Poker bankroll management, building and strategy – online poker guide

Pokerlistings.com review

Sunday, March 29th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | 5 Comments

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series

Introduction to the Pokerlistings.com website

Almost every online site about poker, from the smallest blogs to the biggest online poker guides, is involved with affiliated promotional deals in one way or another.  Affiliation deals are one of the primary ways of converting online traffic to an income.  Basically, online sites selling a product or offering a service will pay other websites what’s known as a CPA (Cost per Action) for each person referred who buys a product or signs up to a service. This basic principle of generating an income is also utilized at Pokerlistings.com. 

What sets Pokerlistings.com apart from the jungle of online sites promoting poker sites is the sheer amount of relevant and qualitative poker information they offer. Pokerlistings.com is basically a complete online poker guide and one of the largest of it’s kind.  Additionally, due to their size Pokerlistings.com are able to offer better poker sign up bonuses than other affiliation sites.

In this review I will focus on the features I like the best on the Pokerlistings.com website and also mention some of the annoyances I experienced while navigating the site.

Pokerlistings.com features, Market Pulse

The Market Pulse page keeps track of the online poker performances of 3645961 (and counting) poker players. Here’s a list of some of the information available on the Market Pulse page:

• Browse the top 100 online poker winners and losers sorted by day, week, month, year, poker room, game type and stakes.
• Check the online poker traffic report to find out which sites are most popular
• Find the biggest pots won online sorted by day, week, month, year, poker room, game type and stakes
• Use the Real-Time table finder to find exactly the cash game, poker tournament or poker freeroll you are looking for
• Check out how the famous players are doing on the tables
• Use the Online Poker Player search to find information on your opponents (players are divided into 9 categories: calling station, bomb, rock, shark, mouse, warning, maniac, red fish and green fish)
• Browse the Market Pulse player statistics section to find information on Highest BB/100 players, Lowest BB/100 players, Highest VP$IP players and much more

As a fun side note I entered my online nick in the Online Poker Player search and found some data on my early fixed limit days on Party Poker. Turns out I’m a green fish only slightly higher rated than the calling station. The advice presented to me was to “grow some balls”…LOL. I hope I have improved since then.

Pokerlistings.com features, Poker Players

The Poker Players page features a database of 15346 high profile poker players. Each player profile features:

• Detailed biography
• Recent tournament placements
• Player statistics
• Player analysis by Barry Greenstein
• Player photos

My only encounter with poker stardom was on the Carribean Poker Classic 2008 where I played in a couple of tournaments where Juha Helppi was also playing. I have heard that Gus Hansen trained for his boxing match against Theo Jørgensen in a small boxing club on Østerbro (Copenhagen, Denmark) so perhaps I will bump into him one day if he decides to enter another fight.

Pokerlistings.com features, Live Tournaments

Very extensive live updates, blogs, interviews and TV from all the major live poker tournament events.  I especially like the Pokerlisting’s Live Tournament Coverage calendar which gives a fast overview of upcoming tournaments.

Pokerlistings.com features, Poker Strategy

A poker article database containing 386 poker strategy articles (the pokerbankrollblog has 200 articles now for comparison:-)) written by poker pros. The poker strategy articles are divided into the following categories:

• Beginner poker strategy
• General poker strategy
• Cash game no limit hold’em strategy
• Poker theory
• Psychology of poker
• Seven-card stud strategy
• Cash game limit hold’em strategy
• Tournament no limit hold’em
• Bankroll management
• Omaha
• Poker math

I think I might read through the Cash game section one day when I have time as I feel this is the weakest part of my game (my friend Artur will definitely agree with me on this one; he was appalled by my lack of cash game skills on the Caribbean Poker Classic cruise)

Pokerlistings.com features, Blogs

Being an avid blogger myself it was fun to read through some of the poker pro blogs on the Pokerlistings.com Blog page. In addition to their own team of poker pros, Pokerlistings.com also have a number of guest bloggers including Anette Obrestad. Anette is famous among other things for winning an online poker tournament with tape across her computer monitor so she couldn’t see her own cards. You may ask why I’m interested in Anette Obrestad. Here’s the thing. Recently I made my own Twitter profile and have become quite the Twitter aficionado. I noticed that Anette also has a Twitter profile and have added her on several occasions. Not once has she returned the favour and added me to her Twitter followers!!! So Anette if you are reading this I just wanted to let you know that I’m very disappointed in you for not following me on Twitter, especially since you speak so highly of Twitter in your latest blog entry.  

