When you’re a poker beginner there’s basically two ways of improving your skills. Either you gain experience yourself by putting in the hours at the tables and seeking out information from books and online resources. Or you get feedback on your play from other players who have already beaten the level you’re aiming to beat. In reality, the fastest way to improve your poker skills is a combination of both.

However, as a poker beginner, playing micro/low stakes, it is difficult to get qualified and reasonably priced feedback, since most poker schools and coaching sites cater to more experienced players. Enter Grinderschool.

—Please support this blog by signing up to Grinderschool through my affiliation link. It won’t get you a cheaper subscription, but I’ll make a few buck to help improve this site—

Grinderschool caters specifically to low stakes players from 0,01/0,02$ cash games to 3/6$ cash games. Grinderschool also has tons of quality poker videos on MTTs ranging from freeroll tournaments to 550$ buyin tournaments. All you pay, to gain access to the site and interactive forum, is a low monthly subscription fee down to 10$ per month. This makes Grinderschool the perfect choice if you’re on the lookout for a beginner’s poker school. In addition to poker tutorial, Grinderschool also offers reasonably priced coaching down to 40$ per hour, which might turn out to be the best investment you make in your game.

Poker schools are a great way of gaining the knowledge needed to take your game to the next level. However many of the available online poker schools are more or less affiliate sites in disguise. This means that the main focus of the site is not to help you become a better poker player, but instead to sign up you up to their poker affiliation sites. Don’t get me wrong! There’s nothing wrong with making a buck or two through affiliation work (I do it myself on this blog). What I don’t like is when sites pretend to be something they aren’t. If you’re looking for a real poker school then keep on reading, and I’ll give you my reasons for claiming Grinderschool to be the best poker school online today.

—If you wan’t to support this blog, please sign up to Grinderschool by clicking on my affiliation link. It won’t get you a cheaper subscription, but I’ll earn a bit a dough to help improve this site—

GrinderSchool definitely does not fall into the category of disguised affiliation sites. The people behind this poker school earn their money selling subscriptions to some of the best online poker training material available. Grinderschool caters especially for low stakes poker players (down 0,01/0,02$ limits and freerolls) which otherwise have a hard time finding quality poker material at a reasonable price. The combination of low subscription fees and great poker material is what makes Grinderschool really stand out from the rest. Grinderschool subscription fees start as low as 10$ per month. If you want more information on subscription fees check out my full review of Grinderschool (FYI most – if not all- of the annoyances I list in this review are out-dated and do not apply to the current version of the Grinderschool site)

Grinderschool features include:

• An easily browsable poker video library with more than 900 videos and 7  new videos released each week.
• A dedicated team of 11 poker enthusiasts who cover all aspects of low stakes poker through their own experiences at the grind. Read more about the current GrinderSchool instructors here.
• A no-spam / no-flaming forum where you can get qualified feedback on your poker questions.
• Private coaching lessons at a fair price.

The people behind PokerTableRatings.com were kind enough to put down a few words about their poker hand histories and other poker tools.

• We offer a discount coupon of 10% on ANY  PokerTableRatings Hand History order as part of the collaboration between the Poker Bankroll Blog and PokerTableRatings.com.
• Simply enter the code pokerbrb10 when checking out and you will automatically receive the discount.
• In addition you can get a free pokertableratings hand history sample of  10000 hands by signing up through Poker Bankroll Blog (see procedure below on how to get the sample)
  

Why purchase poker tools from PokerTableRatings?

“I want to be better at poker.”  We’ve heard that sentence a million times.  Here’s the secret to success: you need the right tools.

That’s where PokerTableRatings.com comes in.  We let you research your competition and find your own leaks.  PTR supports all the major poker rooms (Full Tilt, PokerStars, Cake Poker, Bodog, Absolute, iPoker, OnGame and Party Poker) and player results are updated in almost real-time.  You’ll be able to see how much money you, your friends, your enemies, or any poker celebrity has won or lost.  The detailed player stats will show you what you’re doing different than the top winners and where your opponents have leaks.  Best of all, you can get 10 free searches a day for just registering.
For those players wishing to take their games to the next level, PokerTableRatings offers their Premium Content, an essential tool-kit for any serious poker player.  Only $12.95 a month unlocks a variety of weapons specifically designed to arm you with the knowledge to crush your opponents.  PTR provides Premium subscribers in-depth player statistics, position analysis, player modeling, and opponent match-ups from over nine billion hands.

