the majority of which spread No Limit and Limit Holdem, and the area is spacious and comfortable. The staff is extremely courteous and can provide you with anything from a drink to a tableside massage.

Poker games at the MGM Grand

One of the best features of the MGM poker room is the variety of poker games it offers, including daily tournaments. Texas Holdem cash games are quite affordable, as you can always play games as low as $2-$4 Limit or $1-$2 No Limit. For higher-stakes players, the $500 buy-in No Limit cash game always has action and another interesting variety is /$4/$8 Limit with a kill pot, something rarely seen in a casino. Some beginners lament the fact that there is no bad beat jackpot offered, but this really means that the house takes a smaller percentage of rake from each pot, which really adds up in the long run.

The poker tournaments at the MGM Grand are also extremely popular. Every day of the week there is a $65 buy-in No Limit Holdem freezout at 11am, and Sunday through Thursday there is also an evening tournament starting at 7pm with an $85 buy-in.

The level of poker competition at the MGM Grand

The availability of low-stakes poker coupled with the fact that the MGM Grand is one of the most noticeable casinos on the Strip makes the level of play comparatively soft, and the games can get downright fishy at times. A large number of beginners use the MGM Grand to test out their budding poker skills, and the table atmosphere is typically quite friendly. For experienced poker players, there is great potential for large profits. You will still be challenged, however, if you manage your bankroll well, and move to some of the bigger games. The daily tournaments offer another type of poker test.

We recommend these poker school and poker tools

Poker pros at the MGM Grand

You likely won’t encounter as many professionals at the MGM Grand as you might at some of the higher end Las Vegas casinos, but multitudes of poker players gladly make that trade-off for its comfortable environment, inclusive nature and pleasant atmosphere. The fact that the MGM Grand also offers incredible cuisine, world-class entertainment and the largest casino in Las Vegas will give anyone plenty to do in between poker sessions.

Sick of poker – but can’t stop playing

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011 | Poker and Life, Poker Articles | 4 Comments

When ever I bust out of tourneys these days my first thought is always: “what an utter waste of time” followed by “why do I keep playing every week?”. The next line of action is usually to close my account for a number of days. The following evening, I find myself missing something to do. Poker has become a way of killing off some hours between workouts, updating this blog and spending time with my girlfriend. It’s almost become a habit. I seriously need something else to do in the time slot between coming home from work and going to bed. I also need to stop playing poker, when I’m not motivated to put in the long haul. Does anyone else feel the same way at times?

Online Poker Cheating

Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 | Poker and Life, Poker Articles | No Comments

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

Adam wrote the article below about online poker cheating. Have you experienced online poker cheating? If so we would love to hear from you in the comment section of this article.

Cheating in online poker is a very popular conspiracy topic for poker forums and communities.  The idea of “cheating” in online poker can create a lot of sub-topics, and it largely depends on what we define as cheating – and who’s doing the cheating in the first place.

We recommend these poker bonus deals

Poker Rooms Cheating
Poker rooms tend to get a lot of press from disgruntled poker players who receive continuous bad beats or get “sucked out” of massive pots by a set on the river.  However, it is extremely unlikely that any poker room particularly the public traded ones like PartyPoker incorporate cheating or rigging the deck into their operational strategy. The negative publicity and legal settlements against them would bankrupt the company and may even force the owners into jail.  Hence, the odds are 99% that a poker room doesn’t rig the deck or con their players out of their money.