Pokerlistings.com annoyances

I really dislike the entire top part of the menu below the header on the front page:

I get that Pokerlistings make money by promoting poker rooms (and in fact their poker room reviews are actually quite good). What I don’t get is why they think it’s necessary to use most of their top menu space to display the same poker room reviews organized in 8 different ways. All they achieve by doing this is adding to the unorganized feel of the page and increasing the difficulties navigating around.

This leads me directly on to my main critique of the Pokerlistings page: the information overload. It’s a double edged sword, because the massive amount of (mostly good) information on the site is also what sets it in a league of its own. Nevertheless, there is so much information crammed onto their site that it takes a couple of hours to figure out where the good stuff is. My personal taste is that I do not like websites that fail to present their information in a clear manner. Having said that, the pages I have mentioned in this review are actually quite well made and easy to navigate, so if you stick to them and don’t get lost in the poker room review jungle you should be fine.

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

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools

Online poker tournament statistics: cummulative blinds

Sunday, March 8th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools | 4 Comments

This article is a part of the Poker Mathematics series.

Recently I have wondered if it is possible to calculate the probability of winning a poker tournament based on which strategy you use and how your all in moves are distributed. During the process of collecting data to solve this problem I have run into some interesting observations which I would like to share with you.

Check out the previous post in this series: Online poker tournament statistics: player exit percentage

Having discovered a relationship between player exit percentage and the time any given tournament has been running for, the next step in calculating the probability of winning a poker tournament was to estimate the cumulative amount of blinds payed for any given period of time a poker tournament has been running for.

Just to remind you, the calculations shown below are based on the blind structure of FTP (Full Tilt Poker) regular tournaments with 10 minute blind levels (I’ve only included the first 10 levels )

In order to calculate the amount of blinds payed pr. level shown in the table above, I estimated a total of 10 rounds played pr. level. Because FTP tables are 9 handed the assumption of 10 rounds pr. level means that on average a player will pay the blinds a little more than once pr. level; 1,11 times to be exact.

Summing the “Blinds pr. level” over the “Tournament duration” up to blind level 34 led to the following table:

I myself was quite amazed when I saw these numbers. 866000 chips payed in total blinds for a 6 hour tournament. That’s a lot of chips!!!!

To have some sort of reference I wanted to calculate how many successive all ins you would need to win to pay these blinds. To keep things as simple as possible I assumed that each all in would double the  1500 chip starting stack. According to this assumption, 2 successive all in wins  increase your stack from 1500 to 6000, 3 successive all inn wins from 1500 to 12000 and so on.

The rounded necessary all in wins are shown in the table above (the precice numbers in brackets). Luckily it only takes roughly 9 successive all ins to win 866000 chips….aren’t you relieved:-)

I am now ready to calculate the probability of winning an online poker tournament, but you will have to wait until my next article to find out what it is.

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

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools

Poker Team Bankroll

Thursday, March 5th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Projects, Poker Tools | 6 Comments

Submitted by Matt Gai this article belongs to the Poker Project series

Free web-based service for turning your home poker game into an enterprising partnership with your friends

This article explains the history, features and strategy behind pokerteambankroll.com

The idea was spawned as my friend and I were talking during a car ride down to Atlantic City for a poker tournament over a year ago. He said to me, “We should get everyone in our home game to pool our money together so we can play in big tournaments like a World Poker Tour (WPT) Championship and the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event!” That was all it took to get the wheels spinning.

The very next week I drafted up the concept on paper so all of the home game players could get on the same page. I laid it out for everyone. Our team goal was to put together enough money for one $10,000 buyin to the WSOP Main Event for one of us, plus $1,000 for 1 Main Event Satellite buyin for a second player, plus $2,000 for travel, food and lodging expenses for both. $13,000 in all.

In order to reach our goal, we were going to follow this plan…
Any profit made in our home game could be contributed to our team bankroll in exchange for an equal number of points. I would collect the money from each player and record an equal number of points on paper (e.g. $82 profit contributed = 82 points recorded). I then put the money in a savings account that I set up just for this. We did this every week – and we still do. Anyway, every week, profits are contributed and points are given. And it adds up quickly!