A Premium Hand Replayer displays key stats on every player:

A WebHUD provides real-time stats on all the players at your table.

A Premium Table Finder helps you sift the waters for sharks and fish.

Hand Histories

That’s not all PokerTableRatings has to offer.  Whether your game is Holdem or Omaha, limit or no-limit, PTR also offers hand histories from every major poker site—from micro-stakes to nosebleeds.  Simply import the hands into Hold’Em Manager, PokerTracker or Poker Office, and you’ll instantly be able to see how often they’re raising from under the gun, how often they defend their blind, and more.  PTR has recently launched their brand new Sit-N-Go hand histories designed to help SNG grinders gain a significant edge on their competition.  Finding out if that tough regular continuation-bets JJ on a K♠10♠6♣ flop or checks for pot control could be the difference between going out on the bubble and making the money.
PTR has been dedicated to tracking the online poker community and providing superior tools for improving players’ games since 2007.  Whether you are an amateur or a long-time professional, PokerTableRatings.com is the place to go to increase your poker knowledge.  So visit PTR to determine your own leaks, the leaks of your opponents, and take some time to observe how Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan play THEIR hands….you may be surprised and learn a thing or two.

Procedure for getting free PokerTableRatings hand history sample:

• After you select the poker site and stake level, hit the checkout cart and it will show “$0.00″.

• If you have a PTR account, then you just need to checkout.  If not, then it will prompt you to create an account for free so you can get the hands.

• These hands can be imported into Holdem Manager, PT3 or Poker Office.

• The hands are emailed to you in a zip file or they can go to your MYPTR section to download.

• Once you have used the offer, you cannot get the free hands again.

• If you have any questions about the hands or need help with downloading/importing, you contact support directly at info@pokertableratings.com.  The support team responds very quickly!

Loui Levino wrote the article below on various online poker cheats which will potentially rob you of your bankroll. Read it through and if you have experienced a different online cheat let us know about it in a comment.

There is a million ways to make a million bucks; but there is also a million ways to lose your $100 poker deposit if you are not careful. The online poker rooms use some of the safest and most secure encryption methods that you’ll  find anywhere on the planet. As part of their random number generator; Pokerstars uses thermal radiation inputs. This is essentially the same encryption method that the CIA uses now to code data. This type of data encryption is so secure that the CIA will even tell you that this is what they use… because it can’t be hacked, the pattern can’t be anticipated, and it is unlikely that the pattern that is used to generate outputs will ever replicate itself.

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However, if you are not careful there are still plenty of ways to lose your money to online poker cheats.  Here is a few of them…

Collusion – Unfortunately, some players choose to work together to gain an advantage over their opponents. Sometimes this is done casually, sometimes it is done in a very predatory fashion. Collusion is most common is short-handed limit cash games. If you see any signs of collusion, keep your eyes open and send an email to the security team if necessary.

Phishing Scams – These are rare in the poker world, but they do show up in a few different forms. The poker room staff will never ask you for your password at a poker table and you should never give this information to anyone. Always protect the sensitive details of your account; just as you would for a bank account.

Insider Cheating – This is basically impossible at the large online poker rooms, but there have been cases of insider cheating in the past. This has only occurred when the owners of a poker site have decided that they wanted to cheat their players using security/integrity audit player accounts; these player accounts enabled the owners of the site to see the hole cards of other players. These types of accounts do not exist anymore at any of the poker rooms.

Funds Seizures – This has happened on a few occasions over the last 5 years.  Funds are hardly ever seized from online poker accounts. In most cases, the funds are confiscated from third party money transfer service like Neteller.

Bankrupt Poker Rooms - There have been plenty of bankrupt poker rooms in the last several years. Most players are able to get their funds back from the poker room without any issues. In some cases, the poker rooms shut down and the management team is never heard from again. To avoid something like this happening to you, just stick to the largest and most reputable poker rooms. In most cases where a poker room has gone bankrupt or funds have been seized from a third party payment processor, the funds are returned to players quickly, so this is not a major concern among online poker players.