Online Poker Players Cheating
If you’re going to get cheated in online poker, the chances are that it’s going to be from the other players sitting at your table.  There are two forms of online poker player cheating that can be used to exploit the system: active cheating and passive cheating.  Active cheating works by players working in teams or colluding against the others at the table.  They’ll continuously raise the other players out of the pot and basically steal every pot possible losing you big chunks of your poker bankroll.  Fortunately, this type of collusion can be caught out by the poker room’s automated software.  Passive cheating, where opponents communicate each other holdings to each other (on msn), is much harder to spot, and is your highest chance of being cheated against in online poke.  I have witnessed this form of collusion myself in the past, along with one of the player’s getting refunded by the poker room, so I can tell you that it does happen. None the less, it really doesn’t happen that often and there still ways to defend yourself from it with a tighter strategy.
In the recent past – specifically on the Cereus Network, security lapses enabled a group of players to cheat by seeing everyone’s opponent’s playing cards.  This caused a massive upset in the industry, but it was spotted and remedied literally hours afterwards however.  Things like this might happen on odd occasions, but 99% of poker sites employ 128bit encryption and RNG (random-number generators) to ensure hacking is impossible. This is similar to the type of security that modern online banking use.

We recommend these poker school and poker tools

Poker Cheating with Poker Tools
The most common method for cheating in online poker –regardless of whether you consider it cheating or not – is to use live tracking software and a Poker HUD.  Together, these tools provide key information and reads about the opponent’s at your table.  You can use them to narrow down your opponent’s hand range and get a feel for his playing style.  The majority of these tools are accepted at major poker sites such as Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, however there are a number which are forbidden, specifically those live tracking tools which use a remote database of data as opposed to uploading your own hand history from your desktop.  To see which poker tools are forbidden, you can go to www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/prohibited.

Phishing Online Poker Account Details
The final method of cheating in online poker is through phishing.  Phishing involves using spoof emails and fraudulent websites to trick players into giving them personal information that can be used to hack into their account.  You can easily defend yourself against this type of cheating by being smart about who you divulge sensitive information to.

Tags: Poker and Life, Poker Articles

What type of poker player are you

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 | Poker and Life, Poker Articles | No Comments

Submitted by Professional Poker Player Adam Breit, this article belongs to the Poker and Life series.

What type of poker player are you? Adam wrote the following article about the subject

There are a lot of ways to approach poker and these result in different types of poker players. The first way people play poker is the easiest and most entertaining. It is the approach of the gambler, the true addict. This is the man that goes to the casino with $1000 in his pocket, ready to be spent on fun. Somewhere deep inside his mind he knows he will probably lose a lot of money, but this doesn’t bother him at all. Why? He ignores all the little voices that tell him he will almost certainly lose. He tells himself there is a chance he will come home with a shitload of money, and all of his problems will be gone. He dreams about showering his wife and children (or himself) with gifts. Clearing the bad conscience he built up from all of his previous visits to the casino, where he wasted his family’s money. But naturally this rarely, if ever, happens. And every time it doesn’t he tells himself; “oh well, at least I had fun”.

We recommend these poker bonus deals

This is the tragic kind of poker player and rational beings obviously do not agree with this kind of idiocy. Especially when you can actually win money with poker! In my opinion poker is a sport and not a game. It is like playing tennis in a club your whole life, but never actually training and getting better, never winning any prize money. It might be fun, but the entry fee is $5000 a year. In my opinion poker should never be approached like that; it has to be taken seriously and there is no way around it.

One exception can be made when you’re the second kind of poker player, the rich boy. Then you have all (or at least, a significant portion) of the money in the world. It is like a world where Nuclear Fusion works, and electricity is almost free, like the air we breathe. Losing money loses its significance, since you have near unlimited access to it. “Paying for playing” doesn’t count anymore and you can finally have careless fun with this game, without being anywhere near afraid you will end up in the gutter thinking your life through, telling yourself you did your best but just weren’t smart enough.

Of course this can only happen if you are rich in the first place, which you probably aren’t since you are reading a strategy blog! So first, before we can become the second kind of poker player, you need to be the third kind of poker player. The smart poker player.

We recommend these poker school and poker tools

And don’t think the only thing you need to be is smart. Even with an IQ over 140 you will not make it on your own. You need guidance. Read books, talk to friends who played the game before (but ignore their boasting, it is almost always untrue). Try to find some good poker blogs and strategy databases until your mind is completely full. Then sleep and go again. After which you should start to play poker, at the lowest stakes. Also, try to have the best computer software installed to track your and other people’s play.