The idea is, when we reach our goal, whoever has the most points will take $11,000 from the bankroll and use it to travel to Las Vegas to play in in the World Series of Poker Main Event, poker’s most prestigious tournament. Our team member with the 2nd most number of points will take $2,000 from the bankroll, travel to Las Vegas and play in a satellite tournament to try to win a seat in the Main Event. If that player wins a seat, then the team will have 2 players in the Main Event, thereby doubling our chances of cashing.

Here’s the best part, and you may have guessed it already, but, if either player cashes any money in the Main Event, everyone who contributed to the team bankroll will be paid out according to their percentage of contributions. For example, if the point leader, who contributed $3,500 in profits to the team bankroll, which is 27% of $13,000, cashes $100,000 in the tournament, he or she wins $27,000. The rest is paid out accordingly.

What this means is that everyone has a shot to win big money, regardless of how much you contribute. Take this hypothetical example: Player B has the least amount of points contributed (130), which translates to a 1% share in the bankroll. If the point leader wins the WSOP Main Event and cashes $10 million, player B wins $100,000. Not bad for a $130 investment!

So here’s where the web site comes in. I got tired of recording everything on paper, and so, being a webmaster, I decided that the best way to keep track of all of our activity would be online. That way, everything got recorded safe and sound, anyone on the team could easily check their statistics at any time, and everyone would always know where they stood with respect to the goal. We started recording and tracking every single buyin, cashout and contribution for every weekly home game on the website.

From there I starting adding features like a message board, photos, avatars, event selection, goal management, team management, emailing and more. It became so useful and so integral to our team that I decided to put it out there for the entire world to use.

Now anyone can create a private team on pokerteambankroll.com and use it to turn their home game into a big tournament team effort – and transform their home game players into poker super stars – all for free. Good luck!

Post by Matt.

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

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Projects, Poker Tools

Online poker tournament statistics: player exit percentage

Sunday, March 1st, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools | 7 Comments

This article is a part of the Poker Mathematics series.

Recently I have wondered if it is possible to calculate the probability of winning a poker tournament based on which strategy you use and how your all in moves are distributed. During the process of collecting data to solve this problem I have run into some interesting observations which I would like to share with you (warning: math content ahead). First a little teaser….my findings indicate that it is possible to make good mathematical estimations on how many hours it will take before the final table in a tournament is reached based on the number of players registered for the tournament:

In the table below you will get a feel for how many hours you will have to play to reach the final table based on the number of players registered.

In the following table you will get a feel for the size of tournament you should choose given the time you have available.

Here’s a recollection of how I calculated the numbers above:

My tournament statistics project is based on online poker tournaments at Fulltilt poker and more precisely freezeout tournaments (i.e no rebuys and add ons). First of all, I came to realize that I would need to be able to estimate the number of players in an MTT given the time it takes for the tournament to finish. For example if a tournament lasts 3 hours, how many players were registered to play in it from the beginning?

What I did was to note down the following information for 25 online poker freezeout tournament on Fulltilt poker:

• The time the tournament had been running
• The number of players registered
• The number of players remaining

From this data set I was able to calculate the exit percentages, that is the relative number in percent of player exits, and plot them against the time the tournaments had been running. For example, in one tournament running for 3 hours and 28 minutes, 611 players registered and of them 25 remained yielding an exit percentage 95,9%.

Player exit percentage raw data

I was quite surprised to see the raw data plot shown above because it indicates an exponential mathematical relationship between the exit percentage and the time an online freezeout tournament has been running for. This relationship seems to be independent of the buyin of the tournament and the number of players entering.

I transferred the raw data to Origin and did a peak fit analysis to determine the mathematical relationship between the exit percentage (EP) and the hours played (x). Based on my original data set I imposed the following boundary conditions:

• EP(x=0)=0% : No players exit the tournament before it starts
• EP(x=6 hours) = 100% : All the freezeout tournaments I sampled had ended within 6 hours

Player exit percentage fitted data

Turned out the relationship was exponential as expected:

• EP(x) = A(1-exp(-Bx)), in this case A was 99,5 and B was 0,96

Now here comes Now here comes the interesting part. Given the equation above, relating the exit percentage with the number of hours played, it is now possible to estimate both the hours it takes a tournament to finish and the inverse, namely the number of players entering into a tournament given the hours it takes to finish.