Money Trading – There are many online forums where you can trade money between poker sites through other players. Money trading between players on different poker sites is a common method that small-time scammers will use to try and get your money. Always be careful when trading with someone who you met through an online poker forum or chat room.

What happens when players are caught cheating? The consequences will depend upon the type of cheating that occurred. When it is possible; the poker rooms will return the funds to players who were cheated at the table.
There are some cases in which the poker room support staff will not be able to help you. If you fail to protect your personal information or you try to trade money with another poker player and the deal goes sour… the poker site will usually not step in to help you deal with your situation.

We recommend these poker school and poker tools

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GrinderSchool	Paid monthly subscription for as little as 10$ a month.	GrinderSchool is the best online poker school helping low stakes players to win money consistently. Click for more details
MagicHoldem	Software license for less than 100$ a year	One of the best poker odds calculators. Click for more details

What else should you look out for? It’s the real world and it’s a big world. If you are smart and you use your head in the online poker environment, your money should be safe while you are playing poker. Protect your information,  report suspicious activity and only play on the largest and most reputable online poker rooms. You can use this site to find more information about making a safe online poker deposit.

Written by Loui Levino author of Poker sites by Lou.

This is a guest post written by AceUnchecked, read the blog here.

Let’s face it. We play poker to make money. We play because we want to turn a small amount of money into a larger part of money. Now, I understand that there are many reasons that we play poker, but I believe that pretty much every player can agree with the fact that we play poker because we, at least in part, want to make money.

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This basic assumption means that poker is business, and we need to start treating it as such.If you don’t look at poker as business, let’s look at some of the jargon used in both worlds of poker and business. The first and most obvious is profit. When we walk away from the poker table, we look at our net profit. Sometimes we have gains and other times we count our losses. Another common term in poker is pot equity (which is the relative value the pot has to your chances of winning.) Often times we look at our poker winnings as ROI or Return on Investment, which is obviously from the business side of things.

So, if poker is business, what does that mean to our playing? What is the practical application here? Well, if we treat our playing like business we can do a few things.

First, limit your liabilities. As we have discussed in this blog at length, bankroll management is the key to minimizing risk. When you minimize your risk and regularly perform above 50% of the time, your bankroll will grow.

Second, we can analyze our strengths and identify niches. Playing online poker is all about finding the table that you play the best at. With so many options you have to find the game that suits your style. I cannot tell you how many sessions I have fouled up by moving from 9 handed tables to heads-up. If you are in a rhythm that is going well at a certain table, changing the game you play will only hurt you.

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GrinderSchool	Paid monthly subscription for as little as 10$ a month.	GrinderSchool is the best online poker school helping low stakes players to win money consistently. Click for more details
MagicHoldem	Software license for less than 100$ a year	One of the best poker odds calculators. Click for more details

Finally, if all goes well, we can treat poker as an hourly job (or profession). I’ll admit it, even though I have been up at the tables lately, I am not to this level yet. But rest assured, I am analyzing and re-analyzing my game so that I can become a more disciplined player so that I can rely on poker as a source of income. We all start at the hobby level but moving to that intermediate level of profitability is a long and arduous road.

Go get ‘em!

Usually I write my own reviews of poker related products, but the people behind the MagicHoldem online poker odds calculator were kind enough to put together a well written and more or less objective review of their product, which I have chosen to post here. If you like the review below and want to support the Poker Bankroll Blog I would really appreciate it if you sign up through my affiliation link above.

Online poker is a challenging game, but it need not be so hard to learn with the help of an online poker odds calculator. This review takes one of the more popular calculators, MagicHoldem, out for a test drive to see if it’s good. Read the review to see if the benefits are worth the money.

So how much will MagicHoldem set you back? There are two ways of acquiring a one year license:

• Pay $89.90 per year, or 119,9$ for a two year license.
• Register and make a small deposit (from 20$-30$) with one of the 4 different poker room affiliates available through the MagicHoldem website.

To go the license route is expensive, but even casual players will find that they can recoup that cost pretty quickly with the extra wins. Thankfully, you don’t have to go into this purchase uninformed. The developers of MagicHoldem allow the software to be demoed for 100 hands. If this still isn’t enough to convince you, their support team can give you an additional 200 hands.

What is it all about? Well, professional online poker players know that the key to playing poker is knowing the odds. Bluffing is a necessary talent, sure, but mastering the art of bluffing won’t guarantee that you win games. Consistent winners in poker know about playing the odds to their advantage. Strong players knew concepts like pot odds, where even with a weak hand, the recommendation is to bet as the pot is so large relative to the cost to try for it.

The advantage with playing online poker is that you can have calculators that do this for you and provide this information in real-time. MagicHoldem is one such tool and for the most part, does a very good job of displaying all the vital information needed during a game.

Installing MagicHoldem is straightforward. Download the odds calculator, let it install, and then run it.

Once installed, MagicHoldem automatically detects your online poker room as long as it’s one of the 100+ supported. For the most part this detection works like a charm, although there are times when resizing the window or doing other stuff can cause some problems, but for the most part, such occurrences are very rare. Contacting support is easy and so far, their replies have been both quick and knowledgeable.

However, ease of installation and hand detection are completely useless if the data displayed isn’t worth anything. Fortunately, MagicHoldem includes virtually every necessary statistic to help any player make an informed decision. In a single glance to the left side of the table, at any time of the game, you can determine all important probabilities. For example, in the screen shot provided, before the rookie all-in decision was made that there was a 44.7% of making a pair. With the 0.1% probability under the straight flush column, there was also the confirmation that it was possible to not only make the flush, but that the cards were close enough for a straight flush to also be possible. Below those stats are the pot odds calculations and the potential outs. One benefit to MagicHoldem over other odds calculators is that it graphically displays the outs which makes it easier to visualize the possibilities. It also helps confirm that the calculations are being made correctly.

All in all, the MagicHoldem online poker odds calculator provides any poker player with a wealth of information. It’s unobtrusive and blends in nicely with virtually any table. In the screen shot, the player made a newbie decision – they went all in with a hand that looks strong, but isn’t really. Here, MagicHoldem’s advice to wait and be cautiously optimistic was sensible. There are a lot of potential winning combinations with A-6 suited, but none of them are particularly likely to appear. That’s not to say that MagicHoldem’s advice is to be relied upon exclusively. Behaving in such a robotic manner is very easy to see through in the long run. However, it does make a good guide and allows the player to develop a good intrinsic sense of the cards and situation (for example, when to bet due to pot odds). Combined with solid poker strategy reading and a lot of practice, MagicHoldem definitely does make a good companion and will help most players develop winning instincts.

Many online poker players use specially designed software to analyze their opponents’ and their own game. This makes perfect sense. Software like PokerTracker, Holdem Manager or SNGWiz will help you gain an insight into what goes on at your table, as well as into exactly how you’re coping with the challenge. Rest assured, using PokerTracker or SNGWiz does not make you guilty of data mining. You’ll only make use of data which is available to everyone anyway. What the software does is that it keeps track of things and compiles statistics the average human brain would be incapable to do.

As I said, many people use such software aid while playing, but few people use these programs to their full potential.
Here’s a rundown of the various statistics such programs generate, together with an explanation and pointers towards interpreting the data.

There are two basic types of statistics poker tracking programs such as PokerTracker, Holdem Manager or SNGWiz generate, namely preflop statistics and post-flop ones.

Let’s start with the preflop stats.

The VPIP% (Voluntarily Put Into Pot) expresses the number of times your opponent put money into the pot of his own will (blinds do not count here) in a percentage-based manner. The higher this stat is, the looser your opponent is. The lower the stat, the tighter the opponent. In a 6-max NL Holdem game, a VPIP% should normally be around 19-24%.

The PFR% (Preflop Raise percentage) is an expression of how often your opponent raises preflop. This one will help you asses your opponent’s preflop aggression level. When compared to the VPIP, the PFR can tell you how often an opponent cold-calls, which is an extremely efficient indication of his fish status. You can use all these stats on yourself too, in order to determine how optimal your play is.

3b% (three-bet percentage) is a measure of how often someone re-raises preflop. The lower this stat is, the tighter your opponent is on his three bets. If his 3b% is around 3%, he doesn’t really light three bet, and you can feel safe putting him on AA-10,10, AQs, AKs, whenever he does.

The F3 (fold to 3-bet) is an extremely useful stat. This will tell you how often you can light three bet against an opponent to force him to give up the pot.

Moving on to the post flop stats
The post flop stats are equally interesting, and potentially useful. The AG (a measure of the aggression factor of your opponent) will let you know when you can run roughshod over someone. For the AG, a value of 1-3 is normal. If your guy has an AG of 0.5, put pressure on him and get out of his way when he strikes back. An aggression factor of about 4 means you should take it easy with this guy, pick up a monster and let him tie the noose around his own neck.

WTSD% tells you how often your guy goes all the way after he takes a look at the flop. The normal values are between 20-30% here. Use this stat together with the AG one and find out whether your opponent is weak-tight or tight aggressive.

The CB is the continuation betting %. This stat is only useful when used in conjunction with the PFR%. The lower the PFR% is, the higher the CB should be.

The 2B is a stat describing how often your opponent fires the second barrel on a post-flop bet.

The FC is an extremely valuable stat: it tells you how often your opponent folds his continuation bets. The F2 is how often the guy folds to a second barrel bet.

When you use these stats, please take the sample size into account. The larger the sample size (the more hands you track your target-opponent through) the more relevant these stats will be. Small sample sizes have a tendency to mislead.

These stats can even be used to approximate the rakeback amount that you’ll generate through your real money play. If you’re signed up to a poker prop deal or to a rake rebate deal, you’ll be able to estimate your rake contribution and thus your due rakeback as well.

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

Check out our Poker Freeroll and Tournament League.

Since amateur poker players started showing up to live tournaments and winning millions of dollars by taking down the so-called professionals of the sport, the online poker industry has literally exploded. Millions of people from across the globe are looking to hone their craft and win some big bucks by playing games like Texas Hold’em and Omaha. And they’re all looking for that proverbial edge to make winning easier.
Enter Poker Tracker.

Poker Tracker Software, LLC is the company behind its namesake Poker Tracker software line. In short, Poker Tracker is a software tool that performs a series of statistical analyses during the course of your poker game. By compiling data and quantifying results, Poker Tracker acts as an external brain, so to speak, giving poker players a crucial edge by upgrading the one tool every player needs: Memory.

In poker, many will concede that luck is a factor. Hot streaks and cold streaks are real. The power of that blank stare and the coldblooded bluff – these are all essential traits to have. But without a good memory, especially in the online world, a player’s game will suffer. Poker Tracker records and stores all essential details of the game.

The software feature has a large database library, keeping track of hand histories, profits and losses, number of hands played, time at the table, the table style (as in limit), and it breaks it all down to a sweet science, calculating graphs of statistics that a player can check to figure out how much they’re winning and losing per hand, per hour and per game.

Poker Tracker doesn’t work on every brand of poker. If you like to play best video poker online, then you won’t be benefiting from the software. But for every other poker game, like Hold’em, Stud and Omaha, the software keeps track of your entire game.

The real benefit here is that it helps an individual player to understand his or her strengths and weaknesses. By looking at these thorough records that are simplified into easy-to-understand graphics, a player can better know when to bet and when to get out, as well as knowing how much to stake and where to play.

Poker is all about percentages, when you really get down to the heart of the matter. A tool like Poker Tracker is basically an odds calculator for every conceivable aspect of the online game.

The software is 100% legal. In fact, most of the largest and most legitimate poker sites on the web endorse the use of the tool. So, basically, Poker Tracker isn’t a tool that gives you the edge over other players, per se; it just helps your game to be all it can be. And this is why poker sites have no problem allowing the add-on software to be used in conjunction with their sites.

PokerTracker3 is available from their website for $89.99 for the full version, $49.99 for micro stakes, and you can also receive a free trial version to see if you like it.