In short, don’t be arrogant and build up slowly. Treat it like any other sport, except that this sport’s muscle is the brain, which is far more fun to stimulate. And do not forget; poker will not only affect your income and stress levels; it will affect your entire life.

Adam B.

Tags: Poker and Life, Poker Articles

Overcoming obstacles in online poker

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 | Poker and Life, Poker Articles | 1 Comment

Cory was kind enough to write an article about his own poker experiences and how to overcome the obstacles we all experience in life. Hope you enjoy the article as much as I did. If you have time, check out corywilkinsband.com. Great music!

I was recently asked to incorporate a little bit of autobiographical information in my poker articles for the Bankroll Blog.  Before I do, I just want to let you all know that the contents of this article, overcoming obstacles, in no way is meant to give you the impression that my life is so much tougher than yours, because it’s not, we all have obstacles and negative factors that try and hold us back from doing our best, but one of mine happens to be very visible.

For those of you who don’t know, I was born nearly completely blind and over the last twenty-eight years the little vision that I had has been slowly deteriorating until I’m left with just the slightest bit of light perception, which will probably be gone in the next few years.  I used to play card games with my grandma when I was a small child and I had enough vision back then to play games like Go Fish with a regular deck of cards as long as they were the jumbo print.  Now I can, in the right lighting and if I hold the card an inch from my face tell you if I’m looking at a face card or not and be right about three quarters of the time.

I discovered poker about five years ago, interestingly enough not from Rounders or from Moneymaker, or from TV at all, but from this website called allinplay.com that has accessible on line games, so blind and sighted people can play together.  In 2005 they introduced a play money Texas Hold ‘Em game and I had remembered playing five card draw with my parents and figured learning a new poker game would be fun.

I quickly lost my chips over and over again in this new form of poker and being the competitor that I am, I figured I was going to learn better strategy.  I spent two weeks looking up Hold ‘em strategy on Google before I played another hand.  I learned a good many things, I should be raising more than calling, I shouldn’t be playing many hands when I’m one of the first to act.  By applying a few simple rules I began to completely crush the games.

However, crushing play money games isn’t exactly something to get all excited about for me, so I decided that I wanted to play live.  I asked one of my friends to help me and trained her to whisper my hole cards in my ear, then let me know all of the action as it goes around the table.  After we developed our system it was time to convince the local casinos to let us play.

Most were very helpful and encouraging once I was able to convince them that I was indeed blind and needed the assistance to play and would not be using my helper to make my decisions because I would be making all of my own decisions.  Then I started playing live.

Most times other players are really great about it too, but every once in a while I’ll have a player complain and I’ll explain to him or her my situation, if they are still not satisfied I’ll call the floor to explain for me.  This can be a rather uncomfortable way to start a session, but it’s just reality.

So just from my poker life I’ve had to create a way to help me play, get my method allowed in a live casino, plus have to deal with the occasional ass hole who thinks I’m cheating.  Also think of the physical tells that I miss, my inability to quickly estimate someone’s stack size and you would think I’m at a rather large disadvantage.  However, I’m still a winner in the games I play.  I play live about once a week and with the help of my lovely girlfriend Kathi I also six table limit hold ‘em on full tilt.

So next time you’re facing a tough situation, stress, just not being on you’re a game, I don’t want you to think from this article that I’ve got it worse than you, that’s not my point at all, I just want you to remember, that no matter how big the obstacle is, no matter how long the odds if you set your mind to something and are determined to succeed, I mean really determined nothing can hold you back.  Success is not just the glory of accomplishing a goal, it’s the product of all the hard work, the late nights, the overcoming circumstances that are out of your control and coming out on top.

It’s so easy to give up or put in half the effort you should, but you will only meet your potential if every day you strive to effect any changes you can in a positive way, overcome the things that you’re powerless to change and always focus on getting better.  Nothing is free and nothing is handed to us on a silver platter, but great things are there for the taking if you put forth the initiative.

Tags: Poker and Life, Poker Articles