Since I’m not able to paste Excel formulas into WordPress blog posts, I have made some tables with some sample data just to give you an idea of how you can use the formula.

In the table below you will get a feel for how many hours you will have to play to reach the final table based on the number of players registered.

In the following table you will get a feel for the size of tournament you should choose given the time you have available.

Hope you found the information in this article useful. If you have any comments or want a copy of the Excel spreadsheet I used to calculate the data in the tables, please let me know.

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

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools

Poker tournament bonus search

Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Bonus, Poker Tools | No Comments

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series.

Repeating the same thing doesn’t make it less true, therefore with no further ado, my words of wisdom: “when playing online poker you should always have either a bonus or rakeback deal associated with your deposit or your account. This will maximize your earnings, increase you bankroll and provide a faster route to higher limits.”

For all you tournament players like myself, finding the right bonus for your limit of poker tournament play and poker site  requirements can be a tedious task. Fortunately my buddies at WOSB  (World Online Sports Bookmakers) have created a poker tournament bonus search page to aid you in your bonus hunting (see screenshot below).

On this page you simply enter your preferred deposit method,  jurisdiction requirements, poker network and the amount you wish to deposit and then press “Find best tournament bonus”. The  poker tournament bonus list below is automatically updated to show you the best tournament bonuses available matching your criteria and ranked by the bonus rake back percent (the percentage of your tournament fees that is paid back to you as a bonus).

If you want to rank the poker tournament bonus list by one of the other columns in the table such as “Bonus Amount” or “Bonus Percent” simply click on the column header and the table will automatically be updated.

Remember that some poker sites offer both bonuses and rakeback at the same time. We have a list of rakeback and bonus deals available through the PokerBRB website.

FYI the poker tournament bonus search page looks best when viewed in Firefox, but the people at WOSB have promised me that the IE version will be improved as soon as possible,

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

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Bonus, Poker Tools

SNG (Sit and Go) poker bonus search

Saturday, February 21st, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Bonus, Poker Tools | 5 Comments

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series.

When playing online poker you should always have either a bonus or rakeback deal associated with your deposit or your account. This will maximize your earnings, increase you bankroll and provide a faster route to higher limits.

However with more than 357 online poker sites available with their own individual bonus programs, finding the best bonus for your limit and type of play is a daunting task. Fortunately my buddies at WOSB  (World Online Sports Bookmakers) have created several bonus search pages which are a great help for you bonus hunters out there.

The first page I want to mention is the SNG poker bonus search page (see the screenshot below). On this page you simply enter the SNG limit you play, the amount you wish to deposit and other details such as deposit method, jurisdiction and poker network and then press “Find best sit and go bonus”. The SNG poker bonus list below is automatically updated to show you the best SNG bonuses available matching your criteria and ranked by the bonus amount earned per 100 SNGs played.

If you want to rank the SNG poker bonus list by one of the other columns in the table such as “Bonus Amount” or “Bonus Percent” simply click on the column header and the table will automatically be updated.

In many cases it turns out that clearing poker bonuses by playing SNG tournaments is much faster compared to playing cash games and often corresponds to rakeback percentages in excess of 50%.

Remember that some poker sites offer both bonuses and rakeback at the same time. We have a list of rakeback and bonus deals available through the PokerBRB website.

FYI the SNG poker bonus search page looks best when viewed in Firefox, but the people at WOSB have promised me that the IE version will be improved as soon as possible,

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

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Bonus, Poker Tools

List of all online poker sites

Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | 1 Comment

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series.

Do you ever get the feeling that the online poker business in one big jungle of poker sites and poker networks where there’s no logic to which sites offer/don’t offer rakeback and allow/don’t allow American players. I might have the solution to calm your nerves and provide you with that precious overview.

My buddies at WOSB (World Online Sports Bookmakers) have been working hard to put together a list of all online poker sites and rank them according to the traffic their web pages receive. Can you believe they have  currently registered 357 online poker sites in total?

Their online poker list also includes useful information such as the poker network the poker sites belong to, whether the poker sites offer rakeback or not and whether the poker sites allow American players or not.

I have included a screenshot of the WOSB list of all online poker sites below to give you an idea of how it’s organized. To check out the list yourself visit WOSB poker list. 

WOSB poker list

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools